Baconian Science in Post-Bellum America: Charles Peirce's "Neglected Argument for the Reality of God"

Abstract

While always somehow considered outside the main currents of academic philosophy, Charles Sanders Peirce has the unique distinction of having been discovered over and over again by many different philosophical schools; at different times neopositivists, orthodox Kantians, neorealists, pragmatists, and semioticians have each claimed him as one oftheir own. More work on Peirce in the broad context of American intellectual history, however, still remains to be done. Although Peirce's contributions to the philosophy of science have been explored in tedious detail, far less attention has been paid to his religious thought. Yet in many ways Peirce's interest in religion was directly related to his fascination with science. Neither can be fully understood in isolation. Throughout his life Peirce attempted to preserve the Baconian goal of a true partnership of science and religion in a world that was emphatically becoming post-Baconian. Peirce's Argument for the Reality of God in many ways serves to illustrate a redefinition of the goals of Baconian science along with a radical revision of its details. The Neglected Argument was written at a time when Darwin's theory of evolution had become an established fact for mainstream intellectuals and when the work ofEinstein and Planck had already pointed toward a real conflict between Newton's laws and Maxwell's equations and consequently to the end of classical mechanics; old ideas of scientific common sense were rapidly becoming anachronisms. Yet Peirce forged his own path and provided a unique way to preserve the importance of both reason and faith. A close reading of the Neglected Argument, when placed in the context of Peirce's life and intellectual influences, provides a window into the spirit of