 Welcome to George H. Smith's Excursions into Libertarian Thought, a production of libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. Francis Bacon and the Rise of Secularism In the previous chapter, I discussed the influence of Pyrrhonic skepticism on modern thought and the ways in which skeptical arguments were used to support the fideistic contention that reason cannot generate certainty, leaving us no choice in religious matters except to rely entirely on faith. Among the important consequences of Pyrrhonism were the replies that evoked from philosophers who attempted to refute it. Two of the most important attempts were undertaken by Rene Descartes, 1596-1650, and Francis Bacon, 1561-1626. In this chapter, I focus on the arguments of Bacon, who was a seminal figure in the development of modern secularism. It is difficult to imagine the course that modern philosophy might have taken if Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon had never existed. Both are widely recognized as key figures in the history of modern philosophy. Descartes is often credited as the founding father of the philosophical trend known as rationalism. Bacon, if not credited as the father of modern empiricism and honor usually reserved for John Locke, has at least attained the status of its godfather, and Bacon's extraordinary importance as a philosopher of science has long been appreciated. Although Bacon was accused of being a secret atheist, his belief in Christianity, though extremely liberal by the standards of his day, appears to have been sincere. He flatly rejected a literal interpretation of the Bible in favor of doctrinal pluralism, maintaining that biblical passages should serve as infinite springs and streams of doctrines. Because biblical writers typically express themselves through metaphor, scripture should not be used as a source of scientific knowledge, nor should it serve as a basis to criticize the conclusions of science. The spheres of religion and science should be kept completely separate, neither being allowed to impinge on the domain of the other. The various mysteries of Christian revelation, such as the Trinity, are incomprehensible to reason and therefore must be accepted entirely on faith. When theology is permitted to transgress beyond its proper sphere, every development of philosophy, every new frontier and direction is regarded by religion with unworthy suspicion and violent contempt. Thus, as Peter Erbach, Francis Bacon's philosophy of science and account and a reappraisal in 1987, observed, Bacon banished the Bible as a source of information for the scientist. In driving a wedge between philosophy and theology by insisting that we give to faith only that which is faith, Bacon gave his blessing to a secular tendency that, like a slow acting poison, would eventually undercut the foundations of Orthodox Christianity. As Franklin Baumer, commenting on the rise of 17th century secularism, explained in modern European thought, continuity and change in ideas 1600 to 1950, secularism, unlike free thought, pose no threat to particular theological tenets. What it did was to outflank theology by staking out autonomous spheres of thought. The tendency was, more and more, to limit theology to the comparatively restricted sphere of faith and morals. Bacon's scientific secularism, while it did not challenge Christianity per se, exiled God to the nether regions of faith and theology, thereby denying him any direct role in the acquisition of natural knowledge. God, according to Bacon, worketh nothing in nature but by second causes. Speaking of God as the first cause is a matter of theology, not science, and reasonable men, do not unwisely mingle or confound these learnings together. Bacon's secularism was so consistent that he rudely dismissed any reference to miracles in accounts of natural science and history. As for the narrations touching the prodigies and miracles of religions, they are either not true or not natural and therefore impertinent for the study of nature. It is fair to say that Bacon has more influence on the rise of secularism than did Descartes, who assigned to God a key role in his philosophical system. Far more significant, however, is the substantial difference in their views of human reason or understanding as Bacon, Locke, and others in their tradition often called it. In a nutshell, we may say that for Descartes, reason is an infallible faculty of cognition, an instrument that cannot fail in its quest for absolute certainty if used properly. For Bacon, in contrast, reason is inherently fallible. It is prone to error even in the best of circumstances, so we must stand perpetually on guard, willing to correct or revise our present beliefs. Both Bacon and Descartes rejected the epistemological skepticism of Montaigne and other Fideas, according to whom we must rely on faith to attain a certainty that reason is unable to provide. But their approaches differed significantly. Bacon, unlike Descartes, did not attempt to overthrow skepticism with a definitive theoretical refutation. He did not employ the Cartesian method of systematic doubt in an effort to establish an infallible criterion of knowledge, such as the intuitive grasp of clear and distinct ideas. Instead, Bacon plotted a course to certainty that must be traveled step by step, and he insisted that we must sometimes traverse the same ground over and over again to check our bearings. Certainty, in other words, did not reveal itself to reason in a flash of insight. Rather, it is an elusive ideal that reason may attain to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the circumstances. As Bacon saw the matter, the skeptical argument that we can never achieve certainty amounts to little more than a pretentious bit of futile and self-defeating dogmatism. The skeptic, having proclaimed that infallible certainty is unattainable, never tries to attain it because he knows that man is a fallible being for whom error is an ever-present possibility. Bacon responded, in effect, that defining certainty in terms of infallibility makes certainty unattainable to human beings at the outset, and thereby renders the concept of certainty altogether irrelevant to human knowledge. Rather than blocking the path to knowledge with an arbitrary and unrealistic definition of certainty, we should recognize that the quest for knowledge is beset with difficulties. Then, through a process of trial and error, we should see whether those difficulties can be overcome. Bacon wrote, Our method and that of the skeptics agree in some respects at first setting out, but differ most widely and are completely opposed to each other in their conclusions, for they roundly assert that nothing can be known, we that but a small part of nature can be known by the present method. Their next step, however, is to enjoy the authority of the senses and understanding whilst we invent and supply them with assistance. Bacon's attack on skepticism distinguished particular doubt from total doubt. Particular doubt, that is, doubt that arises in regard to a specific knowledge claim, is useful both as a spur to inquiry and as an antidote to the proliferation of error, as when a false conclusion is inferred from a premise which has not been fully justified. Total doubt, in contrast, is the universal doubt of skepticism. Bacon regarded the latter as a rather cowardly surrender to the difficulties that frequently arise in our quest for knowledge. Skeptics sometimes pointed to the diversity of philosophic opinions to support their contention that certainty is unattainable. But Bacon was unconvinced. Nature is far more complex than the mind of man, so the same essential truth may be expressed in different ways by different thinkers. Scientific knowledge, cumulative and open-ended, progresses as one scientist improves on the contributions of his predecessors. Human intellect is not an infallible instrument, far from it, but to say that an instrument can sometimes fail is not to say that it must necessarily fail in every case. Just as the human hand could not construct architectural wonders without the aid of external tools, so the human intellect cannot attain certainty without the aid of objective methods to test and validate our knowledge claims. Again, quoting Bacon, the unassisted hand and the understanding left to itself possess but little power. Effects are produced by the means of instruments and helps which the understanding requires no less than the hand and as instruments either promote or regulate the motion of the hand, so those that are applied to the mind prompt or protect the understanding. The skeptic who denies that we can ever attain certainty is like a person who, after observing the limited power of the naked hand, declares that man will never be able to build a cathedral. The skeptic, trapped in a sophisticated web of his own making, perpetually whines about the obstacles to knowledge. Bacon argued that the time of the philosopher would be better spent devising methods, cognitive instruments in effect, to enable us to overcome those obstacles. Thus, if Bacon's stress on the inherent fallibility of reason did not land him in skepticism, it is because he rejected infallibility as a criterion of certainty. Certainty is something we achieve through sustained mental effort, a laborious and systematic process of trial and error, not something that is revealed to us in a flash of infallible insight. Certainty is achieved piecemeal through the investigation of particular knowledge claims, not wholesale through a process of deductive reasoning based on clear and distinct ideas. Our ideas, if they are to generate useful knowledge, must be framed according to our experience of nature, and that experience, if it is to be reliable, must be subjected to objective methods of verification. The foregoing must be kept in mind if we are to appreciate Bacon's celebrated discussion of idols or fallacies of the mind of man that hinder our quest for knowledge. Bacon was the first great pathologist of human reason. Later philosophers used his mode of analysis, a mixture of psychology sociology and epistemology, to explain why reasonable people with good intentions can and often do, hold incompatible beliefs. It was largely owing to Bacon that religious dissent which had previously been condemned as the deliberate and therefore sinful rejection of divine truth came to be regarded as the innocent byproduct of human fallibility. This doctrine of the natural diversity of opinion, especially as developed by John Locke, was destined to play a key role in the struggle for religious toleration. Bacon's basic point is quite simple and, from the perspective of a Cartesian rationalist, quite disturbing. There is no natural harmony or correspondence between the world of ideas and the world of nature if, as the rationalist maintains, our senses are inherently untrustworthy and liable to lead us astray the same is true of reason itself. The human intellect has its own distinctive characteristics a nature apart from that which it seeks to know understanding is not a passive process in which the intellect merely reflects the external world of nature rather the intellect actively contributes to the cognitive process leaving indelible marks on its final product. Thus, the human mind resembles those uneven mirrors which impart their own properties to different objects from which rays are emitted and distort and disfigure them. Bacon calls these natural distortions idols or false notions of the human understanding. Bacon divided his idols into four principal categories. One, idols of the tribe are inherent in human nature and the very tribe or race of man. Two, idols of the cave pertain to the individual for everybody in addition to the errors common to the race of man has his own individual den or cavern which intercepts and corrupts the light of nature. Three, idols of the market are formed from the commerce and association of men with each other. Four, idols of the theater have crept into men's minds from the various dogmas of peculiar systems of philosophy as so many plays brought out and performed creating fictitious and theatrical worlds. Human understanding according to Bacon does not operate in isolation apart from the will and affections. Our desires and feelings influence how we think. We are more likely to believe something that we wish were true, the comfortable and the familiar rather than something difficult, disturbing or unconventional. We also tend to develop a vested interest in our beliefs defending a pet theory because we created it or worked hard on it or simply because of its familiarity. Bacon maintained that people who think differently often exhibit different biases. People with strong powers of observation for example may attribute too much importance to minor differences among things. Other people may overemphasize their similarities. In any case, examining our own beliefs subjectively is extremely difficult given the many subjective factors that affect our understanding. But Bacon offered a valuable piece of advice, namely that we should be particularly suspicious of those theories that give us the most satisfaction and should subject them to rigorous scrutiny and criticism. Perhaps the most radical aspect of Bacon's approach was his unequivocal rejection of final causation as a legitimate mode of explanation in the physical sciences. To appeal to a final cause is to explain a phenomenon in terms of its supposed purpose and though Bacon's critique of this method was primarily directed at the Aristotelians of his day known as scholastics, i.e. schoolmen because of their dominant presence in European universities it had far broader implications for the Christian worldview. To banish final causation from the realm of explanation is to banish all references to a divine purpose in the universe. Bacon made God an absentee architect of creation a first cause who, having created the universe thereafter, left it alone to operate according to the secondary causes of natural law. Understandably Bacon was universally praised by later deus. Indeed, depending on how we read Bacon we may even have rejected the notion of a first cause altogether. According to Bacon we cannot reasonably demand an explanation for existence because something must first exist before it can function as a cause of something else. So why did so many people seek to go beyond the brute fact of existence and pause it God as a first cause? Because, said Bacon, the human mind is active and restless. It is engaged in a perpetual quest for intelligibility, for ultimate explanations that will satisfy its desire to understand. But when reason is unable to satisfy that metaphysical urge, as is often the case, the imagination steps in with fanciful explanations of its own. Thus, the mind moves up the ladder of cause and effect and posits God as the ultimate cause of everything else. This is a fancy of the imagination, not a judgment of the understanding. Reason tells us that the greatest generalities in nature, such as the fact of existence, must be accepted just as they are found and that such facts are not causable. Existence, in other words, is a causal primary. The ultimate foundation on which all explanations depend. An irreducible fact beyond which the mind cannot go, but the mind does not want to hear that reasoning. It cannot find satisfaction in being told that its metaphysical journey must end, abruptly and unceremoniously, at the impenetrable wall of existence. Thus, the imagination satisfies this metaphysical desire at the expense of reason and another idol takes its toll. This has been excursions into libertarian thought, a production of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. To learn more about libertarian philosophy and history, visit www.libertarianism.org