Home: Somersetshire, England
Rational/Empirical: Empiricist/Scientist/ A Christian Friar who felt Christian thought should include science.
Influence: Lasting. However, many of the inventions credited to him (gunpowder, optics) were really borrowed Arab discoveries.
Greatest achievement: Criticized the church for its doctrine of biblical interpretation over the scientific method. So much for the ridiculous idea that christianity deserves any credit for the discovery of scientists who happened to also be christians. Bacon helped promulgate the rational idea that mathematics, with experimentation, is the only means of arriving at knowledge of nature.
Surviving works: Bacon was critical of the methods of learning of the times. At the request of the Pope, he wrote his scientific and philosophical Opus Majus (Major Work), on the necessity of a reformation in the sciences. Pope Nicholas IV, had him arrested and his books banned, mainly because he said:
Knowledge by empirical means should carry equal weight to rational thought
"Argument is conclusive . . . but . . . it does not remove doubt, so that the mind may rest in the sure knowledge of the truth, unless it finds it by the method of experiment. . . . For if any man who never saw fire proved by satisfactory arguments that fire burns . . . his hearer's mind would never be satisfied, nor would he avoid the fire until he put his hand in it... that he might learn by experiment what argument taught. Roger Bacon, Opus Maius, pt. 4, ch. 1 (1267).