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This site is part of the natural religion project The natural religion project A new theology A commentary on the Summa The theology company
Theology
What is theology? Literally it means talk about god. Jackson, 1 To do meaningful theology, we need to know god. Here, we take god to mean the whole of reality. My god is a union of myself and my environment. Insofar as I interact successfully with my environment, I survive. If my environment goes outside my range of adaptability, I perish. So god is my judge.
God is also my provider. We draw sustenance from our environment, matter, energy and information. Each of us lives as part of the whole. Our environment surrounds us like the layers of an onion, stretching from home and family to the whole universe. So god = environment = whole = universe. This is the local view of god, seen from the point of view of each particle within the divinity.
Every particle has its personal life, but we also have a lot in common. This community leads us from personal considerations out through the layers of the environmental onion to the things which are common to every particle in the universe. Knowledge of these common properties is good because it serves as a concise guide to dealing with god, and so to survival.
This view of god may be brought into focus by comparing and contrasting it with the classical God of Christianity. The Christian god is immense, omniscient and omnipotent; the Christian God is also simple and eternal with no parts, spatial or temporal extension. Finally the Christian God has three personalities, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
This coalition of attributes was modelled by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologia, left incomplete in 1273. Aquinas. The Summa is the starting point for natural theology.
The first question for theology is does god exist? Aquinas argues that it does by showing that the world cannot explain itself and must therefore be explained by some other preexistent being which we call god. This proof is model dependent. On Aquinas' model, god and the universe are absolutely distinct.
Here we develop a new model of god. This model allows us to identify god and the universe. Theology can thus become a science, based on individual and collective observation of god rather than the authority of ancient texts. The purpose of this site is to explain this model in detail and apply it to modern religious questions.
Books
| Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologica (translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province), Tabor Publishing 1981 'Brother Thomas raised new problems in his teaching, invented a new method, used new systems of proof. To hear him teach a new doctrine, with new arguments, one could not doubt that God, by the irradiation of this new light and by the novelty of this inspiration, gave him the power to teach, by the spoken and written word, new opinions and new knowledge.' (William of Tocco, T's first biographer) Amazon back |
| Jackson, Roger, and Roger Makransky (editors), Buddhist Theology: Critical reflections by contemporary Buddhist Scholars, Curzon Press 1999 Jacket: 'This volume is the expression of a new development in the academic study of Buddhism: scholars of Buddhism, themselves Buddhist, who seek to apply the critical tools of the academy to reassess the truth and transformative value of their tradition in its relevance to the modern world.' Amazon back |
Click on an "Amazon" link in the booklist at the foot of the page to buy the book, see more details or search for similar items
Related sites:
Concordat Watch
Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty
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