Philosophy of science theology

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The philosophy of science of theology is a sub-area of fundamental theology in which theological statements and research are examined as part of a self-reflection to determine to what extent they meet scientific standards. It therefore represents on the one hand an application of the general philosophy of science to theological research, on the other hand it includes programs that develop a specific theory of science or epistemology under the conditions of certain theological assumptions.

The independence of theology as a scientific discipline is occasionally disputed, since many of the areas it deals with in university operations are also special subjects of history , philology , philosophy , anthropology , psychology and sociology . A philosophy of science of theology therefore always has to show what constitutes the unity of theology and a peculiarity in access to these objects. The relationship to God is often mentioned here as the actual specific feature. A central task of the philosophy of science in theology is to show how theological statements can be obtained and justified. Insofar as theology is in fact mostly practiced within denominations , it is also necessary to justify within whether and how the truth claims of the different religions and denominations can be reconciled with a uniform methodology of theology. This is countered by Friedrich Schleiermacher's approach , according to which theology has no subject area of ​​its own at all, but its knowledge is merely held together by a common purpose, which he sees in “church-leading action”.

This article, on the other hand, presents approaches that defend the meaning and possibility of theology's own philosophy of science, in particular the approach of Wolfhart Pannenberg and Gerhard Sauter .

Subject of theology

God as the subject of theology in Pannenberg

According to Wolfhart Pannenberg , theology as a science can only be properly understood as a science of God. This is initially pursued without a denomination: The science of Christianity, for example, is based on the science of God, but is not identical to it. It is almost trivial that the existence of God is controversial. Pannenberg sees the question of God open and unfinished. The subject of theology is based on this awareness of the problem. With this, Pannenberg avoids the aporias of a dogmatic positive theology. But although God cannot be observed, statements about God can be checked. The idea of ​​God is to be proven in the experienced reality of man and the world. The idea of ​​God remains hypothetical in relation to this experienced reality.

Since God cannot be determined empirically, the science of God is only possible if God is given in other objects of experience. Religious experience has intersubjective validity only in its relevance for human understanding of the world and of self.

God can be understood as the all-embracing reality. Theology questions the totality of the (empirically given) reality in terms of the ultimately determining reality. This no longer happens as in the tradition of modern times , according to which God is seen as the first cause of the world, but access to the idea of ​​God leads through human self-understanding.

The reality of God shows itself (in contrast to the God of the philosophers) in history . God shows himself in the way that reality as a whole is historically experienced. This is expressed in the individual religions, as there is an understanding of reality as a whole. In the religions (mostly on special historical events) the self-expression of God becomes thematic. This need by no means be restricted to the major religions. However, since religion seeks to create intersubjectively valid truth, a purely individual religious experience has no comprehensive theological relevance.

The specialty of the theological investigation is the question of the religious intention of a religious tradition in the individual religions and their history. This is left out in the individual sciences (including religious studies ).

God as an object of theology in Sauter

According to Gerhard Sauter , one cannot talk about God objectively, but only talk to and with God. One can not avoid analogous speaking of God, but it must be noted that this is not possible without restrictions.

Talking about God gives order to talking about the world, since the world is spoken of as God's creation . Theology therefore does not represent a system of knowledge that depicts reality, but rather speaks to God in its statements about the world.

Since God cannot be empirically observed, one has to talk about him in a different way than about other things. According to Sauter, speaking about God is unpaid, promising and hopeful and not absolute, but contingent. Since sentences about God are hypotheses, they can be checked. This verifiability is not to be understood in the empirical sense: a statement is not only true if it can be empirically verified, but also if it can be justified. This does justice to the holistic character of a complex of theories or paradigm , in which not every single statement has to be empirically verifiable, as long as the overall system corresponds to the perception. This is also the main message of the Duhem-Quine thesis .

Theological judgment and justification

Theological judgment at Pannenberg

For Pannenberg, the assertions of a religion are hypotheses in which traditional assertions must prove themselves against contemporary experience. Even if a religion claims revelations for itself, these have been handed down by humans and must be checked for reliability and truth.

The theology of religions tests religious traditions against the standard of their own understanding of divine reality. This is not limited to the Christian tradition, but the traditions of Christianity are only a special case.

A theological statement is a hypothesis about the truth of manifestations of religious consciousness. By relating tradition and the present to one another, the theologian comes to the interpretation and criticism of then and now views. Religious statements that have been handed down to us prove themselves if they understand the context of all experience of reality better than others. This probation takes place on the life of the individual.

A hypothesis is not proven if

  1. it is not implied in tradition.
  2. there is no relation to reality.
  3. there is no area of ​​experience.
  4. other hypotheses provide better explanations.

Pannenberg is close to critical rationalism, since probation and falsification play a major role for him. In contrast to Karl Popper and Hans Albert , however, he does not check theological statements like scientific statements on individual sensory data, but on the human understanding of the world and self.

Theological judgment at Sauter

Sauter does not see theology as a science that is limited to problem-solving behavior. Rather, theological work leads to the constitution and mediation of meaning. The question of meaning in the face of total questionability is fundamental for theological problems.

Theology gets into a dichotomy between totality and uniqueness, since contingent situations with an all-encompassing horizon of meaning are to be agreed. The theologian can therefore only make limited statements: his total concepts (such as “God”) are necessary for the explication of theology, but cannot adequately describe reality.

Although theology includes all speech acts of faith, it has to be objectified and is therefore limited to the linguistic act of making a statement . Theology is also language criticism; it must strive for clear language and be able to make the meaning and meaning of its theological vocabulary transparent.

The subject of theology is history. However, this must not be made absolute: it is possible to speak of God in history, but one cannot equate God with history. So theology must try not only to talk about the historical work of God, but also about the presence of God.

Progress in theology is not achieved through problem solving, but through understanding its time and through adaptation or conscious failure to adapt to the zeitgeist. This procedure falls under the catchphrase challenge and response . Theology should convey its traditions without just reciting them. The gain in knowledge takes place in the balance between tradition and the present.

Theological statements can be obtained by asking authoritarian texts from traditions which binding statements they contain. However, this cannot be naively adopted: Theological statements can only be formulated if they can also be checked. They must belong in the context of the reasoning of theology and can be derived from it. Sauter differentiates between the context of discovery and the context of justification. Obtaining theological statements (for example, by referring to history) must not be confused with their justification.

The justification of a theological statement does not have to be limited to empirical verifiability. For Sauter, the church plays a major role in the justification, as it is a communicative authority that creates a consensus. The question of the truth comes to the fore in the dialogue process. Here dialog rules are set up, which for example define canonical texts and elaborate rules of interpretation. Instead of a metaphysical system, there is a communicative finding of truth.

Sauter is close to the discourse theory, which is also represented by Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel . Therefore, the general objections to discourse theory apply to him: A Christian consensus, which stipulates that God shows himself in the Old Testament and New Testament and especially in the person of Jesus Christ , can in no way guarantee the truth of this statement only because of intersubjective agreement. By distancing himself very far from empirical verifiability, Sauter can no longer easily establish the relationship between statements obtained through consensus and reality. This is particularly evident from the fact that different communication communities can come to irreconcilable consensus.

Critique of theology through early philosophy of science

Questions and concepts about the functioning of the sciences have existed since ancient times. The systematic philosophy of science developed primarily in the tradition of logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle in the 20s and 30s of the 20th century and as a result of Neo-Kantianism . The Vienna Circle, founded by Moritz Schlick , included philosophers, mathematicians and natural scientists such as Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath . They were mainly oriented towards modern mathematics and the exact sciences. Wittgenstein's early work , the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, had a major influence on the Vienna Circle .

The early logical empiricism was strictly based on the sense data as a given. Every meaningful sentence had to be checked against sensory data. “The meaning of a sentence is the method of its verification ” has become the famous criterion of meaning of the Vienna Circle. Since statements that contain concepts such as God cannot be directly verified , such statements have no cognitive meaning. From the point of view of logical empiricism, religions therefore have no cognitive sense and cannot be treated in a rational system, but can very well have an emotive sense. Like art, they can express an attitude towards life. Metaphysics, however - in the usage of the logical empiricists an area that falsely treats religious (emotive) statements as if they were cognitive statements - was rejected by logical empiricism as consisting of pseudo problems. A similar problem arose with regard to ethics, because it apparently has to refer to values ​​which, however, do not represent sensory data in the world.

There are two ways out for theology: Either it no longer speaks of God and thus makes itself irrelevant, or it denies the theory of meaning that goes along with the verification criterion.

Criticism of the verification criterion has already been expressed within logical empiricism, for example by Reichenbach. The best-known contest of the verification criterion comes from Karl Popper . With the textbook example "All swans are white" he showed that all sentences can never be fully verified. Instead of the verification criterion, he therefore set the falsification criterion . Its falsification criterion is not directly linked to a theory of meaning. Metaphysical sentences - in Popper's diction, sentences that cannot be falsified - are not empirical, but under certain circumstances they can be criticized and thus rationally treatable.

Another problem of the verification criterion is related to the presence of unobservable entities , which is noticeable in the so-called theoretical terms in scientific theories. Even atoms cannot be observed directly; in the case of quarks , neutrinos or other subatomic particles, indirect detection is difficult. Theoretical entities are not integrated into a theory on the basis of observations, but rather, for example, by inferring the best explanation . This abductive conclusion postulates a hypothetical cause for an observation in such a way that the cause can explain the observation and no more probable hypothesis can be identified. However, this is not a generally valid conclusion. The light ether and the phlogiston are two examples in which this type of conclusion was later refuted by experiments in the exact sciences.

Logical empiricism reacted to this criticism with a modified criterion that is based on the more general terms "verifiability" and "confirmability" instead of verification. Theoretical terms are permissible as long as they are empirically relevant to prognosis. This criterion is normative, so the logical empiricists do not justify it logically but out of expediency. In addition, it only delimits the empirical from the non-empirical, so it no longer necessarily marks the limit of the rationally treatable. Therefore, the objection of logical empiricism no longer applies unreservedly, according to which God cannot be talked about rationally because of his unobservability.

Another answer was the separation of humanities and natural sciences and orientation towards hermeneutics , historicism or consensus . However, such a split is very controversial, even if the ideal of a unified science , which was striven for in logical empiricism, for example, is also criticized. Most of the conceptions of the philosophy of science are, however, in the tradition of analytical philosophy , which rejects a general division between the humanities and natural sciences and emphasizes the expressive nature of science.

Anti-Realist Theology

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In the current philosophy of science, the debate about realism and anti- realism in science plays a major role. In particular, the questions are controversial as to whether laws of nature are true and whether their postulated objects refer to real existing entities.

The best-known anti-realistic theorist of science is Bas van Fraassen . In his opinion, the goal of science is not truth, but empirical adequacy . A theory is scientifically tenable if it agrees with the sensory data. This avoids two problems of scientific realism: Firstly, it behaves agnostically towards unobservable entities and thus avoids erroneous statements about existence as with ether and phlogiston. Second, it pays tribute to the underdetermination of theories: since several theories can be empirically adequate and mutually contradicting one another, the realist must introduce additional, not easily motivatable, criteria to mark one theory as true and the other as false. The antirealist can avoid this. For him, a coexistence of rival paradigms is possible.

An anti-realist interpretation of theology can avoid the problem of denominational theologies and make theology scientifically acceptable even to radical atheism .

A particular religion is a theological paradigm if and only if it can meet the criterion of empirical adequacy. This has to prove itself in people's understanding of themselves and the world. Different denominations have the status of rival paradigms. In contrast to a realistic interpretation, however, no denomination has to be distinguished from another, but the theologian behaves agnostically with regard to its truth content. A Christian theologian is only distinguished by the fact that he participates in the scientific research program of the Christian paradigm.

In anti-realistic concepts of science, the question of truth in science can thus be excluded, so that it only appears in the existential self-understanding of the individual. In this respect one does not speak of truth, but of possibilities of justification. The personal act of faith is not affected. An atheist, on the other hand, can reject all statements about God to the effect that no reference object corresponds to them. The empirical relevance of denominations and religions is unaffected. Agnostics, on the other hand, abstain from making a final judgment as to whether a god is or not. Under these conditions, personal belief is different from the theologian's objective scientific approach.

See also

  • Fundamental Theology , Philosophy of Religion (The subject matter dealt with under "Philosophy of Science of Theology" is partly established as a sub-area of ​​these disciplines.)

literature

Essays

Monographs

  • Bernhard Casper, Klaus Hemmerle , Peter Hünermann : Theology as a science. Methodical approaches. (Quaestiones disputatae; vol. 45). Herder, Freiburg / B. 1970.
  • Ingolf U. Dalferth: Religious speech about God. Studies on the analytical philosophy of religion and theology. (Contributions to Protestant theology; Vol. 87). Verlag C. Kaiser, Munich 1981, ISBN 3-459-01298-6 (plus dissertation, University of Tübingen 1977).
  • Ingolf U. Dalferth (ed.): Linguistic logic of faith. Texts of analytical philosophy of religion and theology on religious language. (Contributions to Protestant theology; Vol. 66). Verlag C. Kaiser, Munich 1984, ISBN 3-459-00987-X .
  • Hans-Peter Großhans: Theological Realism. A linguistic-philosophical contribution to a theological language teaching. (Hermeneutic studies on theology; Vol. 34). Mohr, Tübingen 1996, ISBN 3-16-146591-1 (also dissertation, University of Tübingen 1934).
  • Kurt Hübner : Belief and Thought . Tübingen 2001.
  • Ulrich Köpf : The beginnings of theological philosophy of science in the 13th century. (Contributions to historical theology; Vol. 49). Mohr, Tübingen 1974, ISBN 3-16-136072-9 .
  • Andreas Kubik, Michael-Murrmann-Kahl (ed.): The complexity of the theological study today. A debate in the horizon of Schleiermacher's theological encyclopedia, Frankfurt a. M. 2013.
  • Franz von Kutschera : The big questions. Philosophical-theological thoughts . DeGruyter, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-11-016833-2 .
  • Wolfhart Pannenberg : Philosophy of Science and Theology . New edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 1987, ISBN 3-518-28276-X (reprint of the edition. Frankfurt / M. 1973).
  • Helmut Peukert : Theory of Science, Theory of Action, Fundamental Theology . 3rd edition with a new afterword. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 2009, ISBN 978-3-518-27831-4 (also dissertation, University of Münster 1976).
  • Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger : Theological Principles. Building blocks for fundamental theology . 2nd Edition. Wewel, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-87904-080-X .
  • Gerhard Sauter u. a .: Philosophical critique of theology. Theology and the more recent epistemological discussion; Materials, analyzes, drafts . Verlag C. Kaiser, Munich 1973, ISBN 3-459-00603-X .
  • Richard Schaeffler : Reflection on Faith and Science. Theses on the philosophy of science and the history of science in theology (Quaestiones disputatae; Vol. 82). Herder, Freiburg / B. 1980, ISBN 3-451-02082-3 .
  • Thomas Schärtl : Theo-grammar. On the logic of the talk of the Trinitarian God (Ratio Fidei; Vol. 18). Pustet Verlag, Regensburg 2003, ISBN 3-7917-1838-X (plus dissertation, University of Tübingen 2001).
  • Thomas Schärtl: Truth and Certainty. On the peculiarity of religious belief (Topos plus pocket books; Vol. 526). Pustet, Regensburg 2004, ISBN 3-7867-8526-0 .
  • Leo Scheffczyk : Theology and the sciences . Pattloch, Aschaffenburg 1979, ISBN 3-557-91157-8 .
  • Walter Kern , Hermann J. Pottmeyer , Max Seckler (Hrsg.): Handbook of Fundamental Theology. Volume 4: Treatise on theological theory of knowledge. With a final part “Reflection on Fundamental Theology” . 2. verb. and act. Edition. Francke, Tübingen 2000, ISBN 3-8252-8173-6 .
  • Gottlieb Söhngen : The unity in theology. Collected papers, articles, lectures . Zink, Munich 1952.
  • Gottlieb Söhngen: Philosophical exercise in theology. Realize, know, believe . 2., through Edition. Alber, Freiburg / B. 1964.

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