In search of the first scientific empirical experimental theology in history!

Ahem. Yes.

I've had this curious phrase, "the world's first scientific empirical experimental theology in history," written on my whiteboard for some weeks now. Partly because the excess of adjectives makes it so endearingly enthusiastic, but mostly because I'm trying to figure out exactly what it means.

It's a phrase of Timothy Leary's, from an obscure early book called NeuroLogic, describing his ambition for his eight-circuit model of consciousness. But what on Earth is a scientific theology, and why would anyone want one?

Abraham Maslow, with his more restrained phrasing, sheds some light on it: "we may be able to accept the basic religious questions as a proper part of the jurisdiction of science once science is broadened and redefined." That is, neither of them accepts that "spirituality," whatever that might be, should be exclusively in the hands of the theologians. It's an aspect of human experience, and so it belongs to the psychologists. But where Maslow seems, tactfully, to be suggesting that we take God out of religion and do away with Him entirely, Leary seems to want to put Him into science. Both are about equally prone to saying either that religion is obsolete, or that everything is religious.

Which brings me back to a problem I keep encountering: that "God" is getting more and more vaguely defined by the day. Everybody from physicists to theologians uses "God" as a metaphor - but what is it a metaphor for?

There's a feeling amongst the religious that the subtlety of modern theology isn't understood by their critics. The criticism I keep hearing of Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion is that "he obviously doesn't know anything about modern theology." So what is modern theology? Paul Tillich, of whom I hear so much in lectures and debates, has this to say about God: "God does not exist. He is being itself beyond essence and existence." And he refuses to define religion any more specifically than "concern with ultimate concerns." On the subject of why someone would choose to express this concern in organised religion, he says that "symbols open up something in us." Similarly, John Hick sees religion as "our human response to a transcendent reality, the reality that we call 'God'," and advocates Christianity only insofar as it is the "best fit" for somebody raised in a Christian culture. In other words, religion is a set of useful metaphors, and God is some impersonal universal force.

Which, funnily enough, sounds exactly like the kind of God-as-metaphor that Dawkins discusses in the very first chapter of his book - the God of Einstein and Spinoza, of which he says:

The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason.

But if nobody now claims to believe in the God of ordinary language, where do we stand? What's the difference between Leary's and Maslow's and Tillich's and Einstein's and Dawkins' religions?

Practically, though, the answer to this is the answer Dawkins gives - that whatever the philosophers believe is irrelevant, because there are about 3 billion people out there who do believe in a miracle-wreaking, sin-punishing personal God.