Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
The reformers, by standing the hermeneutical idealism of
sola scriptura
against traditional notions of church authority, had committed themselves
to an epistemic hierarchy in which the truth value of religious claims seemed
to be measured by an impersonal standard—the plain truth of Scripture.
The Bible was no longer mediated by tradition or authorized teachers, and
certainly not by popes; Christendom's true priests were those who drank
only from the pure waters of revelation. To reiterate science's parallel stand-
ing as a second divine “topic” in such a religious climate was to hitch it to
the rising star of Protestantism. This is not what is most often remembered
about Francis Bacon, if he is remembered at all. In our fragmentary cul-
tural memory, he is known for his insistence that science should have an
empirical and inductive basis and for the aphorism “knowledge is power.”
But terms like “empiricism” and “inductivism,” no less than Bacon's instru-
mental view of knowledge, are merely the abstract shells that have survived
from what was once a vibrant mythological scheme built upon this Protes-
tant vision. Like seekers after scientific patronage today, Bacon needed to
relate science to society in some vital way, and he did this by tying it to the
larger religious movement that was unfolding around him so that science
might share in the ultimate value that the Reformation now assigned to
the unmitigated reception of God's revelation. This was an imitation, but
a revolutionary one. The church had always respected science, for the same
reason that Bacon now gave, because it was an activity of reading the “topic
of God's works.” His rhetorical genius lay in recognizing that this idea could
be more specifically allied with the revised notions of Christian priesthood
that were emerging within the Protestant Reformation. If nature was indeed
God's revelation, and if empirical science offered the only direct path to its
truths, then the new natural philosophers were also priests and could lay
claim to the same authority that entitled English clergymen to draw from
the public treasury. In this way the same ascendant ethos of Protestantism
that was on the verge of creating a Puritan revolution in England became
tied up with the identity of a scientific culture that was soon to gain unprec-
edented fame in the generation of Hooke, Boyle, and Newton.
But why should we regard this Baconian rhetoric as the ancestor to evo-
lutionism? Again, I believe that the answer to this question is found in those
operations of cultural mimesis that preserve narrative forms. I said earlier
that evolutionism gains its rhetorical force from being identified with evolu-
tionary science, by seeming to have the same technical basis, and we should
notice that in the scientific vision mediated by Bacon something analogous
to this was already in place. At the same time that empiricism was being
