Chapter 1 (continued) 

Of course, “Science”, in the modern sense of the word, was not suddenly made possible by one writer’s describing how it should be done. In every era, for centuries, a few rare thinkers had already been using methods pretty much like those Bacon described. They just hadn’t been conscious of the steps in the method. But Bacon’s book on how the material world should be studied gave scholars a new model to use, and to think about and discuss, one much more specific and real-world oriented than any of the earlier models had been.

 

                         St. Peter's Basilica, artistic and scientific marvel of its time

                                 (credit: Patrick Landy, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

 

Whether Bacon started a revolution or merely articulated what was already taking place in the minds of the creative folk of his time is not important for my case. What matters is that the method Bacon articulated began to get results long before he articulated it. Navigation, architecture, agriculture, medicine, industry, warfare – even the routines of daily life began to undergo radical improvements because of the insights and inventions of Science.

At this point, as Science began to affect people’s material lives, inevitably, its ways began to affect their deeper thinking. For many people who were trying to hang on to a traditional faith, the changes to the old, generally accepted ways of thinking were not welcome. The same still holds true for many today.

                                   

 

                                                               René Descartes 

                        (credit: Frans Hals [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

 

A younger contemporary of Bacon was the man many still see as the leading light of the Renaissance and its new way of thinking, a sickly French parochial-school boy who became a sickly man with a mind like a razor: René Descartes. He spent years maneuvering to get a feel for what the religious leaders of his time would let him say, and only then did he publish his views on how thinking and learning about the material world should be done. (We need to keep in mind that when Rene was 4 years old, Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake for spreading views that the Church did not like. Descartes knew all about Bruno’s case. He was understandably wary of offending the authorities of his time.) Descartes offered his readers a way of thinking about thinking that was more nuanced and sensitive to the authorities than was Bacon’s. But Bacon lived in Protestant England; he could get away with being more unorthodox.

Descartes separated Science from Religion and, thus, from moral theory. Under his model, Science can advance our ways of dealing with the physical world, the world of the body, but Religion and its inherent morality must oversee the activities of our minds and souls, which are not in any way physical. For the people of his time, the affairs of souls were seen as being much more important than those of bodies or anything else made of matter. Under Descartes’s model, Religion retains control over our decisions about what we should be doing with our lives, including how we should be using the findings of Science.^3,4

Descartes’s clever maneuver enabled him, in his writing at least, to separate the mind from the body and the realm of faith and morality from the realm of physical experience. It was a move that somewhat ameliorated the religious authorities’ scrutiny of those who studied the physical world and how the things in it worked. But he only delayed the inevitable. Humans have concerns in both “realms”, the concrete/sensory and the abstract/moral, so sooner or later we must deal with the fact that the two realms must interact somehow in order for them both to involve, and matter to, us. Descartes knew full well of this problem in his philosophy, but could find no solution to it.