A Critique of Theological Thinking

!

 

so if we can't differentiate the terms by claiming that one is systematic and the other isnt....and we can't say that one has procedures and the other doesn't (both have rituals that are oriented via assumptions and require one act upon the world in certain ways with the idea of engendering some effect)...but we don't want to say they're the same thing...then maybe the matter is more sociological than anything else.



religion and science---still with the vapor swirling----occupy different social spaces. each discipline operates on a specific type of object(s) using a particular range of procedures that generate results which are interpreted as legitimate or not, important or not, by particular communities, using particular instrument.

if you wanted to be a theologian--which is a specific thing, you know?---it's not just being involved with a religious organization or way of life---

chances are that you'd have to play the academic game in a more or less similar manner as anyone else. to the extent that all the major disciplines---theology to physics----are primarily academic, there are certain general similarities in how they work. like i said, the differences would lay the objects of analyses, operations performed on them (which would determine the technological situation), the ways in which analyses were understood to work, and the networks of legitimation----so in something like theology, probably books are far more important than journal articles, where in the hard sciences, journals are much more central as a way to communicate stuff. this is all starting to change, they say. anyway... so they'd differentiate by readership and uses to which the texts were put.

in theology, for example, there are situations in which a book or books come to be understood as important because of who wrote them as much as what they say---so for example the textual work done by some of the main liberation theologians, while interesting, became a big deal largely because of the social and political work that liberation theology enabled---before that fine gentleman j=p 2 shut it down for being communist. but i digress. in most other academic disciplines, there are the folk whose work is understood as important within particular sub-fields and other people who popularize things and they're not necessarily the same people---but there's no reason to go on about this stuff in general as one could get an idea of the state of various disciplines and their subfields pretty easily if you decide to look into one or another in particular.

but saying that it's largely a sociological question what separates theology (which is not---again--a synonym for religion---which is, in turn, not a term that applies easily to all forms of belief...but that's a digression maybe) entails that one move off the general and into specific situations then maybe go back to the making of generalizations...but at least then you're talking about something specific.

it's also possible to have a philosophical discussion about types of knowledge produced by various procedures etc., but even there it's typically a good thing to have actual examples that one is looking at rather than simply waving one's hands in the general direction of the specific. if you look at any philosophy of science piece, there's something specific involved (i remember a whole riot of stuff about the question of whether psychoanalysis can produces scientific knowledge for example, much of which rest on problems that arose from an insistence on experimental method, repeatability and all that in a conceptual context that foregrounded the unconscious....there's interesting stuff to think about there for a while.)

science fetishism is tedious as well. i think it's far more interesting to think about the various types of scientific work that might engage your interest as philosophical projects. as a fast example, i have a friend who works in a pharma company that is working on a drug that might take out relatively simple forms of cancer. the problem, she says, with alot of earlier generations of such drugs was that folk defaulted into thinking about tumors as growing from the inside out. because that's, like, normal. but the inside of cancer tumors is the history of their growth--they grow from the outside. so the outer layers have to be attacked to neutralize the types of tumors that this company is working with. where did the idea that tumor growth worked from the inside out come from? it wasn't a matter of observation. it was an assumption simply pulled into the experimental frame for x period of time until something occurred to someone about results of a procedure---or failures---that enabled that to become a problem. (there are details to this story that were explained to me, but it's not my area of expertise so they didnt stick in my brain....) anyway, this is a capital-intensive form of genetic manipulation that is at play here. and it's a philosophical undertaking, an exploration, undertaken with particular technological tools that are built around conceptual assumptions that nonetheless runs up against questions or problems created by assumptions that people simply map into what they're doing as a matter of course.

now i am thinking about a cheese steak.

 

Not at All!
I obv. oversimplified stating that "Science is a METHOD", the correct story goes more or less that way:

Philosophy, etimologically "love for knowledge", is a huge branch of human study that more or less include every compartment of ideas and lines of thinking that tries to define, explain and eviscerate every possible line of thinking of human ideas with a rigorous and defined (even if changing in function of the field of study) method. Science is, at a large extent, a Branch of Philosophy. So even if philosophy isn't all scientifical, science is for the most part philosophical.That is why science advanced degrees are called "PhD", other than historical reasons (where, prior to Galileo, science was defined as "natural philosophy") but that are ancestrary to most of the academic institutions (expecially anglosaxon ones, where the terms is used), because a scientist that have reached a certain level of knowing, skills and deepness in science is "a man that loves and guide the knowledge", so an expert in philosophy.
There is even a Branch of philosophy at a direct higher level than Science, dedicated to the study of the conditions and definitions that makes science possible and the definition of science applicable. This Branch is called Epistemology (in truth is a branch of epistemology, but let not be too kinky). If "somethings" falls under the rules set by epistemology (at least by a current of epistemological thinking) than is Science, otherwise not. There are many current in epistemology, but everyone I know (and I know a good deal of it, since my work and my passion) stick to a basic principle: "logically driven hypothesis and deductions accounting for experimental driven facts" (so to speak "sensate esperienze" "sensed and reasonable experiences" "certe dimostrazioni" "certain deductions" of the Galileian Scientific Method).
Then there are others requisites, for Popper was the Falsifiability, so the fact that must be not only a logically deduction driven from experimental facts, but also that there must be margin for other experiments to prove wrong the theory and "keep the science forward" for example...

Without experiments and facts, logical deductions are part of Philosophy but not part of Science.

Damn some time ago on a philosophy journal in italy was questioning if String Theory was effectively labelling as "Science" or not...

And that makes Theology a perfectly good and respectable branch of Philosophy, which is something bigger than science that includes science, but is not "science"

That's why, as philosophy teaches us, and theology remarks, everything is just in the definitions and assumptions. After that it's downhill all the way!