Naturalism and Our Knowledge of Reality
Testing Religious Truth-claims
Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies Series

Philosophical naturalism is taken to be the preferred and reigning epistemology and metaphysics that underwrites many ideas and knowledge claims. But what if we cannot know reality on that basis? What if the institution of science is threatened by its reliance on naturalism? R. Scott Smith argues in a fresh way that we cannot know reality on the basis of naturalism. Moreover, the "fact-value" split has failed to serve our interests of wanting to know reality. The author provocatively argues that since we can know reality, it must be due to a non-naturalistic ontology, best explained by the fact that human knowers are made and designed by God. The book offers fresh implications for the testing of religious truth-claims, science, ethics, education, and public policy. Consequently, naturalism and the fact-value split are shown to be false, and Christian theism is shown to be true.

Introduction; Part I Direct Realism; Chapter 1 An Introduction to Direct Realism; Chapter 2 The Representationalism of Dretske, Tye, and Lycan; Chapter 3 Searle’s Naturalism and the Prospects for Knowledge; Part II Philosophy as Science; Chapter 4 Cognitive Science, Philosophy, and Our Knowledge of Reality, Part One; Chapter 5 Cognitive Science, Philosophy, and Our Knowledge of Reality, Part Two; Chapter 6 Can the Churchlands’ Neurocomputational Theory of Cognition Ground a Viable Epistemology?, Errin D.Clark; Part III Other Alternatives, and Naturalism’s Future; Chapter 7 Other Proposals, PeggyBurke; Chapter 8 The Future Directions of Naturalism; Chapter 9 A Positive Case for Our Knowledge of Reality; Chapter 10 Methodological Naturalism and the Scientific Method, and Other Implications;

R.Scott Smith has written many articles and a monograph on Virtue Ethics. He specialises in ethics, phenomenology, philosophy of religion, and constructivism (especially in postmodernism, naturalism, and philosophical theology, including the emerging church as a practical extension). He teaches on these themes, including a graduate philosophy of religion class on naturalism, postmodernism, and constructivism.