ABSTRACT
The seventeenth-century scientific revolution marked the beginning of the Enlightenment era, an era that witnessed the transformation of human knowledge away from the religious and metaphysical and toward the secular and the scientific. The work of Francis Bacon, the progenitor of the modern scientific method, was an integral part of this shift. The dawn of the western Enlightenment is located firmly within his philosophy, a philosophy that held that both religious and intellectual authorities must be questioned in order for knowledge to progress. Bacon's philosophy promoted the ideas that authority must be questioned, that religion must be separated from scientific inquiry, and that the scientific method must be self-corrective. Religion is belief based on untestable and unquestionable assumptions. The intellectual left equates religion and science, reducing both to mere discourse spread by historical accident or design, while the political and religious right reduces both to alternative descriptions of the universe and shouts discrimination against religion in the biology classroom.
