Is theology of any use?

When I was writing Faith Versus Fact, I sometimes visited professors in our Divinity School, located right across the Quad. I discovered that the faculty was divided neatly into two parts. There were the Biblical scholars, who addressed themselves wholly to figuring out how the Bible was made, the chronology of its writing, comparisons of different religions, and so on. Their questions were basically historical and sociological, and I found that, as far as I could tell, most of this group were atheists.

Then there were the real theologians: the believers who engaged in prizing truth out of the Bible, and taking for granted that yes, there was a god and somehow the Bible had something to tell us about him. These I had little use for.  Indeed, if you look up “theology” in the Oxford English Dictionary, you find this as the relevant definition. It describes the second class of academics who inhabit the Div School—the ones who accept that there is a god:

After writing my book, and having to plow through volume after volume of theology, including theological luminaries like Langdon Gilkey, Martin Marty, Alvin Plantinga, William Lane Craig, John Polkinghorne, Edward Feser, C. S. Lewis (cough) and Karen Armstrong, I finished my two years’ of reading realizing that I had learned nothing about the “nature and attributes of God and His relations with man and the universe.” That, of course, is because there is no evidence for god, and the Bible, insofar as it treats of things divine, is fictional.  Yes, there is anthropology in the Bible, as Richard Dawkins notes below, but it tells us absolutely nothing about god, his plan, or how he works. If you don’t believe me, consult the theologians of other faiths: Hindus, Muslims, and yes, Scientologists. They find a whole different set of “truths”!  There is no empirical truth that adds to what humanists have found (as Dawkins notes below “moral truths” are not empirical truths), but only assertions that can’t be tested. (Well, a few facts are correct, but many, like the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt and the census that drove the Jesus Family to Bethlehem, are flatly wrong.)

The discipline of theology as described by the OED is a scam, and I’m amazed that people get paid to do it.  The atheist Thomas Jefferson (perhaps he was a deist) realized this, and, when he founded the University of Virginia, prohibited any religious instruction. But pressure grew over the centuries, and I see that U. VA. now has a Department of Religious Studies, founded in 1967. So much the worse for them.

In the end, the only value I see in theology comprises the anthropological, sociological, and psychological aspects: what can we discern about what people thought and how they behaved in the past, and how the book was cobbled together.  I see no value in its exegesis of God’s ways and thoughts.

And so I agree with what Richard says in the video below. Here he discusses the “value” of theology, but the only value he sees is as “form of anthropology. . .  the only form of theology that is a subject is historical scholarship, literary scholarship. . . that kind of thing.” (“Clip taken from the Cosmic Skeptic Podcast #10.”)

I just wrote a piece for another venue that partly involves theology (stay tuned), and once again I was struck by the intellectual vacuity and weaselly nature of traditional theologians. And so I ask readers a question:

What is the value of theology? Has its endless delving into the nature of God and his ways yielded anything of value?

And I still don’t think that divinity schools are of any value, even though we have one at Chicago.  After all, concerning their concentration on Christianity and Judaism, they are entire schools devoted to a single work of fiction.  Granted, it’s an influential work of fiction, and deserves extra attention for that, but trying to pry truth out if it. . . well, it’s wasted effort and money.

I asked this question five years ago, noting that Dan Barker defined theology as “a subject without an object.”