A Response to “Against Cognitive Imperialism”

The author condemns the “hegemony” of scientifi c materialism, comparing it to the dominance of scholasticism during the Middle Ages. He points out that if we are to regard religious entities and spiritual experiences as “supernatural” and imaginary on the grounds that they cannot be measured and described objectively, then we must regard all our experience of the world as equally supernatural and subjective, since all we have is the subjective experience of the data of our senses. On this basis he seconds Harold D. Roth’s call for readmission of contemplative studies to the academy alongside the study of the “Church Scientifi c.” Hal Roth has cogently challenged many of the unquestioned assumptions of postmodernism and scientifi c materialism that are commonly presented by their advocates as being so obviously true that they feel no need to support their beliefs with either empirical evidence or rational argument. Scientifi c materialism dominates much of the thinking in the natural sciences and has made deep inroads in capturing the imagination of the public at large, while postmodernism continues to exert a considerable infl uence in the social sciences and humanities. Despite some deep ideological differences between these two belief systems, many intellectuals have adopted both of them, with the tenets of postmodernism laid over those of scientifi c materialism, like an eiderdown comforter laid over a granite mattress. With their combined domination of the sciences and humanities, they have turned modern institutions of higher learning into bulwarks of “unrefl ective ethnocentrism” and “cognitive imperialism.” This situation bears a striking resemblance to the ideological and intellectual hegemony that medieval scholasticism exerted over European civilization until the early seventeenth century. Medieval scholastics believed that human knowledge stemmed from two sources: the Bible, consisting of God’s word, and the Book of Nature, which was created by