The Two Books

The Method and Its Costs

Bacon’s methodological revolution was genuinely productive. The insistence on careful observation, systematic experiment, and provisional conclusions based on evidence has given humanity extraordinary power over the natural world. This is not nothing, and TLA does not pretend otherwise.

But Bacon’s method came with a cost he did not fully reckon. By bracketing theological and moral considerations from the pursuit of natural knowledge, he created a domain of inquiry that was, in principle, value-neutral. Nature could be known apart from God; knowledge could be pursued apart from wisdom; power could be accumulated apart from any account of what it should be used for.

What New Atlantis Reveals

Bacon’s unfinished utopia New Atlantis describes a society organized around an institution called Solomon’s House — a research institution dedicated to the conquest of nature for the benefit of humanity. The name is significant: Solomon, in the biblical tradition, is the exemplar of wisdom.

But Bacon’s Solomon’s House is a house without the God of Solomon. The comprehensive knowledge it pursues is natural knowledge, not wisdom in the biblical sense — not the fear of the Lord that Proverbs identifies as wisdom’s beginning.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a conflict whose stakes include the question of what human knowledge is for. The serpent’s temptation in Genesis 3 was precisely the temptation of autonomous knowledge — “you will be like God, knowing good and evil” — knowledge pursued apart from the relationship with God that alone gives it its proper ordering.

Bacon’s methodological revolution is, from this angle, a sophisticated and largely well-intentioned version of the same temptation: the pursuit of knowledge about nature apart from the wisdom that comes from knowing nature’s Author.

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