Francis Bacon's Legacy

Whether we like it or not and whether we realize it or not, we are the children of the philosophers who have gone before us. Our thinking is never done in a vacuum, but if you believe otherwise, read on.

For Bacon, standing at the dawn of the scientific revolution, the main enemy had been Aristotelian philosophy. Thus he taught that science must start by clearing the decks - by liberating the mind from all metaphysical speculation, all received notions of truth, all the accumulated superstition of the ages...

Applied to biblical interpretation, the Baconian method stipulated that the first step is to free our minds from all historical theological formulations (Calvinist, Lutheran, Anglican or whatever). With minds washed clean from merely human speculations, we confront the biblical text as a collection of facts that speak for themselves - and then compile individual verses inductively into a theological system...

Perhaps most serious, however, was the Baconian hostility to history - its rejection of creeds and confessions that had been hammered out by the church over the centuries... But notice what this means. It means the church loses the wisdom of the luminous intellects that have appeared throughout church history... the idea that a single generation can reject wholesale all of Christian history and start over again is doomed to theological shallowness...

Moreover, by stressing the need to shed all presuppositions, the Baconian ideal of objectivity blinded people to the presuppositions they actually continued to hold. Thus, in the nineteenth century, religious groups would often charge that everyone else imposed a preexisting, humanly constructed framework of interpretation on the Bible, but they did not; they merely accepted the self-evident meaning of the text...

The paradox is that the very notion that we are capable of freeing ourselves from human systems of thought was itself the product of . . . a human system - one inherited from Francis Bacon. Historians have pointed out "the irony of claiming to overturn human traditions and interpretive schemes while at the same time being wedded to an empirical theological method drawn from early Enlightenment thought."

Total Truth, Nancy Pearcey, Crossway, 2008, pp. 299, 301-302, 304.