Stump vocab

Theology

The systematic study of the nature of God.

Metaphysics

The most general of the subdisciplines of philosophy, inquiring into what kinds of things exist and the nature of their existence.

Epistemology

The subdiscipline of philosophy which investigates knowledge and related concepts like rationality and the justification of beliefs.

Ethics

The subdiscipline of philosophy which investigates what is good or right.

Geocentrism

The doctrine that the earth is the center of the universe.

Heliocentrism

The doctrine that the sun is the center of the universe, and later that the sun is the center of the solar system.

Geokineticism

The doctrine that the earth moves around the sun.

Complexity thesis

The view of the relation between science and religion according to which there is no one general description that can account for the varied ways science and religion have interacted.

Conflict thesis

The view that science and religion offer competing accounts and cannot both be correct.

Middle Ages

The period in European history lasting from roughly the 5th through 15th centuries.

Natural philosophy

A forerunner of Modern Science; the method of learning about the world through natural instead of supernatural means.

Double-truth

The contention that natural and supernatural claims could both be true even if they clearly contradicted each other.

Trinity

The Christian view that God exists as three distinct persons in one nature.

Incarnation

The event when the second person of the Trinity became a human being.

NOMA

Non-overlapping magisteria—the position which claims science and religion pertain to independent spheres of investigation.

Original sin

The state of humanity that resulted from the Fall, according to some Christian theologians.

Two Books

The claim that God has revealed himself in Scripture and through nature.

Scientific Revolution

The emergence of modern science in the 16th and 17th centuries, based on the work of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and others.

Natural reason

The means of acquiring knowledge without the aid of supernatural revelation.

Handmaiden metaphor

The claim that philosophy should serve theology.

Modern science

The approach to the natural world developed during the Scientific Revolution.

Empiricism

The theory that experience, rather than reason, is the foundation of knowledge.

Rationalism

The theory that the foundation of knowledge is reason, rather than experience.

Protestant Reformation

The 16th-century break from the Roman Catholic Church led by Martin Luther.

Secularization Thesis

The claim that supernatural interpretations of reality have been steadily replaced with natural explanations due to the influence of science.

Law of Human Progress

The claim by Auguste Comte that human thinking passes through three stages: the theological, the philosophical, and the scientific.

Positivism

School of philosophy which holds that any meaningful assertion must be capable of scientific verification.

Exclusive humanism

The view that there is no transcendent order beyond that of human beings.

Great Chain of Being

The idea that there is a continuity of existence from the highest to the lowest and an infinite series of forms that exhibit each gradation.

Deism

The belief in a God who created the universe but does not intervene in it.

Sola scriptura

The principle that the Bible, not the Church, is the final authority for doctrine and practice.

Methodism

The Christian movement founded by John Wesley which aimed to reform the Church of England.

Hermeneutics

The discipline that considers interpretation, especially as it relates to the Bible.

Biblical inerrancy

The doctrine that the Bible contains no errors in what it teaches.

Eschatology

The study of the end times.

Biblicism

The conservative evangelical application of the sola scriptura principle.

Predestination

The doctrine that God determined who would be saved.

Atonement

The doctrine of how the saving work of Jesus Christ brings reconciliation between God and human beings.

Natural theology

The practice of arguing to theological conclusions from generally accepted premises drawn from reason or experience of the natural world.

Argument from Design

Arguments that appeal to the observed appearance of order or purpose of natural objects.

Cosmological Argument

Arguments for the existence of God that appeal to facts about causation, change, or contingency of existence.

Ontological Argument

An argument that attempts to prove the existence of God simply from the concept of God as the most perfect being.

Neo-Orthodoxy Movement

A movement within Protestantism which opposed liberalism and sought to recover traditional Christian doctrines.

Fideism

The position that beliefs can be held without justification or rational grounds.

Thomistic synthesis

The approach of Thomas Aquinas to produce one coherent system of knowledge from faith and reason.

Synthetic propositions

Statements that are true (or false) in virtue of the claims made about reality.

Analytic propositions

Statements that are true in virtue of the relationship of terms in them.