Date: Tue, 4 Jul 2000 13:42:55 +0100
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: BHA: Theology as a way of knowing


Hi Doug

Many thanks for your comments to myself and Tobin. 

I can accept a great deal of what you say, including that we can
approach many theological issues 'with scientific means'.

The sticking point for me is that theology sometimes asserts the
existence or reality of domains that imo by definion can never be
validated by personal experience let alone tested for in some sense
scientifically e.g. the existence of an afterlife or the one I have
already mentioned, that the principle of order in the universe(s) is the
love of God. If God exists one could of course experience Its love, but
I don't think one could experience the love of God holding the universe
together any more than one can experience one's own death in advance of
it. 

It seems to me that, if we don't accept them on authority, we can only
arrive at such notions by intuition or faith - and this is what Roy does
in EW. Transcendental arguments are of course offered or implicit, but
my point is there's no way of grounding them  empirically. This is very
different from the gravity waves case which are not in principle
insusceptible to empirical demonstration - or if they are, we have
arrived at ontological limits for science in virtue of the limits of our
powers of observation.

But since you yourself explicitly renounce faith and (critically) trust
in your personal experience and in 'scientific means', I take it that
you do not make such claims. In which case, your theology is not an
essentially different way of knowing from some of the other fields of
inquiry you mention. Other theologies are... 

I take your point re 'demonstrable results' qualifying the element of
faith in science itself.


Mervyn


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