PhilosophersFrancis Bacon

Francis Bacon

Knowledge is power: observe and experiment.

Empiricism1561 – 1626 United KingdomEmpiricistThinker of scientific methodEssayistStatesman
Essays, "Of Atheism" (1612, revised 1625)

A little philosophy inclines to atheism, depth brings men back to religion

What it claims

The universe is not without a mind: it is governed by a divine Providence. That is why philosophy, when it goes to the bottom of things, leads back to God.

Why

A shallow look sees scattered causes; a deeper one finds them linked in an ordered chain, which cannot come from chance.

Valid with an implicit premise

It is one of Bacon's most quoted sentences: "a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion". Taken alone, it is an observation about people, not a proof: it says what happens to minds, not what is true. Indeed Bacon himself lists "learned times", in peace and prosperity, among the causes of atheism. But he immediately gives a reason, and that reason is an argument: when studying nature, we first see only scattered causes; going further, we discover they form a single ordered chain, and such an order cannot come from chance. It is this argument, from the design family, that we reconstruct here. Classification: it defends a Providence governing the world, hence theism.

P1A superficial study sees only "scattered" causes; a deeper study discovers that they are linked together in a single ordered chain.
P2Such order and beauty cannot come from chance: it is "a thousand times more credible" that well-placed elements need no God than that unplaced atoms should have produced this world "without a divine marshal".
P3 · implicit premiseIf the order of the world does not come from chance, it comes from a mind that willed it: there is no third possibility.
Therefore the universe is not without a mind: it is governed by a divine Providence. That is why philosophy, when it goes to the bottom of things, leads back to God.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P3, the computer finds a case where causes form an ordered chain and this order does not come from chance, but from something other than a mind (laws of matter, natural selection): then there is no Providence.
Valid with P3, and each premise is indispensable. The famous sentence is only the psychological conclusion; the real weight of the argument rests on P2 (chance cannot produce this order) and on P3 (chance or mind, nothing else). Bacon does not justify P3: he assumes these are the only two explanations. Yet his own sentence mentions a third: elements "duly and eternally placed", which he finds more credible than atoms, without dwelling on it. That is where modern objections strike: can order arise from a process that is neither pure chance nor a plan?
Analogy. At first you see a few clock parts scattered on a table: nothing forces you to think of a clockmaker. Then you discover that they all fit together and turn the hands. Bacon says: science is discovering that the world is an assembled clock, not a heap of parts.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Diderot (an imaginary atheist, in the Philosophical Thoughts) 1746 · attacks premise 2

If matter has been moving forever, it has tried an infinite number of combinations. Even if an ordered world is very unlikely on each throw, over infinitely many throws it eventually comes up, like a hundred thousand sixes with a hundred thousand dice if one plays long enough. What should astonish us is rather that it never came up.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1746, after the author's death (1626).
The debate goes on (our summary) Bacon already judged the atomist hypothesis "a thousand times" less credible than a well-ordered world without God, but without discussing the infinite-time argument. Defenders of design reply that the world would not be eternal (current physics gives it an age) and that a chance that explains everything no longer explains anything. In the same book, Diderot's narrator still holds that experimental physics provides the best proofs of a supreme intelligence.
Hume (Philo, in the Dialogues) 1779 · attacks premise 3

There is not only chance and reason. We know other principles of order in nature: generation and vegetation. A plant or an animal produces admirable order without any design. And the world looks more like an animal or a plant than a machine: its origin might therefore be a kind of generation rather than a mind.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1779, after the author's death (1626).
The debate goes on (our summary) In the dialogue, Demea asks how this "generation" works, and where its order could come from if not from design. Philo answers that reason is no better explained, and that a tree gives order to the tree that springs from it without knowing that order. Cleanthes admits he cannot answer on the spot. Hume knew Bacon's sentence: he has Cleanthes quote it at the start of the Dialogues.
Bertrand Russell 1927 · attacks premise 3

Since Darwin, we understand why living creatures are adapted to their environment: it is not that the environment was made to suit them, but that they grew to suit it. Natural selection is neither pure chance nor a plan: it produces the appearance of design without design.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1927, after the author's death (1626).
The debate goes on (our summary) Bacon's argument is not first about living things, but about the chain of causes in all of nature. Today's defenders of design therefore move the question to the laws of physics themselves and the fine-tuning of their constants, which natural selection does not explain.