Descartes and Bacon

Rene Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist. He is believed to be the father of analytical geometry. He was one of the main people involved in the Scientific Revolution. Descartes was a devout Catholic, however many people saw him as an atheist. He provided a basis for Calculus used later by people like Sir Isaac Newton. His mathematical legacy is still alive and well today.

Francis Bacon was an English philosopher, author, and scientist. He also served as Lord Chancellor of England, but his political career did not end well. He came up with mos of the methodology that is used for experiments today. His method, called the Baconian Method, helps find the form nature, or the cause of a certain phenomenon. The framework for this method is the same one used in the modern scientific method.

René Descartes and Francis Bacon

Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon both had very controversial ideas for the time periods that they lived in. Rene Descartes was the first to publish his thoughts on geometry. His findings were the jumping off point for our modern day analytical geometry. He was the first to suggest that the world could be defined in scientific terms like matter and motion rather than the world being divinely driven. He published several important writings about his findings. He studied the world through mathematics and science rather than seeing it through the church’s lens of divinity and god. This would be very, very controversial in that time because it would hugely undermine the power of the church. If God is no longer the supreme ruler of everything, he obviously matters much less which means the church matters much less. Not only that, but the very center of people’s belief systems would be questioned which would create unrest in any community and thus make them much harder to control. Following the church was seen as the path to heaven, and if people didn’t follow it and did penance then the church would lose a lot of power over each person’s life. If God does not influence daily events or care about people’s sins then the church becomes irrelevant because people would no longer need them.

Francis Bacon attempted to restructure the educational system and base it on analytical thinking rather than a belief in God. This is even more harmful to the church because it would mean instilling the knowledge from science in people at a young age, making them susceptible to turning their backs on the church entirely. His system offered relief from “the human condition.” This implies that humans need to still be perfected and that we are not the center of the universe or God’s universe. The church preaches that we are God’s image, and by devaluing “the human condition” it devalues God and the church as well. The church was threatened by these two men because of the change and the evidence for their theories that they brought to a world that was formerly controlled by the church.

The Impact of René Descartes and Francis Bacon on the People of Europe

During the Scientific Revolution, René Descartes and Francis Bacon led the people of Europe to begin to refuse the lies of the Catholic Church and start to think rationally. Both men invented new methods of thinking and experimenting that exposed the church's lies. Bacon founded the "Baconian Method" now known as the Scientific Method, which was a way of thinking that used a methodical procedure for investigating all things natural; his method is still used today by scientists. René Descartes was responsible for many advancements in mathematics, like the Cortesian coordinate plane, but he was most famous for his work in philosophy. His work in Philosophy was important because he emphasized thinking without bias, and not deceiving anything that he was unable to grasp; that ruled out almost all things divine. Overall, Bacon and Descartes both had controversial and groundbreaking ways of thought for the time period. These new ideas empowered the people of Europe because they helped them realize that they were being scammed by the Church, and that they should investigate the lies that the Church had been feeding them if they wanted real truth.