The New Atlantis

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Recommended: Critical analysis of francis bacon of studies

The New Atlantis is a novel that tells the story of European explorers who come upon a utopian island civilization in North America named Bensalem. The author of this book, Sir Francis Bacon, is often considered the father of the scientific method and likely wrote this book to give us an idea of his perfect world devoted to the sciences. Society on the fictional island of Bensalem focuses on a scientific institution known as Salomon’s House, where scientific experiments of all kinds are conducted using Bacon’s scientific method. Despite this deep devotion to science, Bensalem also closely follows the Christian religion, and much of the book is devoted to talking about the island’s Christian culture and customs. This summons an intriguing question: What role is there for religion in Bacon’s ideal society devoted to the sciences? This essay will attempt to discover what role religion has in Bacon’s ideal society and the connections between religion and science.

While the Christian religion plays an important part in Bensalem, certain peculiarities of Bensalem’s religious system suggest that Bacon thinks that religion’s role should be limited in society. In Bensalem, once a man lives to see thirty descendants, the government is required to pay for a feast for the man with a ceremony, that Bacon spends three pages describing (Bacon 12-14). This part of Bensalem’s religion seems to be unimportant to the good of the utopian society and just seems out of place in Bacon’s ideal world. Therefore, this could be Bacon’s way of quietly telling us his opinion that certain practices of religion are a waste of people’s resources and are unnecessary for the good of society. Despite Bensalem’s official religion of Christianity, many ...

... middle of paper ...

... own religion devoted to God.

Based on his novel The New Atlantis, Francis Bacon’s perfect society would have a place for both religion and the sciences. When Bacon seems to express criticisms of religion, he is only expressing some of the problems he sees caused by organized religions like Catholicism and Calvinism. Instead of these organized religions, Bacon believes that the future of religion is in science. Bacon sees the many great things science can accomplish for the world and is certain that science must be the way God intended for mankind to accomplish his will on Earth. In conclusion, Francis Bacon’s ideal society would not favor either religion or science, but would instead be devoted to the religion of science.

Works Cited

Bacon, Francis. The New Atlantis. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1901. The New Atlantis by Francis Bacon. Web. 03 Dec. 2013.

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