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Creationism, Bacon, and First Presidency
Nick Matzke has an article in Evolution: Education and Outreach titled, The Evolution of Creationist Movements, that does a nice job of tracing the history of the modern creationist movement and shows why Intelligent Design, especially as championed by the Discovery Institute, is really just re-labeled creationism. There are whole books written on this, but if you want to get a basic overview, this article does a pretty nice job.
What caught my attention was the background on 19th century religion and the religious adoption of Baconian ideals. I don't want to pretend that I'm an expert on this, but I'll sketch out what I've gathered from my reading of this and other material.
Before the scientific revolution, Western civilization was ruled by a combination of religious teachings and inherited knowledge from ancients such as Aristotle and Galen. Reasoning began with premises established by ancients because they wrote during an earlier period when the world was less decayed. (In other words, they were closer to Adam and Eve.) So, for example, if you dissected a cadaver and found that the anatomy differed from what Galen had written, there was something wrong with you, not Galen.
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) broke with centuries of tradition and dogma by arguing that the way to understand the world was to gather facts about it, and use them as a basis to state general laws. This is called induction--collecting particulars and making general conclusions. It is usually contrasted with deduction, where general statements are used to determine particulars. That's probably kind of confusing, so let's try a couple of examples.
Induction: As a physician, you start to see patients who complain of gastrointestinal symptoms. In exploring their history you find that they all ate the potato salad at a local buffet. You conclude that the potato salad at the buffet was contaminated.
Deduction: As a physician, you see a patient who is experiencing paralysis as the result of an apparent stroke. Based on the location of paralysis and your knowledge of the brain, you diagnose the stroke as having occurred in a certain part of the brain.
Followers of Bacon eschewed theories and hypotheses because they were thought to prejudice proper viewing of facts, and this view of science dominated for a while. The inductive approach to science was imported into American Protestant Christianity where it was used as the basis for scriptural interpretation. Given the assumption that the Bible was the infallible word of God, the way to answer questions was to gather up the various passages (i.e. the facts) dealing with the issue, weigh them, and come to a conclusion. This approach to scripture was combined with the sentiment that the scriptures be read according to the plain meaning of the text. This Baconian view of both science and scripture created a superficial harmony between the two, because all facts gathered from nature could be interpreted in the light of the facts of scripture.
However, the Baconian approach to scripture was not without problems, especially when it came to the issue of slavery. The Bible simply did not condemn slavery, and even seemed to support it. Thus, religious authorities who argued that slavery was immoral had do to so without Biblical support. Meanwhile, science moved beyond the Baconian view, and theories and hypotheses came back into favor. This is encapsulated in a quote from a letter by Charles Darwin.About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorize; and I well remember someone saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!
Darwin's theory has been seen as a threat to religion, so it's no wonder that his detractors have sought to delegitimize theory itself. Matzke writes,Historians have argued that fundamentalist opposition to evolution was, in part, an attempt, however quixotic, to return science to its Baconian, theory-free state, and to return the culture to a time when the Bible commanded the same kind of cultural authority that science has, particularly with the elites in government and academia. This is expressed in the common creationist statement (actually, misstatement) that they agree with scientists on all the facts, but that the creationists’ interpretation of the facts differ. Their hope is that modern culture can be returned to a state similar to that in the early 1800s, when science was Baconian and didn’t conflict with Baconian Bible interpretation, and when this unified biblical, evangelical worldview was the cultural consensus and had great cultural power
You can see the contempt for theory in the writings of George McCready Price. Price was a Seventh-day Adventist who is usually considered the grandfather of modern-day flood (as in Noah) geology, which is the backbone of young-earth creationism. At the bottom of this post I've embedded his 1913 book, The fundamentals of geology and their bearings on the doctrine of a literal creation. Enter "inductive" into the search box and you will see example after example of Price extolling the value of inductive science as "true" science.
Why the obsession with inductive science? At least one reason is because it adds value to what would otherwise be considered anomalies or special cases under a competing theory, thus seeming to refute the theory. A classic example of this for Price was his assertion that out-of-order strata refuted mainstream geology, with it's order of layers and the fossils contained therein. Of course such anomalies could be accounted for as special cases where pressure caused folding or overthrusting of geological layers. But Price would have none of that, and dismissed these explanations (no matter how well supported) as speculation. He could then argue that the fact of out-of-order strata actually teaches us something about geology, which is that there is no actual order.
All of this background gives a 1910 statement by the First Presidency additional color.Our religion is not hostile to real science. That which is demonstrated, we accept with joy; but vain philosophy, human theory and mere speculations of men, we do not accept nor do we adopt anything contrary to divine revelation or to good common sense.
This language seems to come straight out of the Baconian tradition--separating fact from theory. Yet we need to be careful because the word theory can be used in at least two different ways, and equivocation between them causes confusion. On the one hand, the word is often used as a synonym for hypothesis, hunch, or guess. Even scientists use this common meaning, which reinforces it in the public mind. And it probably doesn't help that many of the things that come out of 'theoretical physics' sound so strange. On the other hand, the word can be used to refer to the overarching structure that organizes a field of study. I once saw a textbook titled something like, "Organic Chemistry Theory," but nobody would dismiss organic chemistry as mere guesswork (except maybe students!).
So where does this leave us with respect to the First Presidency statement? I'm not really sure. Mostly I just wanted to share some interesting intellectual history and the seeming connection to the First Presidency 1910 statement. Clearly the statement is one of caution that we not chase every new fad. And I doubt that they intended to weigh in on the philosophy of science. But to the extent the statement seems to echo Baconian ideals, it fits into the religious culture of the time.
