to‘an intellectually vulnerable self-blindness among self-declared naturalists’.^83
The reductive and fundamentalist naturalism peddled by the likes of Dennet and
his colleague Richard Dawkins stands in the way of constructing models of
knowledgethatmoveusbeyondthehumanities–science divide. As Alvin Plan-
tinga has correctly observed, the real conflict about true knowledge lies not
between science and philosophy or religion but between science and the materi-
alist premise of naturalism.^84
What, then, has all this to do with the future of the liberal arts or the
humanities? Simply this: the recognition that‘scientists share cognitive ten-
dencies, achievements, and limits with non-scientists’^85 moves us beyond
naturalist or rationalist caricatures of human knowledge. A path has been
cleared to more complex epistemological models that acknowledge the power
and mystery of the mind and the intrinsic role of the imagination in putting
the world together.^86
Humanistic education was born from and nourished by the conviction that
human consciousness participated in a greater rational, moral order. Several
modern critics of naturalism want to rediscover such an order. The non-theist
philosopher Thomas Nagel, for example, wants tofind in nature a‘cosmic
predisposition to the formation of life, consciousness, and the value that is
inseparable from them’.^87 Within Christianity, many evolutionary theists turn
to process theology to reconcile evolutionary science with a divine ordering of
events to stress God’s involvement in creation.^88
Besides the increasing demise of scientism, hermeneutic philosophy also
remains crucial to re-envisioning the liberal arts after scientism. Together with
the emergent trend towards teleological, multi-layered understandings of
reality, hermeneutic philosophy can now come into its own to deepen our
grasp of the historical influences that have shaped human self-understanding.
Hermeneutics has long taught that perception in all knowledge disciplines
involves interpretation, the integration of details into a meaningful whole
(^83) Smith,Natural Reflections, 146.
(^84) Alvin Plantinga,Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism(New
York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 350.
(^85) Herrnstein,Natural Reflections, 148.
(^86) As Ian McGilchrist has recently argued, modern brain research supports this broader view
and thus aids in recovering an intellectual milieu in which Christian humanism and the liberal
arts canflourish. Scientism is essentially the dominance of the left brain hemisphere that dissects,
abstracts, and reifies, but disallows for the panoramic big-picture vision essential for under-
standing that is the domain of the right brain sphere. McGilchrist argues that we need to recover
more right brain thinking which opens us to intuition and uncertainty, thus rehabilitating the
truth found in poetry, the arts, and religion. SeeThe Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain
and the Making of the Modern World(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 428–59.
(^87) Thomas Nagel,Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of
Nature is Almost Certainly False(New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 123.
(^88) For a description of process philosophy and theology, see Ian G. Barbour,Religion and
Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues(New York: Harper, 1997), 281–325.
156 Jens Zimmermann