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Document Details : Title: Is Philipse’s ‘natuurlijke theologie’ wel theologie? Author(s): VAN DEN BROM, Luco J. Journal: Tijdschrift voor Theologie Volume: 53 Issue: 2 Date: 2013 Pages: 136-144 DOI: 10.2143/TVT.53.2.3203315 Abstract : Philipse designs a ‘classification tree’ to establish to what extent the cognitive status of religious statements influences their credibility in public debate in a culture dominated by scientific criteria. This classification tree helps to establish the kind of proof believers can use for their faith. By treating religious convictions primarily as factual statements, he reduces religious faith to the affirmation of a set of cognitive claims that should be provable. He uses a verification theory of meaning to treat faith as a theory with hypotheses that we should be able to test individually. This leads him to concentrate on the question of Gods existence as if this question could be answered entirely separately from the body of beliefs and practices that represent the Christian perspective in religious narratives. Philipse’s partisan attention to the cognitive status of faith as a hypothesis fails to notice which aspects emphasize D.Z. Philips’ and Alvin Plantiga’s approaches of the statement ‘God exists’ within the perspective of faith as a whole. According to Philipse, natural theology takes precedence over a theology of revelation in the justification of religious statements, because natural theology argues the existence of God independently from any particular revelation. Particularly rational believers supposedly need neutral natural theology to illustrate that they are right to interpret certain experiences as revelations of God. That is why every theology of revelation presupposes a foundation in a natural theology that offers arguments for rational non-believers to also understand why it would be reasonable to believe in God. This appears to be a kind of ‘fallacy of the foundational thinker’: from the correct presupposition that a belief in the existence of God is fundamental to a Christian theology, he jumps to the incorrect conclusion that it is primarily Gods existence that needs to be proven. By contrast, we are invited to regard the unity of theology, not as one integral system of explanatory propositions, but as an ‘aggregative unity’ that encompasses many religious practises and reflections. Within this aggregative unity, natural theology proposes a way of dealing with the reality in which we live in the light of Christian faith as a whole: it offers an orientation on the world we live in and tells us how to act in the right way. In such a type of theology, God is a character in orienting narratives and anything but a hypothetical entity whose existence is the subject of a calculus of probability. This narrative sensitizes us to the peculiarities of the world we live in, comparable to Norwood Hanson’s ‘theory-loaded observations’. |
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