Here’s a great illustration for introducing the relationship between evidence, theories, and truth. It does a nice job of showing how evidence should lead us to refine our theories such that they come closer to the truth, even while remaining somewhat imperfect.
My only gripe with the illustration is that it doesn’t saying anything about how prior assumptions/theories affect how we perceive the evidence in the first place. Since I always perceive data through my existing “grid” of ideas and beliefs, there is no just thing as pure evidence.
Nonetheless, for a simple illustration that wants to show the relationship between evidence, theories, and the truth, I think it does a pretty good job. And, since biblical scholars and theologians rely on much the same process, I thought I’d pass it along.
via Imgur
This is good. I agree with your gripe. But I like the fact it shows the process of encountering more evidence and evaluating the theory in light of it. It also illustrates how people can build quite complex theories that might look like they make sense of the evidence, but actually make a lot of assumptions, which, at times, are ungrounded (I’m thinking, for example, in biblical studies, of detailed proposals about the historical and theological development of the Q community – or any other of the communities we claim to know about).
It strikes me that this also illustrates the relationship between exegesis, systematic theology and truth: exegesis gives us bits of evidence. Systematics builds them into a theory, that to some degree or another, approximates the truth. As a systematics guy, do you think that’s a valid transfer?
I like to use Venn diagrams when talking about things like this, but the pentagon and the circle makes the same point quite nicely too. Thanks for sharing, Marc.
Thanks Mark. and I do think that this works well when talking about the relationship between the various theological disciplines – as long as we keep in mind that the same concern about this being overly simplified applies. Even in biblical studies you don’t begin with pure biblical “data” since you come to the data with your existing beliefs and presuppositions. So, in a very important sense, theology actually precedes exegesis. But ultimately your right that exegesis still provides the most important data that theology deals with.
Yes,we certainly all come to the text with a theology in place, whether we realize it or not. I envision a kind of cyclical progression, where exegesis tweaks theology (both biblical and systematic) and that refined theology then informs better exegesis, and so on.
I’m a little late to comment on this but this is a pretty outdated view of how theories are formed and updated. You make the comment that prior theories affect how we perceive evidence (which is true) but in addition to that, theories almost always help us generate evidence. That is, data points and evidence don’t just just hang around out there waiting to be formed into theories. The solution to this that some came up with is sometimes called the hypothetico-deductive model of scientific method and it states that we start with theories and hypotheses, which help us perform experiments which give us evidence and data which confirms our theories and hypotheses. This didn’t work out very well, either because it essentially falls pray to the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent. This was solved by introducing falsification. This said that instead of trying to confirm their theories, what scientists really should do is try to disprove their theories (essentially the 6th picture above). Falsification came to be rejected for a number of reasons. First, scientists don’t actually work that way … they don’t go trying to disprove their theories. And when experiments are performed that give evidence against well-established theories, scientists tend to try to figure out what’s wrong with the evidence (not what’s wrong with the theory!). This tenancy to stick with theories and work out all the problems with them and adjust them to fit the evidence is a vital part of scientific work. Philosophers like Lakatos and Kuhn have pointed out that all scientific are born falsified. That is, there is always evidence that falsifies a theory and can’t be incorporated into that theory. So those pictures should probably have random dots on them that don’t connect anywhere. The picture on simpler theories being preferred is generally true, all things being equal, but in general things are not equal. Very rarely are two competing theories identical in all way except for one having a few more assumptions. Generally, competing theories are wildly different and there is no meaningful way to compare them in order to determine which one is simpler. What if The Truth in the final picture actually looked more like the theory discarded because of “too many” assumptions? We may be better off using those assumptions to help us find more evidence to get to the Truth, rather discarding those assumptions. Or maybe not. The truth is that we don’t know the Truth while we are making theories so any advice about which path to take can only be given in hindsight.
Anyway, sorry for the rambling. Those are my insights based on a personal interest in philosophy of science that I’ve had for a number of years. I don’t know how well they would apply to theology as I’ve never considered it that much, so take it for what it’s worth.