IT will be quite clear from the drift of the book so far that in my
view theology has more in common with the humanities than it
has with the sciences, and that therefore Gadamer's freeing of
the humanities from the lure of the scientific method has conse-
quences for theology, as well as for the humanities. It seems to
be prima facie the case that the temptation to find a 'theological
method' is likely to be an example of Steiner's 'fallacy of im-
itative form', just as it is in the humanities. In fact I would go fur-
ther: it seems to me quite obvious that theology, as an academic
discipline, finds its closest neighbours among the humanities
rather than among the sciences: theologians conduct their
academic work in libraries, not in laboratories; they read books,
they do not conduct experiments.

Theology has, of course, traditionally been regarded as a
science, indeed as the 'queen of the sciences', but in the sense
of scientia, knowledge, as we mentioned earlier, ¹ and not in
our modern English sense. Aristotle regarded speculative, or
theoretical, science (in contrast to 'practical' science) as the
highest of the sciences, and theology as the noblest of the
speculative sciences, for it was the study of the highest reality,
the eternal and immutable being. ² What we call the humanities
were not, from this point of view, sciences at all, for they deal
with what happens in history--with things, therefore, which
have no necessity about them, which could very well have fallen
out otherwise: of such accidental being there can be no true
knowledge (episteme), it is not a fit subject for contemplation
(theoria), it cannot form the subject-matter of a science. Within
such a perspective, theology belonged with the sciences. For
Aristotle, the object of theology could be established by consider-
ing what must be the case if there was to be knowledge of natural
reality at all, that is, if physics, in his sense, were to be viable.
Here was the origin of the cosmological argument for the
existence of God, which established that there must be an

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