LiberalArtsOnline Vol. 1, No. 6
Pribbenow is also a Research Fellow at the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana
Last year, I had the privilege of teaching in Wabash College's sophomore core course, Cultures and Traditions. Perhaps the most painful few days of the discussion-oriented course addressed the issues raised in William Paley's argument by design for the existence of God (in _Natural Theology - or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature_, first published in 1802) and Richard Dawkins' _The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design_ (W.W. Norton, new edition, 1996).
I won't bore you with my inadequate grasp of Dawkins' position, but suffice it to say that our classroom conversations were hampered by my inability to fill in the gaps of the argument---and to draw my bright students into the wonder of scientific exploration and interpretation.
I am liberally educated---or so I like to think---and yet I have managed (as have many of my humanist and social scientist friends) to avoid the sort of in-depth reading and study of the natural sciences that we would expect of those who are well rounded, literate, and curious about the world in which we live. I think about my own liberal arts education in the mid 1970s and recall how I gladly was able to sidestep biology and physics in lieu of an additional semester of a foreign language or a statistics course.
As we have made our initial plans for the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts, we also have found a rather obvious bias against (or misunderstanding of) the role of the sciences in the liberal arts. Our attempt to place an advertisement for Center staff in the Chronicle of Higher Education, slated to appear in the Executive section, was waylaid by some well-intentioned ad staffer into the Humanities section.
All of this is to say that we may have an uphill battle to convince those who care (or should care) about the liberal arts that all the wonders of human knowledge deserve a place at our banquet table and on our reading lists---most especially the wonders of scientific theories and experiments and interpretations.
An interview with Richard Dawkins in the January 2001 Harvard Business Review brings me back to my sophomore students, intent on a genuine liberal arts experience. Perhaps it is a matter of how we define relevance. Dawkins, faced with the growing use of scientific theories and metaphors to diagnose and describe organizations and leadership, suggests that the issue should not be the "easy" relevance of science to human experience (e.g., is behavior hardwired?).
Instead, he says: "My main message to laypeople, therefore, is: Don't rely on the scientists to interpret everything for you. Try to understand the issues for yourselves. Scientific literacy is its own reward. It will take you to places you have never gone before -- and in the process, it will help you to lead a better, fuller -- dare I say it? -- happier life."
And there we have a most eloquent statement of why we care about the liberal arts. Excuse me while I get started in making up for my self-imposed deficiencies---I owe it to myself and to my students.
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LiberalArtsOnline is an occasional email essay on the liberal arts, provided as a public service of the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.
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The comments published in LiberalArtsOnline reflect the opinions of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Center of Inquiry or Wabash College. Comments may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author, LiberalArtsOnline, and the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.