THE SEPARATION OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION

A longstanding commonplace in Bacon scholarship has been the notion that the Baconian advancement of learning depends upon a strict separation of divinity and natural philosophy. In a number of memorable passages Bacon indeed warns his readers of the dire consequences of confusing divinity with natural science: to combine them, he says, is to confound them. This is supposedly what Plato and the scholastics did, and what Bacon explicitly designs the new learning to overcome. Even the acceptable hybrid “divine philosophy,” when it is “commixed together” with natural philosophy, leads to “an heretical religion, and an imaginary and fabulous philosophy” (111, 350). According to this emphatic strand of Baconian doctrine, religion that joins with the study of nature is in danger of becoming atheistic, or an enthusiastic rival of the true church. Natural philosophy that traffics unwisely with divinity collapses into idolatry or fakery.