Panel of Theology

                             The PANEL OF THEOLOGY                              



                           AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PANEL



         Recently in America a fashion, of a sense, has arisen in television. It's been in the musical world for quite some time now in the form of the show American Idol, and it's risen it's head in the culinary world with Iron Chef America, as well as countless other shows and series in TV. My inspiration, however, was from Iron Chef, where two chefs make a variety of dishes from a secret ingredient and their dishes are brought to a panel of three judges where they taste each dish from both chefs and give a scoring to the chefs based on three criteria: presentation, taste, and originality. Once, after watching this ceremony take place, I began to wonder what would happen if the theories of science and theology were put to the ultimate test, to be scored by a panel using the most rigorous set of criteria known to mankind.

         Our "panel" is the four main subjects: science, history, philosophy, and mathematics which are the four pillars of thought. For example, science makes historical claims and helps to understand historic events or even implements, take for instance carbon dating, a scientific process helping to make historical sense. Or if you will, use the mathematicians to make sense of numbers used in history, or the math in science, or even the philosophy in any of these three subjects. By this same token, I would make an argument for a fifth member of the panel, bringing theology into play, or rather, just as pillars were designed to hold up a roof, these four subjects hold up the test of theology.

         Anything that affects one of these disciplines affects them all. Whatever happens to one, also happens to the others. It is in this light that we must consider all theories through our panel, and we must also take theology through all the members of the panel, but to do this we must first go into a form of sub-panel. By this I mean the different subjects within each panel member itself. For science, we go through all it's studies; from biology to physics to chemistry, for history we have the separate time-periods, for math we have everything from algebra to calculus and more. And for theology, we have the contesting members of it's own, Judeo-Christian theology, Islamic theology, Eastern Theology, pantheism, deism, monotheism, polytheism, all of these are currently struggling for dominance within it's very self. Therefore Theology, rather then being affirmed by the panel, must first be affirmed itself, or rather, when we have reached by the four panel members the conclusion that theology is needed, we must then use theology to discover what the Truth is.

         For this, we must first concede that all of these panels contain some personal territory. There are some things that theology cannot tell you about the world, for instance, the boiling point of water, whereas science can't tell you very much about the Deity of Christ. However, both of them make a claim about the beginning of the world, or universe as such. They both make a historical claim that can be tested by mathematics and contested by philosophy. It is because of the fact that all of the panel "judges" overlap that they must be unanimous and that we must choose between the best available theories according to the criteria of each panel member.