(February 14, 2019 at 5:02 am)Belaqua Wrote:(February 14, 2019 at 3:56 am)Grandizer Wrote: I'm not sure why you had to insert theology in there. Experts on theology can be helpful in this case, sure, but not because they are experts on theology ...
A theologian tends to also be a philosopher, and it is their training in philosophy that would be useful to help answer epistemological questions such as whether or not science is the best source of knowledge. Not their training in theology.
Well, I guess I put it in there because polymath257 brought up theology.
As you say, theologians tend also to be philosophers. I would think that a well-trained one would know something about the relation of scientific knowledge to the world-as-it-is and how that would differ from metaphysical and theological questions.
Is that separate from their training in theology? The theology I've read has a lot to say about what the world really is and how we know it. But if you want to draw a distinction between, say, Aquinas' philosophy of knowledge and his theology, maybe that's possible.
Quote:Just because someone believes in God and has a comprehensive knowledge of past and present discussions on God doesn't mean they therefore have the required expertise from being a theologian to help answer metaphysical questions.
Certainly believing doesn't make them qualified, that's true. Nor does it make them disqualified. But anyone who had a comprehensive knowledge of theology would have a pretty solid acquaintance with most metaphysical questions, wouldn't he? What metaphysical question is not addressed by theologians? Or, again, do we have to separate (for example) Bishop Berkeley's writing about ontology and consciousness from his theology? Wouldn't we be splitting pages in half with a razor?
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.
