If the movements of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment were Acts I and II of a play, the cast would number in the thousands. Yet to keep this simple, I will focus on one: Francis Bacon (1561–1626).

Review

I’ve established that the dualistic viewpoint had possessed the culture of Western Civilization for a thousand years. Borrowing from Plato and mystical religious influences (zorastrianism and essenes) its major tenet was that reality was divided between two spheres: the inferior, seen or material world and the far more superior, unseen world. Life was difficult during that period, with life expectancy in the twenties, more than half dying before the age of 20. And to draw on that old Appalachian cliché, they were too heavenly-minded for any earthly good, which served in the church and the king’s advantage in the pursuit of absolute power.

With the Catholic Scholastics rediscovery the writings of Aristotle (a rationalist who, unlike Plato, believed in a unified reality), they began to reshape the thinking of Europe north of the Alps; Thomas Aquinas, who happened to live south of the Alps, became their greatest voice. As I’ve written, Aquinas simply returned to the Biblical account of creation: that the creator, God, made it all and called it very good, not inferior. That human reason is a gift of God, the precise way that God created us and intended as the way we find truth. That the heart (emotions), where we “hear the voice of God,” as the Gnostics described it, is the most deceitful thing in creation and unreliable for finding truth. Modern brain and psychological research confrims this. I know for me, when I was an evangelical, most of my worst decisions were when I was 100% sure I had heard the voice of God leading me to make that decision. When, looking back, I know that my decision was what I wanted to do, and I was looking, emotionally, for a cover by hearing that pretend voice. A form of confirmation bias.

The Scientific Method

Building upon this return to reason of the Catholic Scholastics and the Florentine humanist, Francis Bacon spent time studying epistemology, or how humans find truth. We now know that human consciousness, while integrated with our senses, motor function, and memory, is divided between two major domains: reason and emotions. Reason, or logic, is a mathematical process that reflects the mathematical construct of reality around us and was given to us as the primary way we decipher and process information to arrive at factual conclusions. The orange snake bit six people in our tribe, and they all died. Rationally, I assume it is the result of the snake’s bite. The snake is dangerous. Our emotions, while never being intended as a tool for finding truth, are wonderful and vital to our human experience by reacting to the truth once our reason has found it. I see the orange snake, my heart beats fast, and I run. When we allow our emotions to define truth- whenever I see orange, I will run- it is not helpful.

Francis Bacon figured out that the greatest obstacle to finding truth is our emotions, giving us an irrational bias (running from the color orange). He knew that relying simply on tradition (grounded in our emotions) is not helpful and can distract us from finding truth. Therefore, we need experimentation and observation to see for ourselves and to rely on inductive and sometimes deductive reasoning to reach factual conclusions. Therefore, the first step in finding truth is to mitigate our biases. This became the foundation of the scientific method and the use of blinded and double-blinded studies. If you expect or want a certain outcome (emotional bias), you will get that outcome. If you are blinded to the study, your bias cannot influence it.

I’ve mentioned this example before, but it fits in this present world where we have returned to an irrational epistemology.

Evangelical Pastor Friend says to me: “Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton are running the largest pedophile ring in the world.”

I ask, “Really? I’m not personally a Biden or Clinton fan, but where is the evidence of your claim?”

Pastor: “Everyone knows it (a traditional-emotionally based view); if you don’t, your head’s in the sand.”

Bacon just finalized and put into words this breakthrough in our ability to find truth, which had a profound impact on our society, making life far easier, richer, and living to age 80 rather than 28. Rather than 50% of children dying before reaching 20, now just .9% die before reaching age 20, due to finding the truth about what causes such misery and death. Reason dominates everything we do. We could not get out of bed without depending upon human reason.

The present irrational age likes to romanticize our irrational past, but I bet if they lived in that old culture for a year, they would be begging to come back to modernity.

Next time, I will discuss the disillusionment with the Enlightenment and, finally, how we chose once again, after four hundred years, to return to the dualistic world of the past. Where now, if someone like me says rationality is God-given and a key part of my relationship with God, we are condemned in both the conservative and progressive churches. Reason is good for finding truth, emotions are good for enjoying or running from that truth.

Respectfully,

Mike