(February 14, 2019 at 7:34 am)Grandizer Wrote: My point is that theology is reliance on reasoning (which is what philosophy involves anyway) plus a reliance on faith where reasoning itself isn't sufficient to lead to some "truth". Faith itself is useless to answer the question of what X is or how we know Y is Z because it's pretty much a blind and irrational leap. Philosophy (in the proper sense) is what theologians do when they do reasoning instead to get to a conclusion, so philosophy is what is useful in this case (not theology). Theology (of any kind) is of not much epistemological use to those who don't presuppose the doctrines that are presupposed via faith in the specific theology.
Yes, I see what you mean. That makes sense.
Certainly theology that begins with revealed truths, accepting them because they are revealed, is not going to be helpful for people who don't start from those premises. Aquinas, for example, is very careful to differentiate between things revealed and things provable.
I guess I didn't think about that before because, for the most part, I find the natural theology more interesting, and have focussed on that more myself. But that led me to over-simplify.
I guess then that there are different ways theologians can be of use to those who don't believe a priori. First, the natural theology that starts with observable phenomena and has a chain of reason that ends in God can be challenging and very hard to refute. It also clarifies, for me anyway, what the metaphysical problems are and why it is that science can't address them.
Then I guess there are sort of secondary theological arguments, based on prior chains of reasoning which aren't necessarily popular but also aren't revealed in the religious sense. For example, the idea that there is a Form of the Good and that things in this world point to it, has a long chain of reasoning behind it and a long history of persuading people. A lot of theology takes this as a given, assuming that you've done all the Platonic stuff as a prerequisite, and works from there. Simone Weil, for example, wrote theology of this type.
Finally there are the arguments that are theological because they call on God as an integral part of a chain of reasoning that, even if you don't believe in God in any Christian sense, is helpful for thinking about things. Aquinas' aesthetics, for example, is this way. It falls apart without the notions of beauty deriving from a Form of the Good and of Final Cause as meaningful for explaining things. Yet using those ideas only as markers or tools, the aesthetic system provides a splendid structure for us to think about art and beauty.
I guess I only disagree with you insofar as you say theological thinking isn't helpful unless you have faith in the revealed parts. I have found it very useful. I guess we have to accept the (perhaps unfortunate) fact that a great deal of the world's best thinking has been done in theological contexts, just due to accidents of history. So if we want to avail ourselves of that great thinking, we need to drink in the theology with it.
