Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
The basis of this identity can be found in the two topics metaphor that
Bacon features in the
Advancement
and in several of his other philosophical
writings. A commonplace justification for secular learning dating back at
least to the church fathers and, in Bacon's interpretation, to the Bible itself,
this trope expands upon what the doctrine of creation implies—namely, that
since God is the author of nature, natural philosophy is likewise a form
of theological inquiry.
16
Thus conceived, the Bible is the “book of God's
word” pertaining to spiritual matters and to salvation in particular, but
nature is the “book of God's works,” the great tome that science has been
commanded to probe and ponder in order to illuminate God's creative
rationalit y.
17
While the notion of nature as a second revelation was not new, it seems
fairly certain that Bacon's pervasive and emphatic appeal to this idea was
designed to accentuate the specifically Protestant character of the new sci-
ence. The reformers' insistence upon the solitary witness of the Bible as the
corrective needed to overcome the unsavory excesses of Catholic exegetes
also gave Bacon's fact-centered science a similar role once the topic of nature
was recognized as a parallel source of revelation. If the Protestant slogan of
sola scriptura
represented a kind of “received view” in theology, the demand
for an empiricist approach to natural philosophy was likely to have simi-
lar meaning for this movement. In the decades immediately after Bacon's
death in 1626, this manifested in the inspiration he gave to the Pansophist
movement. The leaders of this amalgam movement of Continental Pietists
and English Puritans recognized in Bacon's scientific proposals the basic
premise of their own reforms. The Pansophists had endeavored to complete
the work of the Reformation by expanding its implications into every arena
of learning and social reform—into secular as well as sacred realms. These
humble scholars and itinerant clergymen (many of them refugees of the reli-
gious wars unfolding on the Continent) were certainly not the aristocratic
patrons that Bacon had hoped to win over, but in England at least they
represented views that were destined, in consequence of the Puritan Revolu-
tion, to come into the mainstream.
Bacon became a hero of religious reform because his decidedly Protes-
tant spin on the two topics idea also situated the science he was advocating
within the Christian historical narrative as understood by the reformers.
Although it would make sense to suppose that Bacon was drawn to this tra-
ditional convention merely because it could protect science from theological
encroachments, this was clearly not merely a
pax Baconia
, as Thomas Huxley
would later call it—that is, a convenient temporary division of the world into
