Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Paul's warning (Col 2:8) to “be not spoiled through vain philosophy.” But as
he goes on to work to “discover then the ignorance and error of this opinion
and the misunderstanding in the grounds thereof,” he does so through a
more complete assessment of Scripture. That which Adam coveted when he
disobeyed God's commandment regarding the tree in the garden, he points
out, could not have been the sort of knowledge sought by natural philoso-
phers. The larger context of the Bible's primordial history indicates that
Adam was created to undertake science, to discover the “pure knowledge of
nature and universality,” when God commanded him to “give names unto
other creatures in Paradise.” The idolatrous knowledge that tempted Adam,
by contrast, was not science at all, but rather “the proud knowledge of good
and evil, with an intent in man to give law unto himself and to depend no
more upon God's commandments, which was the form of the temptation.”
13
Bacon, in other words, was not content just to refute biblical interpre-
tations that seemed to oppose science; his tactic was to answer these with
more faithful readings. He does this by shifting the center of attention, so
far as the Bible speaks to natural wisdom, onto other passages, such as this
one that affirms the religious substance of the scientific act:
God hath made all things beautiful, or decent in the true return of their seasons:
Also he hath placed the world in man's heart, yet cannot man find out the work
which God worketh from the beginning to the end
: declaring not obscurely that
God hath framed the mind of man as a mirror or glass capable of the
image of the universal world, and joyful to receive the impression thereof,
as the eye joyeth to receive light.
14
Natural philosophy was not merely vindicated by the Bible; it was mandated
by it. Because the “
spirit of man is as the lamp of God, wherewith he searcheth the
inwardness of all secrets
,” it is also God's work.
15
In the process of defending science against tacit objections, Bacon was
also tacitly writing science into Christian history. The natural philosopher
who speaks in the
Advancement
speaks as a Christian, as if to assume that
the scientific ethos, once fully realized, was also the Christian ethos and
thus one bent on acting out the human destiny envisioned in the New Testa-
ment. This aspect of his “style and language,” to go back to the quote from
W. A. Sessions that opened this chapter, reflects the “soteriological purpose”
that is everywhere recognizable in his philosophical works—and everywhere
the theological fashion in his day. By making use of the openness to radical
historical revision that the Protestant movement had required, he could
also bring science into the Christian story of salvation as one of its actors.
