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Theology:
Science of God. More widely:
Science of
what has been written or preached in religious traditions as belonging
to the faith of the religion.
My own position, being an atheist, is that in the end theology is a
science of nothing: Its subject does not exist, so far as I can tell,
which is far enough to know that all the proofs of the existence of God
that I know of either are false or prove nothing remotely like what
religions have taught.
Still, many intelligent men in the past - before the rise of science,
especially - have been much concerned with theology, and some of this is
interesting, especially when it is concerned with things that do exist,
such as human beings, moral norms, what it is to have virtue etc.
Even so, from my own point of view much of theology is
nonsense or
false, and has done much harm, and while it makes sense to study
what has been written or preached in religious traditions this is best
done in a real scientific spirit, and not based on a faith that one
cannot prove, that one has little or no good
evidence for, that seems mostly based on
wishful thinking or following
authorities, and that contradicts science in many ways, as is true of
all theology I know of.
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