I’ve been reading Francis Bacon for a legal scholarship project on intellectual propertly law (focusing on how Enlightenment epistemology and views of progress influenced the instrumentalist basis of patent and copyright law). Coincidentally, I came across this passage from Bacon’s Magna Instauratio about the relationship between faith and science, which summarizes my present feelings quite well. It’s interesting that Bacon was wrestling in the early 1600’s with the same things we wrestle with today:
you will find that by the simpleness of certain divines, access to any philosophy, however pure, is well night closed. Some are weakly afraid lest a deeper search into nature should transgress the permitted limits of sobermindednes, wrongfully wresting and transferring what is said in holy writ against those who pry into sacred mysteries to the hidden things of nature, which are barred by no prohibition. Others with more subtlety surmise and reflect that if second causes are unknown, everything can more readily be referred to the divine hand and rod, a point in which they think religion greatly concerned which is in fact nothing else but to seek to gratify God with a lie. Others fear from past example that movements and changes in philosophy will end in assaults on religion. And others again appear apprehensive that in the investigation of nature something may be found to subvert or at least shake the authority of religion, especially with the unlearned. But these two last fears seem to me to savour utterly of carnal wisdom, as if men in the recesses and secret thoughts of their hearts doubted and distrusted the strength of religion and the empire of faith over the sense, and therefore feared that the investigation of truth in nature might be dangerous to them. But if the matter be truly considered, natural philosophy is after the word of God at once the surest medicine against superstition, and the most approved nourishment for faith, and therefore she is rightly given to religion as her most faithful handmaid, since the one displays the will of God, the other his power.