Francis Bacon and His Four Idols

Francis Bacon was an English and Christian philosopher and essayist who used the language of the Church against the Church. He believed that if people wanted to do the work of God, they needed to get rid of the old Greek philosophies and start teaching science, influenced by the Islamic culture. He accused the Church for corruption and idolatry, and by doing that, took the last bit of the Church's power away.

Bacon established four "idols" or scenarios which describe how many people come to wrongly accept aberrations and false information of the world. In Christianity, idolatry is considered a grievious sin. Bacon uses the argument of the Church against it by claiming Christian philosophy had engaged in four forms of idolatry. For example, because people do not want to go through tedious observation and experimentation, they accept new and interesting things as the "truth". However, Bacon believed that you needed to study everything, not just the aberrations, in order to understand the world and the truth. The Four Idols are:

Idols of the Tribe: The bias of human beings to jump to conclusions based on w hat is new or strange rather than investing time to understand what is true. This basically means that humans tend to accept what they are fascinated in as the truth, instead of taking the time to experiment or study in order to find out what the real truth is. One's biases affect one's perceptions of the world, and if humans use that perception to see the world and try to understand things, their understanding will not be accurate, but simply, biased.

Idols of the Cave: Creating individual biases through the educational system. This form of idolatry focuses on the biases of the individual person rather than man kind as a whole. Every person leads a different life, grows up in a different environment, experiences different things, etc. Their opinions and perspectives of the world around them will differ from each other. Thus, when new information is absorbed by each person, that information means something different for each individual. Their biases will get in the way when they take in information, and that will alter one's understanding of the truth, since the truth will be obscured by bias.

Idols of the Market Place: The language created to share knowledge (e.g. philosophy is more concerned with winning arguments than revealing truth) locks us into specific ways of knowing. Communication between people changes the true meaning behind ideas. Words tend to obscure what the mind is truly trying to convey, and so the truth of ideas is slightly altered through communication/conversation.

Idols of the Theatre: The Christian West has given reverence to four of five Greek scholars and has ignored any other udnerstanding of the world. This is an example of how different organizations, associations, or institutions tweak the truth by promoting only ideas which will support them, or satisfy their standards, make them look good, justify them. The Church would only allow for certain Greek philosophers to continue to be acknowledged, while other philosophers and their teachings were ignored and prohibited.