Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
look quite different today. Key rhetorical choices determine key trajectories
of thought. Had Jefferson opted to use a metaphor suggesting a more per-
meable barrier between church and state, say a “fence of separation” rather
than a “wall,” the language and arguments appearing in public debates on
this subject today would likely be somewhat different. In the same way, we
might have reason to think that Bacon's decision to harmonize the new
science with a specific set of Protestant values has been similarly determina-
tive—though by no means absolutely so.
One sign of this, as I said in the previous chapter, is the scientific
culture's tendency to depict what it does in purely empiricist and inductiv-
ist terms, even though scholarly examinations consistently show scientific
work to have a thoroughly rationalistic and deductive side as well. I believe
that this one-sided view descends from Bacon's fateful identification of sci-
ence with a Protestant shift away from the inward authority of theological
reason toward the outward testimony of the Bible.
A second way in which Bacon specifically anticipates evolutionism,
which I will take up in the next chapter, is in his persistent tendency to
identify scientific knowledge with the notion of historical progress. In the
rhetoric of evolutionism, this now manifests in the supposition that because
science alone “reads” nature strictly on its own terms, the historical under-
standing that arises from tracking the course of natural time has distinctive
relevance for humans. Science's devotion to empiricism, in other words,
gives it prophetic historical authority as well. Evolutionism in this regard
descends from the prophetic vision that Bacon dramatized in his
New Atlan-
tis
. The imaginary Christian civilization depicted in this tale had remained
true to the topic of God's word since its conversion in the first century, and
for this reason it had likewise remained true to the topic of God's works.
In consequence, the lost European seafarers who stumble upon Bacon's
island Christendom discover a civilization on the brink of realizing the mil-
lenarian expectations that had been forestalled in real Christian history by
the corruptions of Catholicism. Science and historical destiny are drawn
together on this island utopia because Bacon's story draws upon the under-
lying assumption that natural time and historical time have the same divine
author. And thus to be true to God's revelation in nature is to be in tune
with history's unfolding plan. The historical narrative voiced in contempo-
rary forms of evolutionism continues to reflect this legacy of scientific mil-
lenarianism whenever it depicts the arrival of evolutionary science as a sign
marking the dawn of history's final epoch.
