Atheists have the same problem with theology as fully paid-up Thatcherites presumably have with sociology. You can’t study what doesn’t exist.
Alas, most people think there is such a thing as society, and even though sociology is as prone to flights of pretension and absurdity as any academic discipline, it can also shine precious light on the nature of reality.
So it is with theology. Most people believe in God. Witty analogies with orbiting teapots prove the point. Were humans born with an innate belief in an orbiting teapot, teapotology would be a worthwhile discipline. It might not say much about the celestial china, but it would help us understand better what we are saying when we talk about it.
In the same way, the very fact that belief in God appears to be hard-wired into us, that theism of some kind is the default human position from which only a historically tiny minority of people, mostly limited to wealthy countries, dissent, means that study of that near-universal belief is valuable. God may not exist, but even if he didn’t the human preoccupation with him would merit a university chair or two.
The religious claim, of course, is that God does exist and that theology is not simply a study of human belief but an investigation of reality. And this is where we run into problems, two specifically.
The first is the problem of language. Nearly ten years ago, I found myself in a cramped, windowless BBC basement with ten other religious ‘representatives’. We were there to help develop the questionnaire for the international survey that would feed into the programme, ‘What the World Thinks of God’. It was an enjoyable experience, and although the half dozen BBC execs present clearly felt they were tiptoeing across a politically-correct minefield, it quickly turned into one great, inter-faith love-in.
The problem was, despite the oodles of respect that everyone had for everyone else, it was clear that we were all speaking different languages or, at least, different dialects. Our God-talk soon degenerated into talk about belief, prayer and morality, showing how problematic it is to say anything meaningful about God when you stray outside faith traditions. The God of the Philosophers is an emaciated figure when compared to the God of Abraham.
Even within religious traditions the problem persists, however. The Christian doctrine of God may be Christ-shaped, thereby enabling a fuller and more profitable theological discussion, but that hardly settles matters. In reality, I cannot hope to understand “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted”, still less, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” without living what it is to mourn, to comfort, to bless, to be poor in spirit. As Giles Fraser recently pointed out in these pages, meaning is use and our talk about God, just like our talk about anything else, needs to be located in patterns of life. The language problems that will always dog theology must be addressed (they will never be solved) by locating the discipline in its proper, lived context. Oddly then, Dawkins is partly right: theology does not belong in the academy because it belongs in the world.
The second problem is that of verification. How can you know any theological statement is true? And if you can’t know whether it’s true, is it not then meaningless? A theological answer of sorts was offered to this in the mid-twentieth century with the idea of “eschatological verification” – basically, we’ll find out who was right when we die.
True as that may be, the problem of verification is linked to, and dissolved by the problem of language. Verifying statements in any discipline is a great deal more complicated than was once thought, and the best one can hope for is the extent to which it comprehends and illuminates what we (think we) know about the world.
Christian theology does rather well here, comprehending and casting light on the existence and apparent fine-tuning of creation; the ubiquity of convergence in evolution; the human capacity to understand reality; the conviction that our thoughts approximate to the truth rather than being merely epiphenomenal mistakes of Darwinian survival; the sense that morality is absolute; the impression that there is objective worth and purpose to human life; the belief that there is objective content to aesthetic judgements rather than mere opinion; the stubborn persistence of human selfishness, etc.
Theology’s success here is not unqualified. The biggest challenge to Christian belief has always been suffering, and Christianity’s accommodation of this, even with its focus on the suffering of Christ, still nags and worries. Nevertheless, as long as verification is understood in anything beyond a sophomoric way, Christian theology still has some claim to the title ‘Queen of the Sciences’.
