Theology majors marry each other a lot, but business majors don’t

In some contexts, scholars pursue theology as an academic discipline without formal affiliation to any particular church (though members of staff may well have affiliations to churches), and without focussing on ministerial training.

In some contemporary contexts, a distinction is made between theology, which is seen as involving some level of commitment to the claims of the religious tradition being studied, and religious studies, which by contrast is normally seen as requiring that the question of the truth or falsehood of the religious traditions studied be kept outside its field. Religious studies involves the study of historical or contemporary practices or of those traditions' ideas using intellectual tools and frameworks that are not themselves specifically tied to any religious tradition and that are normally understood to be neutral or secular.

There is a difference between theology and religious studies.

Now, since this website has plenty of international visitors, we should probably endeavor to be more specific and aware of potential differences, but there's definitely a heavy American bent to the visitors.

And, in America, Theology and Religious Studies are quite different.

http://www.ats.edu/ is one of the larger accreditation programs in the US for Theology, and you'll notice two very important bits right on the front page:

"The Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada (ATS) is a membership organization of more than 270 graduate schools that conduct postbaccalaureate professional and academic degree programs to educate persons for the practice of ministry and for teaching and research in the theological disciplines."

and

"ATS membership is open to schools in the Christian and Jewish faiths."

Practice of ministry, and open to Christian and Jewish faiths. This is very different from the type of theology program you are talking about. Your theology programs are our religious studies. Our theology programs are primarily focused on Judeo-Christian beliefs and preparing people to work as ministers in that field.

Biblical studies Systematic theology and ethics History of religions (Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism) Religion and religions (Contemporary Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Hinduism)

Within my choice of words, I would call this religious studies. I'm reserving theology for when you focus on a specific religion, and the idea is that that religion is actually true (as opposed to studying many religions like you'd read many authors in an English degree.) Still, if Oxford disagrees with me about the dictionary then it is probably me who is abusing language. ;)

It's assumed that they became dominant somehow, usually by being convincing. It's almost tautological.

>If your criteria for valid university disciplines was limited to their developing new lab or field research, multiple departments are impacted.

Well, classicists do sometimes dig in to new documents, although rarely. Likewise, literature has a constant stream of new material, if they ended up with a model that perfectly predicted everything that was said about the human condition before 1980, it'd be falsified in a few days by some new paperback on the self-help shelf. Evidence doesn't necessarily have to come from experiments, only observations. see: astronomy.

However, those fields (not astronomy, but English and Classics) in my exposure have, like philosophy, mainly have been run on the convincingness of arguments. So, one side of the divide has evidence, and the other side primarily relies on writing convincing arguments.

>Links about scienceism.

Truthfully, I never said evidence was better than convincingness (although I do think it is), but decades of hardline scienceists have trained everyone to think that saying "evidence" means you don't value philosophy. It would be a bit funny if I didn't, because I don't think any "evidence" has come up once in this entire discussion. How could it? We're on the convincingness side of the branch right now.