This needs a category “Systematic Theology”.
I begin with a take-off from another thread–
That’s the YEC approach, which violates something basic in systematic theology: the two views of anything or for that matter everything: the view from below, and the view from above. And I think the problem we’ve been having revolves around those.
When scientists, and people who understand science, speak about science, if they throw in talk about God then they’re not doing science any more – it doesn’t matter if they’re Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, or whatever. This is inherent to everything that falls into the category of the view from below: it involves what humans as we are can discover with our reason and senses. The view from below cannot include God because human senses and instruments and reasoning cannot find God.
When theologians start with the scriptures and summarize and expound on what is there, that is the view from above: it begins with the axiom that God is real and the scriptures are in one sense or another communication from and/or about Him.
The problem comes when someone tries to do “theology from below”. By its very nature, being a mix of the view from below and theology, it tends to go astray quite easily; also by its nature it leads to disagreements that cannot be resolved because they rest on different worldview – that, too, is the nature of the view from below; it rests entirely on human worldview(s).
What’s happening here is that when a statement that qualifies as view-from-below (VFB) gets made, others are responding to it as though it was view-from-above (VFA) or theology-from-below (TFB). This will inherently lead to disagreement because the two are not actually using the same words much of the time and definitely aren’t using the same concepts. Similarly, statements get made that are VFA but get responded to as though they are VFB or TFB – again, guaranteed to result in disagreements.
From reading back some, it appears that Richard is almost always doing TFB, mixing VFB and VFA, and as noted TFB is effectively an invitation to argument. Others are responding with VFB and occasionally VFA, but he always reads them as VFB, and he responds the same way.
The most common example of VFA has been my posts which stick to the text and don’t venture into science. There haven’t been a lot of those (partly thanks to the need to combine responses to multiple posts into single posts), nor have there been a lot of VFA from others. The arguments therefore appear to be TFB even if posts are actually VFB.
So when we’re writing it should be helpful to ask what kind of post is being made: is it merely science, and thus purely VFB? If that is made clear, then the responses to that post should all be VFB. Is it pure theology, i.e. VFA? Then neither VFB nor TFB can be a valid response. Is it science mixed with theology? Then it is TFB, regardless of whether the theology itself is TFB or is VFB; the mix drops the whole thing into TFB. If that is made clear, then if the science can be tugged clear of the theology then a response can be VFB.
I skipped the last logical option because it is quite frankly a mess: if the science and the theology are intertwined and cannot be pulled apart, then responses will appear to be TFB even if they’re meant as VFB, and the only solution there is to specify that a post is being made as VFB, no theology included, or concede that they are also TFB, or possibly to tug out some of the theology and respond with VFA.
This is clearly no wonder solution since some will not give up doing TFB, but it should help make things clearer. It should also establish that just because science does not include God it is not making a TFB statement, it is doing the only things humans can do when dealing with VFB!
Just for thoroughness, there’s another category, human philosophy. How it fits in to all this I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.
). You want to include VFA ‘factors’, right? You want to include God factors in VFB science, fallaciously conflating them.