Sosyal Bilim Disiplini Olarak İlahiyat Bugüne Ne Söyler?
What is the Role of Theology at Present as a Discipline of Social Science?

Summary/Abstract: From the beginning onward, Muslim theology criticized blind submission and fideism as a form of belief and required evidentialism as a necessity to ground true knowledge, true belief, and true act. In this processes human mind first classifies such facts as physical and metaphysical; reason and revelation, and such values as right and wrong; good and bad; and beautiful and ugly, and with the ability gained by this classification, he can see the differences, recognize the singularities and separate homogenized realities. This questioning continues until it turns out that the divine manifests itself in nature as law and in the individual as consciousness/soul. So, how can this questioning of truth reveal itself in the social order/public sphere? Every mind who closely follows the history of religion in the West knows what transformations the present view of religion in the Islamic world is destined to undergo. Here is the picture we have: In the last four hundred years, which we define as modern times, religion has fought a war in the West that it has finally lost. At the end of this war, modernity declared a one-sided victory, and based on this, the body against the soul; the physical versus the mental; the cultural versus the biological; the natural versus the social; it also promoted the natural sciences against the social sciences and humanities; tried to trivialize/discredit what they declared as enemies by grouping them under the 'unscientific' group. This war seems to have evolved to a different point from its past history and brought together those who define themselves as religious or secular in a third way, and brought them into a reconciliation. This new situation, underlined by Peter Berger and Jurgen Habermas, involving a demand for pluralism, envisages the following: Both religion and secular laws should either make their concepts functional for the peace and happiness of the society and build the public space together, or they should disappear. Those who know the western experience of how religion is dismissed from public sphere because of its malfunction now are aware of the fact that in order that Muslim world does not have similar tragic experience, Islamic theology should act like a social science and must develop a method of integrating religious terms into cultural ones in order to make them effective in the area.

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