Credo for Scientific Inquiry : On the Shared Ground of Empirical and Contemplative Knowing

A Credo for Scientific Inquiry: On the Shared Ground of Empirical and Contemplative Knowing is a sustained philosophical and theological argument for the compatibility — and the mutual dependence — of rigorous scientific inquiry and serious contemplative practice. Written at the intersection of philosophy of science, epistemology, and theological reflection, it proposes that both traditions share a constitutive predicament: the human necessity to begin knowing before knowing is complete. From this shared condition of creaturely finitude, the volume develops a Credo of six epistemic commitments — among them the practice of the double patience, the naming of presuppositions, the crossing of boundaries in the direction of discomfort, and the holding of models with appropriate force — each articulated in a main confession and developed in a substantive annotation essay. The volume draws on conversation partners as varied as Thomas Kuhn, Michael Polanyi, Simone Weil, Francis Schaeffer, John Walton, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Helen Longino, and Susan Sontag, and engages the Buddhist, Christian, Islamic, and Abrahamic Hebrew traditions in a cross-traditional survey of epistemic humility. An Afterword gestures toward a second volume, examining what the vocation of inquiry demands of communities of scientific and contemplative practice in the age of the attention economy.