Bacon abandoned biblical prophecy to read Islam through philosophy

Evidence

The first and most important difference is that, whereas earlier thinkers had seen Islam as a religion with only a negative role in history as a falling away from the truth, a preparation for the final holocaust of Antichrist, part of a downward movement, Bacon (and he is not the only man of his time to see this) had some conception of an upward movement toward unity and articulateness in which Islam had an essential role to play before it withered away. He entirely abandoned the Bible as an instrument for understanding the role of Islam in the world, and relied exclusively on philosophy. — R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle…, 352

Related

• Bacon saw Christianity as intellectually indebted to its infidel enemies (similarity 0.86)
• Roger Bacon was overshadowed by later myth-making about him (similarity 0.85)
• Bacon omitted satanic agency from his account of Islam (similarity 0.84)
• Bacon’s scientific framing removed Satan as the explanation for Muhammad unlike earlier polemicists (similarity 0.82)
• Roger Bacon held Islam as imperfect Christianity from ignorance, not evil (similarity 0.82)
• Thirteenth-century Christians already debated whether rational argument or faith alone could convert infidels (similarity 0.79)
• The mid-fifteenth-century writers treated Islam as an urgent practical problem, not a cosmic role (similarity 0.79)
• Medieval Christian theologian Bacon saw other religions as imperfect stages toward truth, not evil (similarity 0.79)
• Bacon’s advocacy of Arabic-adjacent Aristotelian science led to his imprisonment (similarity 0.78)
• Roger Bacon treated religious conversion as a rational science (similarity 0.78)
• Spanish thought about Islam was mostly rational, not fanatical (similarity 0.78)