Do You Like Bacon?

How we treat nature depends upon how we view it? Do we view it as:

1. raw materials,
2. natural resources,
3. our environment, or
4. our co-created world over which we are meant to care and in which we are meant to thrive.

You can probably tell that I like the last choice.

The first two are products of the Enlightenment understanding of science and some, like Wendell Berry, point out that an environment is something that surrounds you but doesn't necessary mean that you are a part of it. In the Christian worldview, we are the crown of creation and, as such, are part of that creation. We are the crown because we are made in God's image and charged with cultivating it, so that it glorifies its creator in the fullest way.

For all of the environmentalism that is abroad today, there is still a large number of us who think that we can treat nature in any way we want because everything is undefined. There is no nature to nature that deserves our respect. Yes, it feeds us, but we can make it feed us mass quantities of genetically engineered, perfectly shaped, disease resistant, cardboard that resembles fruits and vegetables that our grandmothers used to feed us.

I argue that this resonates with the postmodern view that we can define ourselves and define everything for ourselves and goes back to the Enlightenment where all of our problems were magnified by our desire to control nature.

Listen to what Francis Bacon said:

"Science is the conquest of nature for the relief of Man's estate"

"We must put nature to the rack in order to render up her secrets"

But in 1623, at the twilight of his career, Bacon seems to forsake his earlier view of nature as something to be scientifically exploited.

Without doubt we are paying for the sin of our first parents and imitating it. They wanted to be like Gods; we their posterity, still more so. We create worlds. We prescribe laws to nature and lord it over her. We want to have all things as suits our fatuity, not as fits the Divine Wisdom, not as they are found in nature. We impose the seal of our image on the creatures and works of God, we do not diligently seek to discover the seal of God on things....

Wherefore if there be any humility toward the Creator ... if there be any love of truth in natural things, any hatred of darkness, any desire to purify the understanding; men are to be entreated again and again that they should dismiss for awhile or at least put aside those inconstant and preposterous philosophies, which prefer theses to hypotheses, have led experience captive, and triumphed over the works of God; that they should humbly and with a certain reverence draw near to the book of Creation...

This is that speech and language which has gone out to all the ends of the earth [Ps. 19] and has not suffered the confusion of Babel; this must men learn, and, resuming their youth, they must become again as little children and deign to take its alphabet into their hands....

May God the Creator, Preserver, and Restorer of the universe, in accordance with his mercy and his loving-kindness towards man, protect and guide this work both in its ascent to his glory and in its decent to the service of man, through his only Son, God with us (The History of the Winds, qt. in Noll, Scandal of the Evangelical MInd, 204).