Four Forms of Idolatry

When the Church was already doing bad Francis Bacon decided to attack the only thing that the church had left, which was education. He claimed that the Church had gone against these idolatry's.

1. Idols of the Tribe-"The bias of human beings to jump to conclusions based on what is new or strange rather than investing time to understand what is true".

What this means is that when something new was discovered and no one new that much about it the church would not allow it to be proven true and just say that it goes against the church. This stopped them from learning new things and kept the church in power because everyone thought that the church knew best.
2. Idols of the Cave- "Creating individual biases through the education system".

This means that they just interpreted the words into their own meaning. Meaning that the saying or phrase can mean one thing but they would give it the meaning they want it to have. The church sort of is like the Allegory of the Cave because they only show you images they want you to see.

3. Idols of the Marketplace- language created to share knowledge (e.g. philosophy is more concerned with winning arguments than revealing truth) locks us into specific ways of knowing.

This one is also like the first one and it means that the church is again trying to force their views on its members. Most of Europe was uneducated so they didn't have to worry about getting caught and if someone did every go against the church it was called heresy and they were killed or baned. This just helped give the church more power and keep them in control more.

4. Idols of the Theatre- Christian west has given reverence to four of five Greek scholars and has ignored any other understanding of the world.

This is also like the others becuase the Christian West would only selelct a few of the scholars and focus on them and completely ignore all the other ones. Forcig people to believe that only these are right and the others are wrong. This makes people think that the church knows best and when they learn about the specific ones from the church then they too automatically think that the other scholars are wrong. The church is really good on imposing its ideas on it followers and it only picked the philosophers they liked. I am kind of glad that the church isn't in that much power anymore because then our lives today would be very different from what they are right now.