Hacker News Reader

Comment by mieseratte | Hacker News Reader

> Put another way, the rest of us ostracize theology as a discipline, leaving its students to associate primarily with one another.

That's unnecessarily harsh and probably wrong.

View on HN

Theology is not present in universities, religious studies is (edit: by theology I meant the study of God, not the study of religion: that's not quite right as you can see in my replies). Theology is taught in special schools, because it fundamentally does not work the same way as other studies. In Universities, there is an expectation that no specific category of ideas should be preferred above any other unless it beats out its competition on the grounds of convincingness or support by evidence. Learning new theology is quite close to learning anything else, but research is very different!

In fact, there's also a little gap inside the universities, between people who primarily rely on evidence (the sciences), and people who primarily rely on being convinced (the humanities). So you've got faith, evidence, and convincingness, and their followers find it difficult to talk.

There are lots of universities with theology departments. You can just google this.

There are religious studies departments named theology, and there are religious schools that also teach enough other classes to be considered universities, but no secular University would have a department that, say, gave you a Minister's license for a specific denomination. (That's because it would require you to focus on things too specific.) I am implicitly separating "the study of human religion" from "the study of this, true, specific religion" in choosing words for religious studies and theology.

1) Not all universities are secular universities. In fact, many prestigious universities are not secular.

2) We are obviously talking about students whose majors are titled 'theology', not your own personal definition of the word.

In Alex's assertion above (the one a level above the one I replied to), I believe he was using Theology to mean the schools that give you Minister's licenses, and religious studies to mean the secular study of religion.

What's relevant is how the term is used in the statistics we're discussing.

> There are religious studies departments named theology

I think your argument is trailing off into absurdity here.

If a department from a reputable university like Oxford calls itself the theology department, you're telling me that they're wrong and they aren't actually a theology department, they're something else instead? Do you think we should let them know their mistake?

> If a department from a reputable university like Oxford calls itself the theology department, you're telling me that they're wrong and they aren't actually a theology department, they're something else instead?

If Harvard was founded a hundred years earlier they'd likely call their chemistry degree a bachelor's of alchemy, yet we'd all understand that they had just retained the name for historic reasons. Does anyone actually use the word theology to mean the secular academic study of religion?

But the major would still be called 'theology', which is the relevant fact in relation to these statistics. And yes, people do use the word theology to mean that. I mean, check the first two sentences of the wikipedia article:

> Theology is the critical study of the nature of the divine. It is taught as an academic discipline, typically in universities and seminaries.

Or see what theology departments have to say about it:

https://www.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/oxford/field/field_document...

The link to the Oxford PDF supports what I'm saying, that they don't offer degrees in theology. Instead they call the program 'theology and religion.'

See also that even though Harvard has a theology school, they don't actually offer undergrad degrees in theology: https://college.harvard.edu/academics/fields-study/concentra...

It's really no different than going to medical school, where you can take a class on homeopathy and probably even do a concentration in complementary and alternative medicine, but they sure as hell aren't going to offer degrees in either of those.

>The link to the Oxford PDF supports what I'm saying, that they don't offer degrees in theology. Instead they call the program 'theology and religion.'

I really don't see how that supports what you're saying. If theology was regarded as equivalent to homeopathy (which is a comparison you could only make if you were completely ignorant of theology), then Oxford would not be offering degrees in "theology and X" any more than they offer degrees in "homeopathy and X".

See also lots of other references to theology degrees that you could easily find by googling:

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/subjects/what-c...

Isn't the latter what is done at places like the Yale Divinity School?

> Theology is not present in universities, religious studies is. Theology is taught in special schools, because it fundamentally does not work the same way as other studies

Your comment demonstrates a profound ignorance of what you claim to be talking about. Theology was one of the most prestigious subjects taught in the original medieval universities (many of which are the most prestigious contemporary ones, e.g. Oxford), and continues to be taught in them today.

Theology's existence in universities is easy verify: https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses-listin...

>Choice of seven papers across four subject areas, from which students select freely

Biblical studies Systematic theology and ethics History of religions (Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism) Religion and religions (Contemporary Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Hinduism)

Within my choice of words, I would call this religious studies. I'm reserving theology for when you focus on a specific religion, and the idea is that that religion is actually true (as opposed to studying many religions like you'd read many authors in an English degree.) Still, if Oxford disagrees with me about the dictionary then it is probably me who is abusing language. ;)

> Still, if Oxford disagrees with me about the dictionary then it is probably me who is abusing language. ;)

I'd say so. Esoteric personal definitions for established terms, even if they make a lot of sense to you, don't typically lead to productive discussions. It's probably best not to wade into one, correcting people, unless you actually understand the vocabulary.

I don't think this is the case. I think it's the difference between say sociology of philosophers, and philosophy. One approaches the field from the outside, one approaches it from within. Neither are particularly more rational than the other, but they instead focus differently. Or maybe anthropology and history is a better comparision.

Philosophers are not expected to believe any one specific theory of metaphysics, nor are historians expected to think anything specific happened except for what's directly supported by evidence. Sociology of religion would belong in a university on account of having plenty of material evidence, along with anthropology and sociology of philosophy as they study there respective subjects. Theology, if it were taken as a study of religion as a phenomenon, would fit in universities. Theology, taken as a study of any specific religion that was supposed to be true, wouldn't.

All academic fields have presuppositions that practitioners are required to start with. Your own example suggests historians would need to accept empirical evidence (it gets more complicated from there: what evidence, gathered by or attested to by whom?) -- that's a starting point. Philosophy can't make much headway without first pulling in some dependencies like Western Logic.

Your claim that Anthropology belongs due to "plenty of material evidence" comes down to a certain amount of evidence (ie, presented conditions) meeting your level of sufficiency; your claim that Theology does not belong likewise comes down to a certain amount of evidence (ie, presented conditions) NOT meeting your level of sufficiency. In other words, if one were to start from the presupposition that God didn't exist, your claim Theology does not belong would be true. Starting from the presupposition that God does exist, your claim would be ludicrous. Theology takes the second presupposition; in the light of the worldview of those who accept that presupposition, it belongs.

Presumably, there are also presuppositions that put homeopathy in universities, along with pantheology, shamanism, and even things that nobody currently believes (but could, if they invented and then accepted new presuppositions). However, philosophers will at least claim to be able to arrive at logic instead of just using it (I'm not sure if this is true, but culturally they value not assuming anything implicitly.) Moreover, science definitely has features that require no preconditioning in order to see for yourself. Even your first chemistry class will involve experiments that you don't need to put yourself in a trance in order to observe the results of. So, while I'm sure that Soplism has convinced many that there's no telling what's really true (and by extension, that any time a group agrees on something they've arrived at it through purely social means), there's definitely a bunch of things out there that you can check for yourself. Is it a presuppositon to say something like, "there is a world?" Some could argue that it is, but it's definitely different from saying something like, "there is a second world that nobody can observe or interact with."

>>In Universities, there is an expectation that no specific category of ideas should be preferred above any other unless it beats out its competition on the grounds of convincingness or support by evidence.

Your claim here is not infrequently made. But university departments frequently hold specific viewpoints. We can see cherished categories of ideas in the past; it is harder to see weighted ideas within the era we live.

>>Learning new theology is quite close to learning anything else, but research is very different!

Classics is the study of what was written and what they meant by it; they can't be polled. English/Literature is also looking at what an author wrote and what they meant by it (sigh: excluding postmodernism). French/German/Latin/etc grammar is looking at what words signify when placed in certain orders. The Philosophy department does not need to conduct experiments or observations. If your criteria for valid university disciplines was limited to their developing new lab or field research, multiple departments are impacted.

>>In fact, there's also a little gap inside the universities, between people who primarily rely on evidence (the sciences), and people who primarily rely on being convinced (the humanities).

Relevant:

https://xkcd.com/435/ - https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-bb61a9b12a5047d3ca4f28...

https://xkcd.com/903/ (the ALT text)

https://twitter.com/existentialcoms/status/62872775579482112...

http://pintswithaquinas.com/comicstrips/the-error-of-scienti...

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/other/3

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/190

>But university departments frequently hold specific viewpoints.

It's assumed that they became dominant somehow, usually by being convincing. It's almost tautological.

>If your criteria for valid university disciplines was limited to their developing new lab or field research, multiple departments are impacted.

Well, classicists do sometimes dig in to new documents, although rarely. Likewise, literature has a constant stream of new material, if they ended up with a model that perfectly predicted everything that was said about the human condition before 1980, it'd be falsified in a few days by some new paperback on the self-help shelf. Evidence doesn't necessarily have to come from experiments, only observations. see: astronomy.

However, those fields (not astronomy, but English and Classics) in my exposure have, like philosophy, mainly have been run on the convincingness of arguments. So, one side of the divide has evidence, and the other side primarily relies on writing convincing arguments.

>Links about scienceism.

Truthfully, I never said evidence was better than convincingness (although I do think it is), but decades of hardline scienceists have trained everyone to think that saying "evidence" means you don't value philosophy. It would be a bit funny if I didn't, because I don't think any "evidence" has come up once in this entire discussion. How could it? We're on the convincingness side of the branch right now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com