Stump vocab

Chapter 1

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, in fact, interacted. John Hedley Brooke is acknowledged as the foremost defender of this view.

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, often attributed to Averroës, that natural and supernatural claims could both be true even if they clearly contradicted each other. Averroës's actual position was more complex. He believed that there may be different levels of meaning but not outright contradiction.

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

Incarnation = According to Christian theology, the event when the second person of the Trinity became a human being.

NOMA = Acronym developed by Stephen Jay Gould for non-overlapping magisteria—the position which claims science and religion pertain to independent spheres of investigation. See also Independence Thesis.

Original sin = According to some Christian theologians, the state of humanity that resulted from the Fall.

Two Books = The claim that God has revealed himself in Scripture (i.e., God's word) and through nature (i.e., God's world).

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.

Chapter 2

Natural reason = The means of acquiring knowledge without the aid of supernatural revelation.

Handmaiden metaphor = The claim that philosophy (or secular learning in general) should serve theology.

Modern science = The approach to the natural world developed in the 16th and 17th centuries during the Scientific Revolution.

Empiricism = The theory that experience, rather than reason, is the foundation of knowledge. See also Rationalism.

Rationalism = The theory that the foundation of knowledge is reason, rather than experience. See also Empiricism.

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

Secularization Thesis = In its cognitive guise, the claim that supernatural interpretations of reality have been steadily replaced with natural explanations because of the influence of science.

Chapter 3

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 in the late 19th and 20th centuries, according to which 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 highest (God) to the lowest (non-existence) and an infinite series of forms that exhibit each gradation.

Deism =

Chapter 5

Sola scriptura = The principle of the Protestant Reformers that the Bible, not the Church, is the final authority for doctrine and practice.

Methodism = The Christian movement founded by John Wesley in the 18th century 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, such that one claims to adhere to the strict literal meaning of biblical passages. See Sola Scriptura.

Predestination = The doctrine (usually associated with Calvinism today) that God determined who would be saved, rather than people choosing for themselves whether to accept God's offer of salvation.

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

Chapter 7

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 or processes and conclude that God must have intervened in the natural world to make them that way.

Cosmological Argument = A family of arguments for the existence of God that appeal to facts about causation, change, or contingency of existence and conclude that a necessary Being must exist.

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 which arose within Protestantism in the early 20th century which opposed liberalism and sought to recover certain traditional Christian doctrines which had been rejected by liberals, including the Trinity and Christ as fully God and fully human.

Fideism = From the Latin word fides, meaning faith. Now used to denote the position that beliefs can be held without justification or rational grounds.

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

Thomistic synthesis = The approach of Thomas Aquinas to produce one coherent system of knowledge from two separate sources: faith and reason.

Synthetic propositions = Statements that are true (or false) in virtue of the claims made about reality, rather than their truth being determined by the relations of terms as in Analytic Propositions.

Analytic propositions = Statements that are true in virtue of the relationship of terms in them. For example, “All uncles are male” is true because the term “uncle” means “male sibling of a parent.” Compare with Synthetic Proposition.