Vladimir Moss – Orthodox Christianity Author

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FRANCIS BACON AND THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE

Written by Vladimir Moss

FRANCIS BACON AND THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE

 

     The profession of scientist first appears in the early sixteenth century, when. Erasmus humorously wrote of them: “Near these march the scientists, reverenced for their beards and the fur on their gowns, who teach that they alone are wise while the rest of mortal men flit about as shadows. How pleasantly they dote, indeed, while they construct their numberless worlds, and measure the sun, moon, stars, and spheres as with thumb and line. They assign causes for lightning, winds, eclipses, and other inexplicable things, never hesitating a whit, as if they were privy to the secrets of nature, artificer of things, or as if they visited us fresh from the council of the gods. Yet all the while nature is laughing grandly at them and their conjectures. For to prove that they have good intelligence of nothing, this is a sufficient argument: they can never explain why they disagree with each other on every subject. Thus knowing nothing in general, they profess to know all things in particular; though they are ignorant even of themselves, and on occasion do not see the ditch or the stone lying across their path, because many of them are blear-eyed or absent-minded; yet they proclaim that they perceive ideas, universals, forms without matter, primary substances, quiddities, and ecceities – things so tenuous, I fear, that Lynceus himself could not see them. When they especially disdain the vulgar crowd is when they bring out their triangles, quadrangles, circles, and mathematical pictures of the sort, lay one upon the other, intertwine them into a maze, then deploy – and all to involve the uninitiated in darkness. Their fraternity does not lack those who predict future events by consulting the stars, and promise wonders even more magical; and these lucky scientists find people to believe them.”[1]

     However, this description mixed up what we would now call true scientists with quacks of various kinds. The distinction began to be made at the beginning of the next century as a result of the works of such men as Francis Bacon and René Descartes, who first expounded the principles of empiricism, or the scientific method.

 

     Bacon, who was at one time Chancellor of England, has been called the first philosopher and prophet of science, and therefore the first man with a modern mentality – that is, a mentality marked by a scientific view of the world. But of course he lived in a religious age, and therefore for him the book of Nature, which scientists read, did not exclude the book of God, the Bible, which theologians read; and God was the Author of both of them. For “it is true,” he wrote, “that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion. For while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity.”[2]

     However, from the seventeenth century both books – that of nature, and that of God - were increasingly subject to a single heuristic method – what we now call the scientific outlook, or empiricism. This is the methodology which declares that the only reliable way of attaining non-mathematical truth is by inferences from the evidence of the senses (mathematical truth describes the structure of inferential and deductive reasoning). This principle, first proclaimed by Bacon in his The Advancement of Learning (1605), rejects the witness of non-empirical sources – for example, God or intuition or so-called “innate ideas” – in scientific work.

     The reverse process – that is, inferences about God and other non-sensory realities from the evidence of the senses – was admitted by the early, believing empiricists (that is, roughly until the death of Newton), but rejected by most later ones. The transition from the early to the later empiricism is marked by David Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1747), in which he writes: “While we argue from the course of nature and infer a particular intelligent cause which first bestowed and still preserves order in the universe, we embrace a principle which is still uncertain and useless. It is uncertain because the subject lies entirely beyond the reach of human experience. It is useless because… we can never on that basis establish any principles of conduct and behaviour.”

 

     In time empiricism became not only a methodological or epistemological, but also an ontological principle, the principle, namely, that reality not only is best discovered by empirical means, but also is, solely and exclusively, that which can be investigated by empirical means; non-empirical “reality” simply does not exist. Thus empiricism led to materialism. However, it was and is possible to espouse empiricism in science and not be a materialist, but to be religious, as is demonstrated by the many believing scientists of the time (and all times).

     In accordance with the difference in the kinds of evidence admitted, there is a difference in the nature and structure of the authority that science (in its more “advanced”, materialist form) and religion rely on. Science relies on the authority of millions of observations that have been incorporated into a vast structure of hypotheses that are taken as “proven” – although in fact no hypothesis can ever be proved beyond every possible doubt, and science advances by the systematic application of doubt to what are thought to be weak points in the hypothetical structure. For, as John Donne said, “the new philosophy [science] calls all in doubt”.[3] Religion, however, without denying empirical evidence, admits a much wider range of things and events as facts - not only Divine Revelation, but also immaterial entities like the soul and all kinds of miracles that empirical science denies a priori.

 

     Bacon compared science to the knowledge of essences that Adam had before the fall – “the pure knowledge of nature and universality, a knowledge by the light whereof man did give names unto other creatures in Paradise, as they were brought to him”.[4] “This light should in its very rising touch and illuminate all the border-regions that confine upon the circle of our present knowledge; and so, spreading further and further should presently disclose and bring into sight all that is most hidden and secret in the world.”[5] “God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world: rather may He graciously grant to us to write an apocalypse or true vision of the footsteps of the Creator imprinted on His creatures.”[6]

     J.M. Roberts writes that Bacon was “a visionary, glimpsing not so much what science would discover as what it would become: a faith. ‘The true and lawful end of the sciences’, he wrote, ‘is that human life be enriched by new discoveries and powers.’ Through them could be achieved ‘a restitution and reinvigorating (in great part) of man to the sovereignty and power… which he had in his first creation.’ This was ambitious indeed – nothing less than the redemption of mankind through organised research; he was here, too, a prophetic figure, precursor of later scientific societies and institutes.”[7 

     Now the spirit of true religion is the spirit of the humble receiving of the truth by revelation from God; it does not preclude active seeking for truth, but recognizes that it will never succeed in this search if God does not help the truth-seeker. For Wisdom “goes about seeking those worthy of her, and She graciously appears to them in their paths, and meets them in every thought” (Wisdom 6.16). In science, on the other hand, while here also there are humble seekers for truth, there is also a proud Faustian spirit, a striving for power over nature, rather than simply the simple contemplation of it, which is incompatible with the true religious spirit. Thus Bacon thought that the “pure knowledge of nature and universality” would lead to power (“knowledge is power”, in his famous phrase) and to “the effecting of all things possible”.[8]

     So important was this power that no human authority, clerical or otherwise, should be allowed to interfere with or limit it. Hence Bacon’s demand for complete intellectual freedom for scientists[9], whose work had to be collegiate and collective in nature, suffering no hierarchical oversight. The Royal Academy (1662) was a conscious attempt to incarnate Bacon’s ideal of collegiate science.

*

     Now Erasmus’ description of scientists, quoted above, indicates that at the beginning true science, occultism and quackery emerged out of a common intellectual medium, and a common striving for power over nature. As C.S. Lewis writes, “There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious – such as digging up and mutilating the dead.”[10] 

     For, as Fr. Seraphim Rose points out: “Modern science was born out of the experiments of the Platonic alchemists, the astrologers and magicians. The underlying spirit of the new scientific world-view was the spirit of Faustianism, the spirit of magic, which is retained as a definite undertone of contemporary science. The discovery, in fact, of atomic energy would have delighted the Renaissance alchemists very much: they were looking for just such power. The aim of modern science is power over nature. Descartes, who formulated the mechanistic scientific world-view, said that man was to become the master and possessor of nature. It should be noted that this is a religious faith that takes the place of Christian faith.”[11]

     It was the waning in the Church’s authority coincident with the Renaissance and the Reformation that led to this explosion of interest, especially in Protestant lands, in what Grayling calls “short ways to knowledge” - occultism, astrology and alchemy. The alchemists, for example, believed that gold could be created from base metals – obviously a very useful and profitable technology, if it was true, which is why cash-strapped rulers such as Queen Elizabeth I and scientist-magicians like John Dee were interested in it, as were even real scientists such as Newton and Boyle. But it was not true; and science grew in proportion as these “short cuts” to knowledge were shown to be false.

     According to Grayling, “The effective demise of the credibility of magia, alchymia, cabala, even though credulousness in them remained (and among a few, remains to this day), can plausibly be attributed to the failure of the supposed ‘movement’ known as Rosicrucianism in the events led up to the outbreak of the Thirty Years War. The Rosicrucian panic in the first quarter of the seventeenth century was what in dramaturgical terms would be called the crisis of occult philosophy, that is, the last great gasp of an outlook that had overstayed its welcome in the intellectual economy of the age, and in that final fling demonstrated its vacuity. Arguably, the interest in questions of methodology of the two chief formulators of philosophical and scientific method in the seventeenth century – Francis Bacon and René Descartes – was piqued not just by the Aristotelianism they rejected, but by the confusion of alchemy with chemistry, magic with medicine, astrology with astronomy, mysticism with mathematics, that was getting in the way of the advance of knowledge. What they rejected, in arguing for responsible methods of enquiry, was the very magia, alchymia, cabala which had engrossed the previous century’s epistemological and metaphysical imaginations.”[12]

     By about 1625, the Catholic Church, spearheaded by the Jesuits (of whom, Grayling claims, Descartes was an agent) had triumphed over magia, alchymia, cabala in its last major, Rosicrucian “fling”. At the same time, however, it had set itself against the beginnings of the scientific revolution, thereby as it were throwing the baby out with the bath-water. For, as Grayling continues: “Remembering that occultism was motivated by a Faustian desire to find short cuts to knowledge and control of the mysteries of nature explains much about the threat it posed to the view – the Church’s view – that those mysteries are not mankind’s but God’s alone to know. From the Church’s point of view there was no point in drawing a line between real and occult science. Finding a way of unlocking the universe’s secrets was every enquirer’s ambition, whatever kind of enquirer was involved – whether by the short-cuts of occultism, or by the empirical and quantitative methods of genuine science. The Church was against both; it did not distinguish them.”[13 

     Having said that, we must acknowledge that modern opponents of religion have exaggerated their case against the Catholic Church, and Christianity in general, as if the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo overthrew not only the old Aristotelean-Ptolemaic model of the heavens and the earth, but religious faith in general. They did not… In this connection it is essential to dissect the Thomist synthesis of spiritual and material knowledge that was accepted by both Catholics and Protestants in the sixteenth century into its constituent parts. Now Thomas Aquinas, as Grayling writes, “brought together the material and the spiritual by joining Aristotle’s science, Ptolemy’s astronomy and Galen’s medical theories – together offering a picture of the material aspect of man’s existence – with the Church’s teaching on the nature and destiny of the soul.”[14] But the Church’s teaching “on the nature and destiny of the soul” did not have to be bound up with “the material aspect of man’s existence” - there was nothing in the Holy Scriptures or the Holy Fathers of the first millennium of Christianity that necessitated an acceptance of Ptolemy’s astronomy. Indeed, St. Basil in his Hexaemeron shows some contempt for all pagan speculations on the nature of the universe.[15] 

     The Roman Catholics’ dogmatization of pagan physical speculations was a critical mistake – rather, heresy; for by giving the pagan Aristotle, and then his Christian follower Aquinas, a status and honour above that of the Apostles themselves, they departed from the faith of the Apostles. By contrast, the Orthodox Church in the East respected, and sometimes used, but never idolized Aristotle (still less, Ptolemy).[16] And, as we have seen, the Orthodox rejected Aristotelian intrusions into theology both in the Palamite controversies of the mid-fourteenth century and in the Council of Florence in 1438-39.

     The discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo certainly overthrew Ptolemy’s astronomy, but in no way did they overthrow the authority of the real sources of Christian tradition – which do not include the foolish wisdom of the Popes!

Much confusion has been generated in this connection by Galileo’s trial, in which, so it is said, a Pope who falsely believed that the earth was flat and that the sun circled the earth persecuted Galileo, who believed on empirical evidence that the earth circled the sun. But the truth, as Jay Wesley Richards explains, is somewhat different. “First of all, some claim Copernicus was persecuted, but history shows he wasn’t; in fact, he died of natural causes the same year his ideas were published. As for Galileo, his case can’t be reduced to a simple conflict between scientific truth and religious superstition. He insisted the church immediately endorse his views rather than allow them to gradually gain acceptance, he mocked the Pope, and so forth. Yes, he was censured, but the church kept giving him his pension for the rest of his life.”

     The earlier case of Bruno, continues Richards, “was very sad. He was executed in Rome in 1600. Certainly this is a stain on church history. But again, this was a complicated case. His Copernican views were incidental. He defended pantheism and was actually executed for his heretical views on the Trinity, the Incarnation, and other doctrines that had nothing to do with Copernicanism.” [17]

 

     In fact, Christian Tradition never denied a spherical earth. For the Prophet Isaiah spoke of Him Who “sits above the circle of the earth” (Isaiah 40.22). The Holy Fathers knew that the earth was round.[18] “The truth is,” writes David Lindberg, “that it’s almost impossible to find an educated person after Aristotle who doubts that the Earth is a sphere.”[19]

     Christopher Johns writes: “The misconception here is not only that medieval people thought that the earth was flat, but that the ancient Greek theory of a spherical earth was somehow ‘lost’ or forgotten in the Middle Ages, and that the Church taught the alleged ‘flat earth theory’ as a matter of dogma, until Christopher Columbus proved them wrong by sailing far into the west without falling over the edge of the earth. The reality is that Medieval people were well aware of the spherical shape of the earth. Medieval art consistently depicts the earth as shaped like a sphere, a spherical earth appears in church sermons of the period, and the earth is explicitly described as a sphere in the writings of Dante and Chaucer. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica, also gives the round earth as an example of an accepted scientific fact and a rational truth: ‘The astronomer and the physicist both may prove the same conclusion: that the earth, for instance, is round: the astronomer by means of mathematics (i.e. abstracting from matter), but the physicist by means of matter itself’ (emphasis mine). Meanwhile, Bede the Venerable, the Anglo-Saxon monk, would note the following in The Reckoning of Time: ‘Not without reason is [the earth] called “the orb of the world” on the pages of Holy Scripture and of ordinary literature. It is, in fact, set like a sphere in the middle of the whole universe’. Stephen Jay Gould, a historian of science, noted the following: ‘There never was a period of “flat Earth darkness” among scholars (regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the Earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology.”[20]

*

     True Religion, unlike both the false science of the pre-modern mind and the true, but often trivial science that replaced it, does not seek power over nature, but rather knowledge of the Creator of nature – Whose power, of course, can only be submitted to, not exploited as Simon Magus tried to exploit it. It opposes science only when it goes beyond its proper bounds and ceases to be empirical in its methods, even becoming so proud and blind as to deny the existence of God. In seeking the truly useful, salvific knowledge, True Religion relies on no other ultimate authority than the Word of God as communicated either directly to the Church, “the pillar and ground of the Truth” (I Timothy 3.15), which preserves and verifies individual revelations. Doubt has no place within the true religion, but only when one is still in the process of seeking it, when different religious systems are still being approached as possible truths – in other words, as hypotheses. Having cleaved to the true religion by faith, however, - and faith is defined as the opposite of doubt, as “the certainty of things not seen” (Hebrews 11.1), - the religious believer advances, not by doubt, but by the deepening of faith, by ever deeper immersion in the undoubted truths of religion.

     When the differences between science and religion are viewed from this perspective, there are seen to be important differences between Catholicism and Protestantism. From this perspective, Catholicism is more “religious”, and Protestantism – less religious and more “scientific”. Catholicism’s view was formulated at the Council of Trent, and was summarized as follows in a letter by Cardinal Bellarmino: “As you are aware, the Council of Trent forbids the interpretation of the Scriptures in a way contrary to the common opinion of the holy Fathers”. This was correct from an Orthodox point of view, but did not correspond to what actually was the case in the Catholic Church. For whatever the Council of Trent may have said, the deciding voice in Catholicism de facto was not “the consensus of the Fathers” but that of the Pope, which often contradicted the patristic consensus. Nevertheless, the essential point here is that for Catholics the criterion of truth was ancient in origin and went back, in theory at any rate, to Divine Revelation as interpreted by the Fathers. Protestantism, on the other hand, arose as a protest against, and a doubting of, the revealed truths of the Catholic religion. From an Orthodox point of view, some of these doubts were justified, and some not - but that is not the essential point here. The essential point is that Protestantism arose out of doubt rather than faith, and, like Descartes in philosophy, placed doubt at the head of the corner of its new theology.

     How? First, by doubting that there is a Church that is “the pillar and ground of the truth”, the vessel of God’s revelation. So where is God’s revelation to be sought? In the visions and words of individual men, the Prophets and Apostles, the Saints and Fathers? Yes; but – and here the corrosive power of doubt enters again – not all that the Church has passed down about these men can be trusted, according to the Protestants. In particular, the inspiration of the post-apostolic Saints and Fathers is to be doubted, as is much of what we are told of the lives even of the Prophets and Apostles. In fact, we can only rely on the Bible – Sola Scriptura. Only the Bible is objective evidence; for everybody can read, analyse and interpret it. Therefore only it corresponds to what we would call scientific evidence.

     But here’s the rub: can we be sure even of the Bible? After all, the text comes to us from the Church, not direct from heaven. Can we be sure that Moses wrote Genesis, or Isaiah Isaiah, or Paul Hebrews? To answer these questions we have to analyse the text scientifically. Then we will find the real text, the text we can really trust, the text of the real author. But suppose we cannot find this real text? And suppose we conclude that the “real” text of the book was written by tens of authors, spread over hundreds of years? Can we then be sure that it is the Word of God? But if we cannot be sure that the Bible is the Word of God, how can we be sure of anything? Thus Protestantism, which begins with the doubting of authority, ends with the loss of truth itself. Or rather, it ends with a scientific truth which dispenses with religious truth, or accepts religious truth only to the extent that it is “confirmed by the findings of science”. It ends by being a branch of the scientific endeavour of systematic doubt, and not a species of religious faith at all 

     The original error of Protestantism consisted in a false reductionist attitude to Divine Revelation. Revelation is given to us in the Church, “the pillar and ground of the truth”, and consists of two indivisible and mutually interdependent parts – Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition. Scripture and Tradition support each other, and are in turn supported by the Church, which herself rests on the Rock of truth, Christ the Incarnate Truth, as witnessed to in Scripture and Tradition. Any attempt to reduce Divine Revelation to one of these elements, any attempt to make one element essential and the other inessential, is doomed to end with the loss of Revelation altogether, the dissolution of the Rock of ages into the sands of shifting, inconstant opinion, driven hither and thither by the tides of scientific fashion.

     Vladimir Trostnikov has shown that Protestant tendency towards reductionism in fact goes back to the Catholicism of the eleventh century, just after the Roman Church’s break with Orthodoxy, and to the nominalist thinker Roscelin. Nominalism, which had triumphed over its philosophical rival, universalism, by the 14th century, “gives priority to the particular over the general, the lower over the higher”. As such, it contradicts the Hierarchical conception, and anticipates Protestant reductionism, which insists that the simple precedes the complex, and that the complex can always be reduced, both logically and ontologically, to the simple.[21] Thus the Catholic heresy of nominalism gave birth to the Protestant heresy of reductionism, which reduced the complex spiritual process of the absorption of God’s revelation in the Church to the unaided rationalist dissection of a single element in that life, the book of the Holy Scriptures. As Trostnikov explains, the assumption that reductionism is true has led to a series of concepts which taken together represent a summation of the contemporary world-view: that matter consists of elementary particles which themselves do not consist of anything; that the planets and all the larger objects of the universe arose through the gradual condensation of simple gas; that all living creatures arose out of inorganic matter; that the later forms of social organization and politics arose out of earlier, simpler and less efficient ones; that human consciousness arose from lower phenomena, drives and archetypes; that the government of a State consists of its citizens, who must therefore be considered to be the supreme power.

     We see, then, why science, like capitalism, flourished in the Protestant countries. Protestantism, according to Landes, “gave a big boost to literacy, spawned dissent and heresies, and promoted the skepticism and refusal of authority that is at the heart of the scientific endeavor. The Catholic countries, instead of meeting the challenge, responded by closure and censure.”[22]

     The truth is that both true science and true religion depend on authority – that is, the reports of reliable men about what they have seen, touched and heard (Moses during his forty days on Sinai, the Apostles in the locked room on the eve of the Resurrection of Christ). False reports can lead to false science no less than to false religion and superstition. Moreover, the reports on which both religion and science are based on empirical evidence: the emptiness of a tomb or the touch of a pierced side, on the one hand; the falling of an apple or the bending of a ray, on the other. The question in both science and religion is: can we rely on this evidence, is it trustworthy and authoritative? And so both science and religion seek truth, and both rely on authority. The difference lies, first, in the kinds of truth they seek, and secondly, in the nature of the authority they rely on.

     Thus there is no contradiction between true science and true religion. This was understood even by the prophet of the scientific revolution, Francis Bacon. As he wrote: “Undoubtedly a superficial tincture of philosophy [science] may incline the mind to atheism, yet a farther knowledge brings it back to religion; for on the threshold of philosophy, where second causes appear to absorb the attention, some oblivion of the highest cause may ensue; but when the mind goes deeper, and sees the dependence of causes and the works of Providence, it will easily perceive, according to the mythology of the poets, that the upper link of Nature’s chain is fastened to Jupiter’s throne…”[23]

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