The Empirical Humanist

Wea­ried by the dis­tor­tion of the­ory by prej­u­dice
in so many areas of intel­lec­tual activ­ity,
many have found the objec­tiv­ity
sought by the nat­ural sci­ences
to offer sta­bil­ity and san­ity to their reflections.

Alis­tair McGrath, Nature (A Sci­en­tific The­ol­ogy, v. 1), 18.

I’m an aca­d­e­mic trained in the human­i­ties. But my heart has always been in the nat­ural sci­ences, a rocket sci­en­tist wannabe. I’ve longed for the same kind of rigor and val­i­da­tion that the sci­en­tific method pro­vides the researcher in the nat­ural sci­ences. And I’m not alone in that long­ing! Sub­jec­tiv­ity has long reigned in bib­li­cal stud­ies, much more so with the advent of post-​​modern epis­te­molo­gies which deny valid knowl­edge of real­ity and “truth”, how­ever defined.

Can researchers in the human­i­ties do bet­ter? I believe that we can, and this blog is a record of my search for valid and effec­tive analo­gies to the sci­en­tific method. This is a sort of pub­lic scratch­pad, a note­book or jour­nal that every­one can watch or kib­itz on. To really learn, one must write about what one reads and thinks about that read­ing. Writ­ing in such a way that the gen­eral pub­lic can under­stand and fol­low (more or less) is also essen­tial: fuzzy writ­ing means fuzzy think­ing. Just look at the writ­ing of Roger Pen­rose, Stephen Hawk­ing, Dou­glas Hof­stead­ter, or (my hero) C. S. Lewis.

Enjoy the ride! I know I will!