Abstract
I was struck recently, while writing a new book on biblical interpretation, by the curious coincidence that two ancient Bacons—no relation to each other—occupy significant roles in the history of the Christian engagement with science.
Roger Bacon (c. 1214–1292) was a thirteenth-century English Fransciscan monk, who in 1267–1268 sent three essays to Pope Clement IV about the woeful state of education in his time, in part because his contemporaries (he claimed) were neglecting important subjects like mathematics, chemistry, and physics. Bacon himself was an experimental scientist, researching into such things as the reflection of light, explaining the composition and effects of gunpowder, and discussing the possibility of inventions of later centuries such as steam-vessels, microscopes, and telescopes. His plea to the Pope was for a renewed commitment to genuine scholarship within a Christian frame of reference, in which science, faith, and scripture would all be seriously engaged and contemplated in relation to each other, and sure knowledge of all kinds would emerge from that process. This Bacon was a light shining on the path ahead, then, which would shortly lead to the rise of modern science—a vessel constructed within the harbor of distinctively Christian thought, even though this is not commonly understood nowadays by modern people raised on a ‘warfare model’ of the relationship between faith and science.
The English philosopher, Francis Bacon, lived in the sixteenth century (1561–1626), just as modern science was getting ready to go places. In his writings, we see science beginning to slip its moorings and sail off in its own direction. This Bacon was committed to exploring nature unencumbered by any previous form of tradition, philosophy, or religion; total knowledge in pursuit of mastery was the goal. It was an approach to “nature” that was inevitably (in its time) still influenced by some biblical ideas. These were now recontextualized, however, within a thoroughly this-worldly, utopian story about reality that justified (as biblical faith does not) the bending of everything in nature to human ends, and was optimistic about the ability of human power to reach these ends.
We are still dealing today with the consequences of the birth of this autonomous, modern scientific monster, which, for all the good it has delivered, has also had profound and negative effects not just on humanity, but on the whole of creation. We shall never know how different the history of the modern world might have been, had Roger’s vision of integrated knowledge gleaned from both of God’s “books” shaped it more significantly than it did, prevailing over both religious obscurantism on the one hand, and reductionistic scientism on the other. Saving our own bacon now, however, may well depend on bringing that first Bacon home, so that he can corrall the other’s idea of human dominion over nature once again within a more authentic version of the Christian Story, where love of God, neighbor, and creation at large directly informs our understanding of what dominion means, and what it is for.