In theirhighly read First Things essay “Voyages to the End of the World,”Peter Thiel and Sam Wolfe use Francis Bacon’s utopian “New Atlantis” to argue thatmodern faith in unlimited technological progress has subtly redefined salvation as a human-controlled achievement rather than a divine gift, displacing religious understandings of human destiny with promises of security, abundance, and mastery over nature.
They warn that this Baconian project - disguised in Christian imagery -risks creating a seductive but spiritually impoverished civilization where technological power outpaces moral wisdom, potentially leading to an end-times trajectory of false salvation unless reintegrated into a framework that respects natural and spiritual limits.
Authored by William Brooks via The Epoch Times,
Founded in 1990 by the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, First Things magazine strives to promote a well-informed public philosophy in the Christian and Jewish traditions.
Last year, one of the most read essays in First Things was titled:“Voyages to the End of the World” by Peter Thiel and Sam Wolfe. Thiel is a tech entrepreneur, investor, and author. Wolfe is a writer and researcher at Thiel Capital.
These thinkers offer a probing examination of our modern technological ambitions.Using Francis Bacon’s unfinished 17th-century work “New Atlantis” as a point of departure, Thiel and Wolfe suggest that modern faith in scientific progress is corroding the religious understanding of human destiny. They contend that Bacon’s utopian tale about knowledge and prosperity contains a warning about the moral costs of unlimited technological mastery.
Thiel and Wolfe’s central claim is not that science itself is evil or that technological progress must be rejected.Rather, they argue that Bacon’s scientific project—and the modern world that has adopted it—rests on a redefinition of salvation.Whereas Christianity views redemption as a divine process that transcends history, Bacon relocates it firmly within human control. In doing so, modern technological civilization risks mistaking power for wisdom. This could have grave consequences as we enter an epoch defined by unprecedented technological advancement.
At the heart of their essay is a close look at Bacon’s fictional account of the island society of Bensalem. On its surface, Bensalem appears harmonious, pious, and benevolent. Its inhabitants are devout, orderly, and humane; its institutions promise healing, abundance, and stability. Its governing institution, Salomon’s House, is dedicated to the systematic investigation of nature for the “relief of man’s estate.” Bacon presents scientific inquiry as a quasi-religious vocation, cloaked in Christian imagery and moral restraint.
Thiel and Wolfe warn that this superficial harmony conceals a radical transformation of the human relationship to nature, knowledge, and God.They argue that Bacon’s true ambition was not merely to advance science but to replace the classical-Christian understanding of limits with a project of total technological mastery. Knowledge, in Bacon’s vision, is not ordered toward moral formation but toward domination and control. Nature is no longer something to be understood within an inherited moral order; it is something that can be conquered and redesigned.
This shift has profound implications.Bacon’s scientific method implicitly promises what religion once offered: security, healing, abundance, and even a form of immortality.By embedding these promises within a framework that appears Christian, Bacon disguised the degree to which his vision subtly marginalized the hand of God. In New Atlantis, God remains present, but increasingly as a symbolic guarantor of human progress rather than as the ultimate judge of human action.
Source: ZeroHedge News
