The above was posted by Mr. Position in a thread in SMP that has since fallen off the earth so to speak. The statement is of great interest to me and probably for many others also. I agree, for the most part with the last sentence of the above quote. I’m hesitant to agree with the first sentence. But herein is a quandary; unless an agreed upon definition, that is workable within the context of a discussion/debate can be put forward; I foresee nothing but floundering about in circles with the above points. My own bias has always put Theology under the umbrella of Philosophy as a subset of that discipline. Science is, more or less, a standalone discipline (aided by mathematics). But I doubt, again, that all would agree on that. And I may be wrong on how these disciplines are separated or categorized properly. At least in a pure academic sense.

Input is appreciated. I look forward to an interesting discussion.

This is interesting as it relates to the "Philosophy of Science" :

http://www.britannica.com/topic/philosophy-of-science

Also there is a difference between "technology" and "science" though they are often lumped together in the modern milieu.

Theology: A combination of questions and answers about the ultimate nature of reality that looks for, posits and sides with the idea of ghosts in the machine

Science: A combination of questions and answers about the ultimate nature of reality on the basis that ghosts do not exist in the machine. It is limited to making statements and developing rules based on quantifiable, repeatable measurements in the physical world.

Philosophy: A combination of questions and answers about the ultimate nature of reality, plus self reflection on the nature of thinking. It doesn't posit a ghost in the machine like theology; in that way it is far more like science. However, it also is not limited to measurements in the physical world; in that way it is freer and superficially more like theology.

The first thing to consider is whether you're trying to talk about it as a historical analysis of the various arcs of these disciplines, or whether you are talking about how advances in each are functionally attained in the present.

It also somewhat matters if you're talking about these fields in their stricter academic senses (philosophy is that which is published in philosophy journals) or if you are taking about them in a broader sense (philosophy happens everywhere and all the time). There's a similar dichotomy for science, with science being what happens when kids play around with the chemicals under the sink, or if science is what gets published in journals.

What you describe seems to take a historical view of philosophy with regards to theology, but also a more functional view of philosophy with regards to science. Something that might help you make sense of the first sentence of the OrP quote is that philosophers use insights from science far more than they use insights from theology. The new ideas in philosophy are therefore "closer" to the new ideas of science than they are theology.

Theology journals do all sorts of things, from history/archaeology to textual analysis. But there's probably nothing in modern science that really has much of an influence over the theology.

And just for fun, wikipedia has a list of theology journals:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_theology_journals

Basically that they are all divided only by perspective and/or time.

Science is the attempt to organize knowledge in a socially useful manner, which for various reasons requires propriety as a regulating mechanism (ie peer review), observable experiment (related to propriety), and compression (language symbols etc.).

Religion then can be said to be science of it's time. To be clear I am saying religion that we view as a past practice from the now, was actually science in its time, and is only rendered by perspective. If that's too much "woo" I mean to say that religion evolved into science which should be quite palatable.

Philosophy I think resolves the trinity if we understand it to be the pursuit of knowledge by focusing on questions as a means of acquiring knowledge and escaping our limitations. Philosophy then can be less concerned with the accumulation of knowledge or the implication of conclusions that might be made from the questions. To not be afraid to ask questions that potentially can't be answered, or that cannot produce experiments with observable results-because these can highlight limitations. This can make "scientists" as seekers of conclusions and compressible observations uncomfortable imo.

For reasons that can be observed in some of my other posts, I think this is all inseparable from society as the only mechanism to provide the things that only "god" otherwise could. Then we understand "religion" was only limited and divided from science because of the limits of social evolution (its more socially useful to believe in a sun god if we do not have the technology or economic man power to build a hadron collider to prove otherwise-this suggests a certain rationality to believe in a sungod, especially in which propriety will support by espousing its connection with "observable experimental results" (ie growing seasons vs prayers for good seasons)), which is then the only true and relevant limit in regard to the pursuit of knowledge, the ability to out grow limits, and the ending of "religion" as a artifact of society that doesn't have it all figured out yet.

Spirituality is related to all three these days, or not yet? Holy redeemer. The stone the builder refused. Human-emphasis-Being. Whatever. Topical.

I only started looking at philosophy within the last 2-3 years, and only because I'd developed this interest in theology / atheism. I quickly noticed that what I was picking up was helping me better understand all sorts of things.
In contrast, I sometimes encounter atheists who basically advocate scientism because they are completely pro-science and anti-philosophy.

I feel like this definition of science might be too narrowly focused, although it seems very popular. But for example qualitative research in sociology is still, to my mind, a science, but not a particularly mathematical one.

I think perhaps the link between science and philosophy has become less obvious because the epistemological (i.e. philosophical) foundations of science are mostly taken for granted, but especially in the sciences where mathematical models are used less, the epistemology is still a matter of some debate.

Even when math features prominently, there are absolutely still philosophical problems. So for example just today the American Statistical Association published a statement on the use and interpretation of p-values in research. The arguments being had are not just mathematical, but epistemological.

I suppose, you could simply say that "science" quite properly represents the maturation of epistemology into a completely separate field from other kinds of philosophy, and that would even make sense given the etymology of the word. But then you get into things like feminist standpoint theory, or critical theory, and there is the contention that it's not really reasonable to treat "objective science" as a perfectly universal and value-free endeavor, at least not for every scientific discipline. Sociology isn't quite physics in this regard. I think there is a valid point to some of that kind of objection.

As far as theology, it seems clear that the kinds of science and philosophy I've been talking about are rather far from theology, especially if we have in mind something like the so-called proofs of the existence of God. But I think it's possible to generalize "theology", in many of its philosophical meanderings, as something more like a search for ultimate meaning or experience. It's very much "philosophy" in the sense of a search for a wisdom to live by. It's always been interesting to me for example that when some early Christian philosophers used the word "theology", they had in mind something closer to meditative experience than deductive argument.

And I don't think that preoccupation with the search for meaning is entirely separate from science or philosophy in broader terms. Theology and Science often stand in opposition to each other for various reasons, but that is in part because both science and religion are involved in epistemological questions, albeit with very different methods most of the time. If "theology" only refers to more or less medieval ways of framing an overarching understanding of reality, than theology properly gives way to science and philosophy, but if it generalizes to the ongoing search for human meaning, I'm not sure it does. It just changes form.

An obvious division is the supernatural:

The premise of theology is a supernatural one (with perhaps some semantic exceptions, i.e. including atheistic religions as theologies).

Within science, the supernatural does not exist, whereas philosophy can at least discuss it. But without scientific support, how would a sound supernatural conclusion be reached in philosophy?


This isn't really the "pure academic sense" you mentioned, though, so perhaps not what you are thinking about.

Both science and philosophy study the real world, while theology studies a fantasy. So I would put philosophy with science and theology with literature. But I doubt, again, that many would agree on that.

Science is just philosophy with explosions.

Thanks for the responses. I was thinking of Science, Philosophy and Theology (S, P & T) in a strict sense of that body of knowledge and ideas that are published in respectable peer-reviewed journals.

My main question is how S, P & T are defined now, 2016, and the relationships between them and of amount of overlap and/or distancing. I realize that to understand the here and now of 2016, a knowledgeable synopsis on the history of how we arrived at this point is useful. The other thing I was pondering is: how differently will this same question be answered in the year 3016? That should give pause to all for some digestion - of pondering the direction(s) that these individual disciplines will take in the future. Will there be divergence, convergence, more overlap or a distancing between disciplines?

Is there a chance of a unity of knowledge? E.O. Wilson wrote this book almost 20 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience_(book)

Just a few thoughts for now.............

This is an extract of considerations in the Philosophy of Science:

In this section on page#2 the "theory of everything" is considered and though the biology of the human body contains molecules the connection of molecules to the physical particles as in physics comes to a dead end; though they can look alike the correspondence is tenuous . Again, reading the cited speaks not only to this particular theory but the difficulties in the presentation of knowledge in scientific systems.

And so, the future of consilience , at least according to this paper , shows that researchers have approached many avenues of scientific knowledge and there is probably more. As previously referenced:


http://www.britannica.com/topic/philosophy-of-science

"This argument builds on some important scientific discoveries. Whereas earlier generations thought that living things must contain something more than complex molecules (some “vital substance,” say), or that there must be something more to thinking beings than intricate brains (an “immaterial mind,” for example), contemporary biology and contemporary neuroscience showed that there is no need for such hypotheses. Given the firm consensus of contemporary science, there is a constitutive hierarchy: all molecules are made out of fundamental particles; all organic systems are made out of molecules; people are organic systems; and societies are composed of people. Yet there is a difference between a constitutive hierarchy of the things studied by various sciences and a reductive hierarchy of those sciences. Biology studies organisms, entities composed of molecules (and nothing more); it does not follow that biology can be reduced to the science that studies molecules (chemistry).

To understand this distinction it is necessary to have a clear concept of reduction. The most influential such proposal, by Ernest Nagel, was made within the framework of the axiomatic conception of scientific theories. Nagel suggested that one theory is reduced to another when the axioms of the reduced theory can be derived from the axioms of the reducing theory, supplemented with principles (“bridge principles”) that connect the language of the reduced theory with that of the reducing theory. So, for example, to reduce genetics to biochemistry, one would show how the principles of genetics follow from premises that include the principles of biochemistry together with specifications in biochemical language of the distinctive vocabulary of genetics (terms such as gene, allele, and so forth).

Many philosophers criticized the idea of unified science by arguing that, when reduction is understood in Nagel’s sense, the constitutive hierarchy does not correspond to a reductive hierarchy. They focused specifically on the possibility of reducing biology to physics and chemistry and of reducing psychology to neuroscience. Attempts at reduction face two major obstacles. First, despite serious efforts to formulate them, there are as yet no bridge principles that link the vocabulary of biology to that of chemistry or the vocabulary of psychology to that of neuroscience. It is evidently hard to think of chemical specifications of the property of being a predator, or neurological specifications of the generic state of desiring to eat ice cream, but the problem arises even in more tractable cases, such as that of providing chemical conditions for being a gene. Every gene is a segment of nucleic acid (DNA in most organisms, RNA in retroviruses); the challenge is to find a chemical condition that distinguishes just those segments of nucleic acid that count as genes. Interestingly, this is a serious research question, for, if it were answered, molecular biologists engaged in genomic sequencing would be able to discover the genes in their sequence data far more rapidly than they are now able to do. The fact that ......"

Theology can be a science, it doesn't have to be. It can be scientific research of religion, usually being a cross-disciplinary pursuit of literary studies, history, archaeology, sociology, psychology and / or pathology. It can also be a purely religious pursuit, being done within religious tradition as part of that religion itself (a rabbi studying his religion's holy works, a priest excercising religious doctrine etc).

Science can never be separate from philosophy. Science without a foundation and (at least basic) understanding of epistemology is worthless. If you don't have that, you'll mistake your model for the study object. Not that this doesn't happen, it is even increasingly common. Furthermore, philosophical discussions on ontology and teleology is also central to why we even have science. And ironically, I don't think anyone who has ever done science has not at some point engaged in those discussions (regardless of their demeanor towards philosophy).

Also, science is a very broad concept. Yes, mathematics is indeed a great tool in science, it's precision and reliance on solid formal logic allows scientists to transcend barriers we find in more traditional language - especially in empirical pursuits.

But science is far broader than that. One of the most valuable early studies on memory in psychology was a man doing a introspective study of his own mind while trying to remember words. Researchers who research pain often ignore objective, quantifiable and empirical data, not because they are difficult to get - but because phenomenological data from patient descriptions of pain often yields better data. String theory is purely theoretical, but it is not unscientific. Trying to understand human society without history is close to meaningless, but historical sources will regularly and consistently fail to live up to either empirical or precision standards. And so it goes...

Short version: You can separate science, philosophy and theology. Doing so is just like separating sports and athletics: Sometimes it will be a useful distinction because not all sports are athletic and not all athletics are sports, but if you cling to the distinction as if they are completely separate categories you will invariably be wrong at some point.

Bold and italic mine. * is my footnote below.

Thanks. I still struggle with some of what I have bolded above. First some simple definitions ripped from the dictionary (Merriam-Webster I think)


Metaphysics*
(1) : a division of philosophy that is concerned with the fundamental nature of reality and being and that includes ontology, cosmology, and often epistemology (2) : ontology 2b : abstract philosophical studies : a study of what is outside objective experience


*Called so because the writings came after The Physics of Aristotle. The term can and is used by some as a pejorative or in a dismissive sense (perhaps with some justification, depending on the target). The same ‘perversion’ occurred to the term sophist (sophistry).

on•tol•o•gy
noun: ontology;
1.the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being.



tel•e•ol•o•gy
noun
Philosophy

1.the explanation of phenomena by the purpose they serve rather than by postulated causes.

Theology
the doctrine of design and purpose in the material world.

*************************************

I disagree that science and philosophy are entangled at the hip and can't be separated. Perhaps this is thought so simply because of tradition? Perhaps I'm wrong in this premise. I'm still contemplating on this.

I found it interesting that teleology had a philosophical and theological definition - a separation of sorts.

The last portion bolded I agree with completely. It is this more than anything that makes any discussion of current events/politics mostly worthless with the majority of humans inhabiting this blue orb. I avoid it like the plague except to tweak noses every once in a great while. But that is off topic (though worthy of a thread somewhere)

Back with more later.

I'm not sure if I could understand both
Science and religion without philosophizing .

It is useful to separate them, in the same manner that it is useful to separate "book" and "text". But just like those two concepts, they will inevitably intertwine.

An easy example: Something as quintessential to modern science as empirical science (which makes up the majority of contemporary science) is rooted in philosophy (specifically empiricism). A basic understanding of those philosophical concepts is necessary to understand the limitations and possibilities of the empirical method. However, just like book and text does not necessarily have to meet, neither does empiricism and science have to. It would be foolish to think you could understand the scope of modern science without a passable understanding of empiricism however.

Similarly, most (if not all) other scientific methods are also rooted in some form of philosophical paradigm. I won't say for certain that there exists some that are not, but I can't really think of any.

Where did you ever find those particular definitions of Philosophy and Theology ? They appear to be self serving but more to the point, a fabrication. I don't believe definitions ever offer much and at most a strictured comprehension but a simple google will offer the following, far from and antipathetic to your presentation.
phi·los·o·phy
fəˈläsəfē/Submit
noun
the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline.
a particular system of philosophical thought.
plural noun: philosophies
"Schopenhauer’s philosophy"
the study of the theoretical basis of a particular branch of knowledge or experience.
"the philosophy of science"
synonyms: thinking, thought, reasoning
"the philosophy of Aristotle"


e·ol·o·gy
THēˈäləjē/Submit
noun
the study of the nature of God and religious belief.
religious beliefs and theory when systematically developed.
plural noun: theologies
"Augustine assimilated Roman ideals into Christian th

The definitions were from the online Merriam-Webster Dictionary which I alluded to in my post and which you quoted. You should read more carefully. And the definitions are for theology, metaphysics and ontology; not Philosophy.

The SEP online would have more comprehensive definitions with explanations and expositions of the three mentioned terms. Most probably in the most objective manner as possible.

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2016/03/th...istence-of-god

Where does God leap from concept/idea to a religious reality?

Where does any idea go from a model of the thing to the reality of the thing?

If you're referring to the ontological argument ((1) in the article) it could be argued that the intuition upon which it depends goes back to Parmenides, who wrote some famous and disputed lines in a poem that exists only in fragments:

τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν καὶ ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι (fr. 3)
"for it is the same to think (νοεῖν) and to be (εἶναι)."

τουτὸν δ᾽ ἐστι νοεῖν τε καὶ οὕνεκεν ἐστι νόημα (fr. 8.34)
"to think and that thing on account of which thought exists are the same"

Note that both translations are contentious but important historically. I think the idea is closely related to the reasoning of the ontological argument.

In any case, you can see a close connection between thinking and being in much classical thought. Think of the word "contradictory" when used to reject something as impossible. It literally means something "against speech", with the idea that something which cannot be (meaningfully) spoken, and therefore which cannot be (meaningfully) thought, cannot exist. It's also important to Descartes Cogito.

*Lao-Tzu impersonation*

The thought which can't be spoken is the eternal thought.

The way that can be named is not the true Way.

Classic flexibility.