Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
language of the Supreme Court ruling in
Plessy v. Ferguson
, we might say that
Bacon had declared science and theology “separate but equal.” Science and
religion were equal to the extent that both realms had revelation as their
subject matter, but they were separate because the new science could have
no bearing upon the metaphysical concerns of theology. As a distinct rev-
elation coming only from natural facts, science could in principle pose no
threat to religion, and therefore theology had no reason to interfere with it.
Given the facility of the two topics metaphor in negotiating this bal-
anced alliance, it is not surprising that Galileo should have latched onto it
as well, though without the same success. The Italian astronomer invoked
this commonplace in his famous
Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina
of
1615, on the eve of his first failed effort to secure the blessings of the church
for Copernican science.
23
Galileo had a more specific aim for this trope, a
desire to reaffirm the traditional Catholic position that the Bible's authors
used the common idioms of their day in speaking of nature and were not
concerned about scientific precision. But while the Catholic exegetical tradi-
tion was clearly on his side, as William E. Carroll has shown, the times were
not.
24
A conservative backlash prompted by the Reformation had pushed
the church toward a more general literalism. Galileo's division of hermeneu-
tical domains suggested that those scriptures dealing with natural questions
were not subject to the exclusive interpretive authority that the church had
reasserted at the Council of Trent. If it had conceded independent author-
ity to astronomers and mathematicians to interpret the topic of nature, as
Richard Blackwell interprets this complex event, it would also have had to
grant them authority to decipher those passages of Scripture which seemed
to fall within the scope of science. By failing to perceive this implication of
the two topics argument, Galileo had unwittingly embroiled himself in the
reactionary politics of the Counter-Reformation. His depiction of natural
philosophy as an exegetical activity aroused fears in the Catholic hierarchy
that science might usurp the church's already besieged authority.
25
The same implication of the two topic argument that helped to derail
Galileo's cause in Catholic Italy helped to advance Bacon's in Northern
Europe, where the Protestant movement was taking a firm hold. Even if
Protestants felt similar fears, these were likely to be allayed by the meta-
phor's suggestion that science participated in the spirit of religious reform.
In throwing aside—after the fashion of the reformers—the secondary influ-
ences of tradition, ancient authority, and textual disputation in favor of the
direct examination of nature's revelation, Bacon's empirical science put on
the Protestant ethos as its mantle. He dramatized this by even insinuating
