A Credo for Scientific Inquiry
On the Shared Ground of Empirical and Contemplative Knowing
By (author) Alan Crouch
Paperback (Forthcoming)
(June 2026)
ISBN: 9781923668973
6 x 9 inches
Price: $34.95
On back order
Hardback (Forthcoming)
(June 2026)
ISBN: 9781923668980
6 x 9 inches
Price: $47.95
On back order
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.
The volume is distinctive in two respects. First, it is written in a hybrid voice: the author’s own first-person narrative — shaped by decades of medical humanitarian work, including field experience in Cambodia in the aftermath of the genocide, and by a long personal trajectory through competing models of science and scripture — is woven throughout the annotation essays, grounding the philosophical argument in lived experience rather than merely illustrating it. Second, it is transparent about its method of production: the annotation essays were developed through an iterative human-AI collaborative process, governed by intentional pauses for human peer review and multi-engine stress-testing, and the Acknowledgement gives a full account of this methodology. Both features reflect the volume’s governing commitment to the intellectual honesty it asks of its readers.
- By (author) Alan Crouch
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