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s cience in g oD ' s B osom
Bacon tells us that human existence is radical discovery and transformation; classi-
cal and biblical prophetic contexts provide him with a framework for understanding
and engendering historical change, and therefore for conceiving of man as an innova-
tive master of change. Further, the oppositions in biblical prophecy between fulfill-
ment and new beginning, and between piety and iconoclasm, provide a precedent
for the productive and dangerous discontinuity between two visions of change that
characterize Bacon's modernity.
—Charles Whitney
It seemed to us that we had before us a picture of our salvation in heaven; for we
that were awhile since in the jaws of death, were now brought into a place where we
found nothing but consolations.
—Francis Bacon, New Atlantis
In the previous chapter, I proposed that the two topics argument, by iden-
tifying science's empiricist ethic with the hermeneutic idealism of the
reformers, established a rhetorical formula for public patronage that has
had enduring qualities. Once such a vital link was found that was capable of
tying scientific inquiry to such a widely sanctioned public value, it was likely
to persist even as the gradual secularization of the English-speaking world
made any explicit identification with traditional religious beliefs untenable.
A version of this hermeneutic rationale lives on, I will argue, in the persis-
tent inclination to argue that science gains its unique public authority from
its empiricist devotion. Science continues to have a priestly ethos because
it continues to be regarded as selfless, an undertaking that is distinctly vir-
tuous because it blocks out those deceptions (“idols,” as Bacon would call
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