First thing first--[] issues an excellent corrective to the narrow view of science that is widespread and does justice to the non dogmatic nature of doing philosophy or theology--you most def have to be willing to shift premises, reconsider in the light of new evidence, etc. What was going to be a post focusing on Nietzsche's joyous science has quickly become a dangerous foray into philosophy proper, from which in the past couple years or so I have merely begged, borrowed, and stolen from for my own purposes rather than dealt with much in its own right. I won't claim to try to reconcile this with recent centuries developments in theology, but theology as you outline it falls into what is broadly referred to as the analytic style of doing philosophy.
Analytic philosophy has all sorts of methods--including both straight-up rationalism and empiricism. The analytic style is entrenched in philosophy proper (my own experience and http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/analytic.asp attest) and features, on the whole, incredibly specialized advances in very narrow nooks of wider problems. Continental philosophy struggles for a foothold in philosophy departments but nearly shuts out analytic philosophy in wider humanities discussions...the philosophy that does the "founding" for studies in rhetoric, sociology, etc. is almost always continental (perhaps with the exception of economics, as I've learned in Deidre McCloskey's Rhetoric of Economics). Both these wide-ranging styles have a huge amount of literature and approaches, but this basic distinction, I think is important, because theology so defined does resonate with philosophy--analytic philosophy.
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Theology, as I practice it, is not the only way to go about doing theology. Like philosophy, there are different theological schools.
ReplyDeleteFor example, Both Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI relied upon continental philosophy in their writings, whereas the philosophy that I rely upon in my work is largely Aristotelian.
Theology and philosophy will work closely together, especially in the process of systems-building.
I disapprove of Baron-Cohen's attempts to join natural science to philosophy in order to formulate a metaphysical system, primarily because natural science does not seem to provide room for metaphysical truth claims. Instead, it strictly seeks to analyze empirical data and patterns.
Empirical philosophy is rather paradoxical, because it utilizes the tools of a formal science in order to prove that formal sciences are invalid. In other words, it seems to deny that any logical reasoning is invalid for truth finding, unless it is grounded in experience. This seems a self-contradiction to me: an experientially-verifiable metaphysic.