Theologians tend to spend a good deal of time simply writing about the views of theologians, and about the views of those (whether one calls them “theologians” or not depends on definitions more than anything else) who wrote down their views in the canonical scriptures of the religion in question. No reference, ever, to underlying data, but only reference to writings and ponderings. Theology isn’t really about gods so much as it is about theology. Peel away layers, and what you find is that beneath the text is text; beneath that text, more text. And if you’re hoping for something other than text, well, it is, sadly, turtles all the way down.
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First, this criticism can be leveled at most academic disciplines in the humanities. Philosophers also write primarily about the arguments of other philosophers. (In fact, analytic philosophers rarely interact at all with non-analytic philosophy.) Scholars of Shakespeare primarily write about the work of scholars in the same fields.
Second, it is simply false to say that data from other disciplines are not taken into account when doing theology. This very website was built within the context of theologians in dialogue with scientists over a theological issue. Empirical data and theoretical discoveries from genetics, cosmology, geology, psychology, and other disciplines are regularly taken into account in theology, as well as philosophy and other non-scientific disciplines. Some branches of theology (such as YECs) do so idiosyncratically or unreliably, but they are far from being the majority among theologians.
Third, it’s true that in some branches of theology (such as evangelical Christian theology), certain writings (such as the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, Early Church Fathers, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin etc.) are regarded as more prominent than others. But this simply reflects the view within that branch that those writings are the “most reliable and significant data” in ascertaining truths about God. This is similar to how Marxist philosophers would give a special place to the the texts of Marx in their work, or how psychoanalysts like @Faizal_Ali may pay special attention to the works of Freud and his followers when looking for effective psychological treatments.
Fourth, it is unfair to say that it’s only “texts all the way down.” Religious texts still contain records of people’s encounters with the divine, even if they are mostly not what modern people would call “scientific”, because the very nature of the divine makes truly scientific approaches impossible - namely, that God is not an impersonal object we can readily manipulate and push around (as we would an electron, for example) to understand whether our theories about him are correct. The Gospels, for example, record interactions and observations of people concerning Jesus Christ, who is viewed as divine in Christian theology. (Whether these texts are reliable or not is not the question here - it is the job of biblical scholars and theologians to discuss and debate that.)
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Sure, but all of those disciplines have some underlying referent to which those writings relate. Biologists write a great deal about the work of other biologists, but that’s because that work in turn is based upon work done in actual biology. If biology worked the way theology does, there would be an old document in which someone said he’d once been shown what a cell looked like, and there’d be ten thousand volumes of commentary upon that document and its implications for cell biology, with nobody bothering to go back and get a microscope and look at a cell.
Since that’s not a statement I made, the simple falsity of it isn’t particularly pertinent, though, is it? It’s true that theology generates theological points of view about subjects which lie outside of theology. But the fact that biology exists and relates to real things does not imbue theological speculations upon biology with any more reality than they would otherwise have.
The notion that the texts of previous writers upon theology contain “data” is precisely the problem. They really don’t. They contain more theology, which is precisely what I was saying: that theology is essentially the study of itself.
Well, they contain CLAIMS about such encounters. Evidence for the underlying reality of those encounters, of course, is what they do not contain. One should not take the marketing literature of a religion as a substitute for evidence: ancient advocacy pieces which cobble together the folkloric accounts of alleged divine encounters are surely interesting from an anthropological perspective, but they are not in any meaningful sense “data” from which conclusions about the divine may be drawn. A man could buy the Brooklyn Bridge without being that credulous.
That claim is commonly made, but never substantiated. It’s a terrible mistake to make claims about the nature of the divine without first having a good look at the divine and ascertaining whether those claims bear up under scrutiny. We certainly do drawn conclusions about all manner of “personal objects,” such as animals, by scrutinizing them, and not all collections of observational data require us to “push around” anything. Dian Fossey didn’t have to wrestle a gorilla or run it through a blender in order to collect data on it.
No, what claims of that sort are is mere evasions. The gods don’t do anything, so it is alleged that nothing they do could ever really be scrutinized. BUT it is also alleged that one should scrutinize their doings as reported in old texts, and assume that THIS type of scrutiny is top-notch, high-quality stuff. Isn’t there a likelier explanation for the gods not doing anything? And if the gods DO something, then why do the theologians never get around to studying THAT?
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This is a red herring. I’m comparing theology to other humanities disciplines, not scientific ones. History works in a similar way to theology - mainly studying ancient texts that recorded what happened in a period of time.
You said the following:
That’s simply false, given how theologians even sometimes look at the “data” of scientists and other disciplines and try to integrate them into theological systems. Of course, that doesn’t prove that theology is saying anything true, but to accuse it of absolute isolation in itself is false.
And the job of theologians is to look at these claims of encounters and try to fit them into a coherent picture. It resembles a historian looking at several ancient sources (some of which may be in tension with each other) and trying to fit together “what really happened and why”.
The issue is that you are taking an extremely skeptical view where none of these claims of encounters are true. You’re free to do that, just as a flat-earther is free to hold that all photographs of a spherical Earth from outer space are either faked or misinterpreted, so all of these are just “claims” without “evidence”. But the issue is that the flat-earther has an unreasonable standard of evidence and an indefensible framework for interpreting it, not that there’s anything wrong with the evidence itself.
The claim has been substantiated multiple times, only that some people refuse to listen and repeat the same misconceptions over and over.
Theology claims to study God. The first question: what does theology mean by “God”? Without an agreed-upon answer to this question, we’re just talking past each other. Suppose you think that “God” means “super power gorilla capable of teleportation and telekinesis”. Then I would agree that “God (according to Puck Mendelssohn) doesn’t exist”. But that wouldn’t get to the heart of the matter.
To actually progress in the conversation, we should ask what theologians mean by “God”, similar to how one can ask an evolutionary biologist what they mean by “evolution”, or what historians mean by “Julius Caesar”. When the definition of God that theologians use is properly understood, then it is pretty obvious that God, if he exists, is utterly unlike an animal or any other personal object. God doesn’t just “do” stuff. In a way, he does everything. He does not even “exist” in the same way as a gorilla or rock exists, because he is the ground and sustaining cause for all existence.
None of this proves that God exists, or that texts recording encounters with God or thoughts about God are correct in their claims. But it does show that you misunderstand what theology is about.
To reject a strawman definition of what one believes is not an evasion. It’s simply being honest.
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@Puck_Mendelssohn, he has some strong points.
I agree. You don’t have to like theology, but at least don’t attack a strawman of it.
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But theology isn’t a humanities discipline insofar as it makes claims about what things are actually present, or absent, in the world. The apt comparison, for such questions as “are there gods” and what are the gods like" is to scientific disciplines.
No, and if @swamidass thinks that’s a “straw man,” as he has said, that’s simply, utterly and quite obviously false. There are no underlying data for the core claims of theology. Now, of course, yes, when theology holds forth about things outside of its own scope, THEN there are underlying data, because those other things have underlying data. But that’s not the underlying data of theology – it’s theology commenting on the findings of other disciplines.
That may be part of their job. But in so doing what do they do? Study texts, and texts about those texts. Theologians are not trying to evaluate the underlying claims: whether there are gods, and what those gods are like. There are no underlying data for those claims.
When theologians do try to “fit them into a coherent picture,” that’s the construction of some kind of internally consistent system – it’s work of a sort, but not very useful unless that work can be shown to have some correspondence to something real. Here, it is, as I have said: the study of itself. Navel-gazing of the highest order.
Not really. I’m happy for the claims to be true, but of course historical evidence is of no particular use in evaluating them. That’s not an “extremely skeptical view” unless you are prepared to take the same credulous approach with all of the non-Christian claims as you are with the Christian ones. And when you’ve done that, you will discover that it’s a non-starter; you’ve lost all hope of credible historical inquiry. When you start calling people “extremely skeptical” for thinking that people don’t really rise from the dead, you’ve lost touch with something important.
But there’s your problem. The definitions of gods that Christian theologians use are not particularly useful. And how did it get that way? Thousands of years of people crafting evasive argument to deal with the fact that their claims were very poorly evidenced. The gods are not hard to find because they’re inscrutable; they are inscrutable because nobody could find them.
Look: it’s true that if we render “gods” inscrutable, then we can say that nothing can bear on their existence at all. But any sensible person then says, “this is no longer a subject which I can form any conception of or understand in any sense whatsoever. It is therefore wholly irrelevant to me.” When it is asserted that these claims about gods are true, surely SOMETHING is meant. And if anything is meant, then the gods must not be inscrutable in this lovely, protective hard-shelled philosophically-tenuous sense.
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Is history a “scientific” discipline? How about African-American studies? Theology is divided into natural theology and revealed theology. The former incorporates more insights from philosophy and the empirical sciences. The latter investigates the “data” for God in certain sacred writings, and resembles more like what historians and scholars of literature do.
Sure. I don’t automatically discount the existence of miracles and supernatural phenomena in other religions. I am not necessarily closed off to the possibility that in some cases, something actually happened. Of course, I don’t also just naively accept that all supernatural claims are true. For example, Tim McGrew lays some rational criteria for assessing miracles in any religion or context, and argues that the Resurrection is in a special class.
Again, it might not be credible to you, just as the astronaut-produced photograph of the round Earth is not credible to a flat-earther. But simply asserting that it’s not credible doesn’t really move anyone who’s not already convinced.
Now that’s another strawman. No one is claiming that people rise from the dead regularly. Christians say that at least one person miraculously and anomalously rose from the dead at one point in time, assisted by some power that is capable of suspending the regularities of nature.
Secondly, your statement insinuates that I’m calling everyone who doesn’t believe in the Resurrection to be an “extreme skeptic”. That is also a misrepresentation of my view. Instead, I am gesturing towards the fact that 84% of the world is religious in some way. Most people who have ever lived believe that there’s something transcendent, some sort of divinity or higher power out there. And this belief is not just professed based on seeing “miracles” or supernatural occurrences; it is a very common human experience to feel compelled to pray and seek out this higher power. I’m calling your view “extreme skepticism” because most people in the world believe there’s something genuine underpinning this universal human sensus divinitatis. Only a small minority of people believe that our religious instincts are no more than just an arbitrary trait that hijacked itself into the evolutionary process and that the best way forward is to rid itself of this desire in favor of “science and reason.” To repeat what @Ashwin_s said: this conversation we’re having is a very Western one.
Now, the exact nature of this transcendence or divinity is difficult to ascertain, which is why we have so many different religions and schools of thought. But for example, all Christians and Muslims (who comprise ~70% of the world population) agree that there is one omnipotent, omnipresent, Creator God who is the cause of everything.
The definition of God that I use has existed for thousands of years. It is not a modern, post-scientific concoction. Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas all used this definition. Hebrew monotheism has also existed for at least a few thousand years. We’re really not that interested in debating whether lesser gods like Zeus, Hera, or Hermes exist; Augustine already rejected that back in the 5th century (see Part I of The City of God).
You could make a bigger claim. You could say all Christian’s,muslims,Jews identify God as the person who revealed himself by the name Yahweh to Moses.
And the remaining 20%+ identify with a worldview where human beings have an immaterial spirit and also believe in Spiritual dimension inhabited by Spirit beings.
So, if consensus is evidence for God, Yahweh has a lot going for Him… and the concept of Spirit beings is universally accepted.
Except for some people in Europe and a minority in the US who think differently and have the gumption to say things like religion are “useless”.
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General principle: Never get into an argument with a theist about theology. It isn’t worth the effort.
My apologies, and I guess it does read that way, but it is not really what I meant to be getting at. I think COVID isolation is making me punchy.
I am inclined to the view that rational scrutiny of miracles is essentially impossible – I mean, one can construct criteria by which to try to do the job, and then do the job in relation to those criteria, but the difficulty is that there are no ways to test the criteria so your results are liable to be garbage and you have no way to know. It winds up being a bit like CSI as indicating design. How much CSI indicates design? Does any amount indicate it? Nobody knows. How much in the way of surrounding circumstances concerning the trustworthiness of sources makes an apparently impossible thing probable? Can any amount of such circumstances do it? I don’t think anybody knows that, either.
I know I do refer to Huxley quite a lot more than most people probably would like, but I find his essay on The Value of Witness to the Miraculous pretty compelling. At that time, over a century ago, what seemingly happened quite a bit (at least, in sources I read) was that people would sort of start the inquiry by saying that, well, first, it’s clear that Christianity is the only religion whose miracle claims have sufficient legitimacy to be taken seriously. With that not-very-convincing (and never explained) launchpad, they would turn to the gospel stories, et cetera, and treat these more or less as they would if they were evaluating a historical document which purported to describe ordinary, non-supernatural events.
I find as I read ancient literature from various cultures that I am not only unable to make that initial claim for Christianity (which I clearly understand you are NOT making, so no contrary implication is intended here) but that I am unable to find much to choose between in the credibility of miracle accounts. I really was quite struck by the account, in one of the sagas (Orkneyinga, I think), of a woman abruptly rising from the dead, issuing a prophecy, and falling down dead again. I cannot say anything against that account on any sort of literary-critical ground. The writer (Sturluson) was credible, there was no reason to doubt his sincerity or objectivity in the matter, and the story makes sense in its context and is free from internal contradiction or any other evident suggestion of error.
All that I CAN say against that account, I think, is that it does contravene probability. And I am aware that there are any number of these sorts of tales. When I was a law student in Philadelphia I became aware of the work of Father Divine, of the MOVE cultist John Africa, and all manner of such things, many of these having their own wellspring of tales shot through with miracle. And while I could easily enough construct some sort of critical framework and rank these on a scale of 1 to 10, I’m not sure that the resulting ranking would be anything other than an artifact of arbitrary features of my critical framework.
I used to follow Skeptical Inquirer magazine some years ago, and it was always fascinating to me to see that all sorts of miracles are still happening today, and are well attested by credible and sincere witnesses – and that they invariably turn out, when amenable to investigation, to be balderdash: often fraud, but sometimes just poor understandings of perfectly ordinary occurrences. The difficulty is that it only takes a small amount of distance from the event to make investigation impractical. To say that a poltergeist turns out to be a child pulling pranks is relatively easy when it’s a current account. But a poltergeist of twenty years ago, un-investigated at the time, falls into the same broad basket of “miracles” – things that one can have no a priori objection to, and that can be said to be therefore within the realm of logical possibility, but that are, nonetheless, just not bloody likely.
What the CSICOP body of work does teach, I think, is that sincerity and profound subjective experience are not only not safeguards against error, but are in fact vectors for error. And this leads me to the view that such things as the sincerity and trustworthiness of those witnesses who told the original stories which eventually wound their way into the gospel accounts are not – even if they could be quite firmly established – any sort of certification of safety.
So I am, and I remain, passionately interested in learning whether there are gods and what they are like. But I cannot think that historical documents can ever be of any use in regard to that question, and even a very strong subjective sense that you’ve got the one good credible case in hand is more likely to be a simple case of self-misleading. That being the case, it seems to me there simply is no alternative to empirical scrutiny, and if that won’t do the job, nothing will. If there is an alternative method which WILL do the job, well, I have never heard of it.
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Ah, but you know. What do you do when you’re not able to travel? I should be getting ready for two weeks in Orkney right now, and instead here I am at home, hunkering down for the apocalypse.
The weird thing with theology is that I really have been trying to give it a go for years. Lots of reading, and all of it rather like a long chomp through a pile of dry leaves. Hardly anything one would call digestible, and hardly anything one would call useful. Textual criticism is interesting at times, though mostly what it highlights is the extremely tenuous nature of conclusions drawn from literary and historical details without more. The full-on philosophizing tends to be pretty unhelpful, and seems, as I have said, to be more directed toward covering over the lack of corroborating facts than toward anything else.
But now and then one hits a real stinker. The last third of the volume on Theistic Evolution was like a sack of chicken manure which had gotten wet and then had been sealed up in plastic for a month before opening. When the ID Creationists hit their stride, there’s no breathing.
A few aspects of this do, at least, draw something from my background. As a litigator you get used to working as a bafflegab penetrator, because the hardest arguments to answer are the incoherent ones and the hide-the-ball games. Most of theology’s scrutiny-evasive arguments are pretty transparent and pretty shallow stuff, and when you see that authors are willing to make bad arguments to avoid having to reach the merits, it not only highlights the weakness of their case but highlights their consciousness of the weakness of their case.
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Two concepts come to mind.
If we take a longer view of history, then science has made religion useless when it comes to describing nature.
Then there is Stephen Jay Gould’s NOMA:
I like to take bits and pieces from this philosophical buffet, and my opinions have changed from one moment to the next, and will probably continue to change. One main view that sticks with me is that we can debate morality in the absence of science, and we can also debate how useful religion is on the question of morality.
Here is a fact for you. There are still countless people who look at nature and see the work of a creator in it.
Science cannot disprove it.
Even when it comes to design in nature, scientists cannot really say it’s not the work of God. Even scientists who are theists view nature as ultimately Gods creation and science doesnt refute that belief.
We can debate anything. When it comes to practical moral decisions, people use religion very very often.
The entire issue with this discussion is that Jerry Cotne wants to divorce the concept of usefulness from people.
For something to be useful, it has to be useful to someone. You cannot divorce usefulness from the person who finds something useful.
The Weinberg quote was talking about direct causes. I think we all agree that a supernatural deity acting through nature in an undetectable manner can not be disproven. More to the point, I can make up wild supernatural explanations for any natural phenomena that can’t be disproven. That will only lead us to the question of how useful supernatural explanations are if they can’t be disproven or tested.
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Again… you are divorcing usefulness from people.
If all people on the planet died… nothing would be useful, including science.
I should think squirrels would have no difficulty finding nuts useful, whether we were watching them eat or not.
Yes… and science would be useless to squirrels…
I think you are beginning to understand what useful means.
The natural laws and mechanisms we have discovered through science will still be around if all people on the planet died. Can we say the same for religion? If you wiped the memory of all people and destroyed every bit of stored information we have ever created we could still rediscover all of science. Can the same be said of religion?
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Yes… they would be… but science wouldn’t be around.(because science didn’t cause the laws to come into place).
Is this so difficult to grasp?
If science is useful to people… its very easy to see what science is useful for.
- Its useful for creating technology.
- It gives us knowledge on specific aspects of reality which can be measured and tested for.
How is this relevant to the usefulness of science. You are indulging in question begging here.
Religion will resurface as God reveals himself to people.