Why did Tertullian want theologians to have nothing to do with philosophy? Was he right?

This is not an easy question to answer, having several implicit assumptions built into it. In the first case, there is the issue of what did Tertullian mean by his statement in his historical context. For example, was Tertullian arguing that no methodological assumption is inherent in the reading of the Bible and in its application to Christian life and worship? In this case, what we are dealing with is Tertullian's understanding of hermeneutics and a theological subset of issues that explore the role of inspiration and interpretation. For example, operating tacitly in Tertullian is a pneumatology (his Montanism p 309) that adopts an immediate understanding of revelation. With Tertullian all one needs is direct or immediate individualistic inspiration in order to understand God and revelation. This denies the general consensus that interpretation is, in part, a subjective event, informed by our previous objective encounters in ideologically-imbued wider culture.

More broadly, the question asks 'what is the role of philosophy in Christian theology?' In this case, the issue is whether philosophy assumes a prescriptive or a descriptive role in Christian theology; this is the normal way in which his statement is taken despite its historical or theological context. The issue becomes a question of how philosophy (or any abstract thought or cultural system) is influenced by or influences theology as understood as a product of revelation. If a system - either thought or cultural - is ancillary to revelation, then the role of that system is to help organize or describe the claims of revelation. However, if a system, thought or cultural, is prescriptive, then it begins to define revelation within its boundaries. Underlying this latter understanding is the quiet confidence that Christian revelation, due to its very comprehensive mandate, is up to the task of correlation or dialogue.

Historically, philosophy has gone hand-in-glove with theology, even in Tertullian's own work. For example, his famous Apology uses Roman legal theory as the basis for the cessation of persecution while his Trinitarian theology and anthropology is derived, for some commentators, from neo-Platonic gnosticism and is proto-Arian. The point here, and this is disputed, is that even Tertullian was not able to escape his own context in his assertion (and work) that theology has nothing to do with philosophy.

The dominant forms of philosophy that have been found useful in Christian theology are Platonism (and neo-Platonism), Aristotelianism, Ramism, Cartesianism, Kantianism (and neo-Kantianism), Hegelianism, Marxism, personalism and existentialism. Theologians who do use one or more forms of philosophy in their theological systems, with rare exceptions, try to follow Augustine in thinking that they are critically appropriating secular philosophy for the use of theology. This can avoid the prescription of philosophy over and against theology's descriptive task.

Should theology be able to verify or falsify its statements?

This remains one of the 'unresolved' issues in Christian theology, perennially reasserting itself on the theological landscape and then removed as a major concern of theology until its next springtime. For example, the mid-century preoccupation with answering both positivism and Popper's falsification assumed a fairly prescriptive role in the British theology of the period. In the late twentieth century the issue of foundationalism and belief has become important in American philosophy and theology as seen in the work of A. Plantinga, W Alston and N Wolterstorff. It appears, at present with the exception of evangelical scholarship, to be not as important for theologians and philosophers. The pendulum appears to swing between two poles. The first pole is a preoccupation with the epistemological or cognitive (informational) aspect of Christian faith and the second is with the soteriological aspect of Christian faith. In these two polarities the question of verification switches from external to internal verification; from objective to subjective statements.

Aquinas is an example of a theologian who works from an epistemological purview of faith as a series of propositions about God, which are related to evidence and open to 'proofing' at some level from external criteria. As a corollary to this, Aquinas has an open apologetic stance, in that he thinks truth from nature can be used to as propaedeutic to faith. His 'five ways' argument of God's existence, for example, does not supplant Christian revelation, but works in concord with a wider Christian cosmology to demonstrate the veracity of faith's claims. Aquinas can argue from principles of a non Christian cosmology in Aristotle that, in fact, the Christian cosmology is true; or conversely, that the Christian cosmology is the best answer to the questions raised in other philosophies.

In Luther, a second model is seen. Here the stress is on the individual's experience of salvation and in the promise of God therein. The stress is not irrational per se, the believer does not believe in faith without grounds, but that the ground of the faith-experience is found in the subjective experience of the truth of the promise of God in Christ. Falsification or verification in this instance is against the biblical promise or witness, the sense of salvation and the subsequent ordering of the world in terms of revelation in the consciousness of the believer. However, for many, this is purely too subjective or existential. In this case, the criticism of Popper becomes germane (p 234). What is verified is the experience itself, which while meaningful, cannot be falsified by its own definition of verification. As a response to this, W Alston's (p 218) work is a counter balance with his stress that belief adds to the sense of doxastic or multi-faceted knowledge of the world (and vice versa), giving other experiences of the world coherence and allowing a fuller disclosure of what is known. In short, it makes 'sense' of the world and verifies, and is verified by, the external world.

In conclusion, it appears that the question is not whether theological statements are verified or not, but what constitutes the grounds of verification. Even those predominately concerned with the soteriological or subjective aspect of faith find themselves begging the question of verification with an insistence that faith is tied to God's promise in Christ as known in salvation.

The cosmological argument has come to be of new importance as a result of the growing interest in the advances of astronomy and physics. How would you evaluate the potential of this argument in modern debates over the existence of God?

Ludwig Wittgenstein's pithy statement on the nature of proofs for God's existence (p 241) is an excellent guide both to the fortes and foibles of the cosmological argument. Wittgenstein notes that believers who attempt to prove God's existence through rational argument give 'their 'belief' an intellectual analysis and foundation' but also that this so-called foundation alone itself would seem insufficient for the existence of God to any believer. Wittgenstein thinks that any faith worth possessing needs to be stronger or more deeply grounded than the 'limited' or poor proofs that rationality alone can grant. The strength of an argument such as the cosmological argument is that it can buttress belief, granting Christian belief a confidence in the marketplace of ideas. However, the weakness is that if left alone as the sole ground or warrant for belief, one has an insufficient base for faith as there are equally credible intellectual, and perhaps more telling emotional arguments (the problem of theodicy), against belief in God based on purely rational or empirical evidence. Wittgenstein's comment is that while believers seek 'evidences' in the physical world for their belief in God these 'evidences' seem, if one is honest, to meager to create the faith they are suppose to found. 'Belief' predisposes one to an understanding of the physical world, not an understanding of the physical world dictates 'belief'. How 'foundational' such arguments really are becomes problematic.

The modern debate issuing from the growth of astronomy and the new physics is no exception. Whether in the Thomist or Kalam mode, the cosmological argument serves, by aiding Christian belief in the creation by God, to stand shoulder to shoulder with the modern scientific understanding of the 'big bang' cosmology. In all three models the simple observation that everything, except an uncaused cause, depends on something for its existence guides the system. In Aquinas it is God as the prime mover, while the Kalam argument stresses the notion of causality itself, while the 'big bang' stresses that the universe began to which the Christian philosopher argues points to an uncaused cause. The major yield in this is that the 'big bang' theory of the universe seems to be arguing the necessity of a personal identity that Christian theology has always claimed. More to the point, such a creator must be perfect, good, trustworthy and so forth. In short, this is the Christian description of God.

The difficulty, apart from the direct equation of attributes to the cause, which is neither necessary nor logical, is that surely the Christian belief in God is far more than that which can be verified by science. In fact, the history of science has shown in its very short life that scientific paradigms are, in fact, themselves quite changeable and rife with assumption borrowed from context. If the nature of science is to undergo 'revolution' (Thomas Kuhn) then what is gained by Christian theology tethering itself to such a changeable entity? If the scientific paradigm is sufficiently altered, on the scale of the shift from Newtonian to Post-Einsteinian physics, and Christian apologetic is invested in that initial paradigm, is Christian belief defeated? As we shall see below in the case of W Paley, this can have disastrous effects on Christian theology's credibility.

Finally, the emotional problem of theodicy (pp 292-295) remains ever pertinent in any cosmological argument. At the core of the argument is the contention that the universe is created. David Hume's original challenge that this creator, based on the evidence of nature, is either malevolent, impotent or fickle remains a strong counterpoint to the cosmological argument. It may make intellectual sense that the universe was created; however, the emotional question of why so much suffering and natural evil remains unsatisfying for many philosophers such as Hume.

Give an account of William Paley's analogy of the watch. What points did he hope to make in this way? Why has the analogy been criticized since his time?

Paley's work on the teleological argument, the 'watchmaker analogy', has a particular genius in its utter simplicity and appeal to common sense. By arguing that just as the discovery of a watch (or other machine) gives clues to the identity of its purposed maker (notion of contrivance) so does the study of nature grant clues to the identity of its creator in God. Implicit in his argument is the notion that the greater the complexity of the machine, the greater the ease of description (really more clues) in determining the nature or identity of the creator. Or in Paley's terms, a watch gives more information about its maker than a simple sundial might of its maker.

The weaknesses in Paley's argument fall into two areas. The first is a logical problem picked up by Hume. This is the problem of moving from evidence of design (or cause), to a description of specific identity (or essence). The simple statement that design leads to identity is logically false. Proof from design leads to an inference only, 'what might the maker be like' and not what (or who) is the maker. Inference is not the same as identity. An inference is not accessible to normal means of proof or reason as it involves a jump beyond the evidence and therefore is illegitimate as a claim of knowledge. It remains a 'belief'. This introduces a second problem in regard to the inference of a maker. The reductio ad absurdum on infinite regression (who caused the designer?) resolves nothing of the identity of the designer as it ever pushes the argument to seek, by logical extension, another designer behind the designer.

The second problem in the argument is conceptual. The Newtonian scientific understanding of the universe heavily influences Paley. This mechanistic and teleological universe understands nature to be created in an ever-developing movement towards order or perfection. When post-Darwinian biology advanced a non-teleological understanding of nature and instead posited a nature created in response to the chaos or determinations of its environment, Paley's thesis is undermined. Instead of ordered and purposed, nature is random and purposeless and Paley's hypothesis that the book of nature can be read to find the identity of the creator becomes difficult. In a like manne, the late-Georgian and pre-Victorian sense of order and progress (and even moral superiority) that runs in Paley's thinking seems to be refuted by the twentieth-century's capacity for violence and atrocities such as the holocaust. Paley's presentation of a well-ordered universe, including a moral universe, seems to be refuted by another experience of human powerlessness before nature and human nature. For many, Paley's argument for design is an apologia for popular sentiment, the reflection of an optimism tied to a worldview that in turn influences his Christian thinking. Or in terms previously encountered, the prescription of his culture affects the description of this theology.

How would you distinguish between an analogy and a metaphor?

Much of contemporary theology and philosophy (as were the medievals) is concerned with semiology: namely, the study of the laws and conditions under which signs and symbols including words are meaningful. The reason for this resurgence of semiology and semantics is quite simply the difficulty of talking about God when philosophers such as Wittgenstein have argued that all language is context-laden. Simply put, 'talk of God' is really 'talk of the human experience of God' and we return to the crippling critique of Feuerbach that theology is really anthropology. The issue, when theologians choose to focus on the semiotics of theology, is on the difference between analogy and metaphor. Analogy is understood as an affirmation that there is likeness between God and things-in-the-world without sharing direct identity. Metaphor extends the notion of analogy by introducing an additional inference to the initial predicated term. A metaphor takes an analogy and adds new meaning to it, taking the analogy beyond its usual affirmation of similarity. It therefore adds a notion of dissimilarity to the analogy, extending meaning.

The following example serves to illustrate. The statement 'God is good' assumes that by exploring the notion of 'goodness' as understood by the creature, there is some representation of God's being as goodness. Or more succinct, there is an analogical connection between the nature of God and the human notion of 'goodness'. To expand this statement to 'God is a good Father' introduces something more to the initial direct prediction of goodness - the metaphor of a father. In this case there is similarity and dissimilarity, a partial attempt to use one notion to help us in exploring the identity of God by underscoring some aspects of God's relationship to us as a father that modified and expands the initial analogical connection of goodness.

Some of the key concepts in theological semiology, especially as metaphor, stress this incompleteness of symbol, as an affirmation of mystery and as a way of engaging the 'whole' human including the affective as well as the intellectual. The stress of 'symbol', outside that of mere language, has re-launched a significant sacramental theology in Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. Finally, John Calvin's understanding of 'accomodation' is another avenue taken by some theologians concerned with the nature of theological language. E Jüngel can be considered to be using a form of accommodation in his work on parables: that is, ways of describing God, including Jesus as the ultimate parable of God and the basis for all subsequent language on God.

Which theological issues were at stake in the Copernican debate?

The issue at stake in the Copernican revolution remains very much present in Christian theology. The issue, while ostensibly dealing with the shift to a heliocentric from a geocentric universe and thereby a shift from 'creation for humanity' to 'humanity in creation', is really the core conflict between biblical revelation and the human sciences. In particular, the relationship of the description of the physical world from the bible and the description of the physical world of modern science is at stake. The issue was does biblical literalism, especially given the constraints of accommodation (p 257), preempt purely scientific descriptions of the physical world? Copernicus' theory challenged a way of reading the bible in a literal manner omitting any possibility that information in the bible might have been 'accommodated' so as to be understood by non-scientific cultures of the ancient near East. This relationship of prescriptive priority remains unresolved, especially when the two disciplines step outside of their competency to the other's 'realm'. Of course, the issue then is whether or not two realms actually exist.