Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
history in which Bacon actively situated the new science when he used the
kind of religious language that Cowley was now echoing. Science could not
have universal meaning except by being fashioned as acting within a narra-
tive that encompassed the whole of history.
This is the direction that Bacon's arguments took from the very begin-
ning. His
Advancement of Learning
(1605) opens, following its dedication to
James I, with an effort to acquit science of various “tacit objections,” and
this depiction of the character of religious resistance sets the stage for sci-
ence's reintegration into the broader scope of religious history.
11
To say that
these sources of resistance were “tacit” was to say that, while they arose
from the existing religious worldview, they did so spontaneously and with-
out conscious reflection. This made it possible for Bacon to present his own
view of religion's relationship to science as the more orthodox one. What
was thought to be a fundamental tension between science and religion was
in fact a distortion that could be put down to moral failing, an example of
what Bacon would go on to call “idols” in his
Novum Organum
. Religionists
had thought that Scripture discouraged natural inquiry, but this was only
a facile judgment drawn out of focus by the “zeal and jealousy of divines.”
12
In this way Bacon managed to condemn religionists but not religion,
and this is the step that enabled him to go on the offensive. As he proceeds
to argue against religious objections in the first part of the
Advancement
, he
is not content merely to show that science is compatible with religion. He
instead argues that science has a positive religious value all its own, that
a true understanding of the Bible would in fact show that the Christian
faith mandates science. What makes this especially significant for us is the
fact that it is also a performance of the emerging Protestant take on Chris-
tian reform. His method of argument is to show that religious resistance
to learning stems from an errant understanding of Scripture, and thus his
defense of science enacts a version of the Protestant corrective for this by
counterpoising the plain meaning of the Bible against such false interpreta-
tions. Bacon may be speaking in behalf of science, but he is doing so in the
role of Protestant reformer. Thus in his response to the “tacit objections”
of divines he just as
tacitly
aligns his own campaign for science with the
reformers' campaign for the restoration of Christian purity.
Bacon begins this process by addressing the first and most rudimentary
objection that “knowledge was the original temptation and sin, whereupon
ensued the fall of man.” He approaches this challenge by first citing various
passages of Scripture that might appear to support this objection, such as
Solomon's cautions in Ecclesiastes against the vanity of learning and St.
