Our responses to a flurry of comments and questions to two recent episodes: one on Open/Process Theism, and the other comparing theology and science as legitimate avenues in the search for Truth.
Two of our recent episodes both evoked a tremendous response from our listeners, in terms of comments left at our two Facebook sites and emails sent directly to us. These two episodes focused on Open and Relational Theism and Process Theism (#90; with Dr. Thomas Jay Oord) and on whether theology and science are equally legitimate avenues in the pursuit of Truth (#91; with Dr. Bethany Solereder). In fact, the response was so great, and the comments so well thought out, that we thought we should devote this episode to unpacking them.
A thumbnail sketch of the questions and ideas that our mailbag had us explore includes the following:
- Open and Process Theism downplay human suffering in the here and now.
- God knowing all things does not undermine free will.
- “My God is too big to be reduced to the extent that Open Theism calls for.”
- “It’s insulting that we say God can’t do something just because we can’t understand it.”
- Theology just isn’t science, and theologians should not try to treat it as such.
- Theology does /does not have a mechanism in place to sift out bad ideas (in the way that the Scientific Method works for scientists)
- “Scientia” (the Latin for science) means knowledge; the word “science” means something different to North Americans than it does to Europeans.
- the term “Theology” is the study of God, and so discussions about peripheral things like Hell, or slavery, or textual criticism are most certainly not theology.
- “Science produces models that work and can do amazing things; what amazing thing, or even mundane thing, does theology enable us to accomplish?”
- “Theologians must use scripture as a foundation for their claims, but it is all too easy to demonstrate that scriptures are the products of humans, not of God.”
- theology does not help us determine what is more likely to be true; instead it is used to justify what we want to be true.
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