The most "solid" theology is just shaky philosophy, though.
It's the on-the-fly, off-the-cuff, brand new, modern theology/philosophy which tends to end up shaky, simply because it's been done with fewer resources and has seen far less attention.
Whatever your take on religion is, pointing to the opinions of people living in a much more inscrutable world is not good evidence.
Personally I fall into the camp that omniscience omnipresence and omnibenevolence are just logically incompatible with the christian belief of a good god.
This is an appeal to authority. "It's good cuz these people said so"
They did spend a lot of time and they mostly failed. In many cases those school of thought that ultimately failed were also squashed during a religious power struggle (which is gives organized religion a bad outlook).
As an atheist, I do not find[1] those philosophies to be particularly coherent or self-consistent - but obviously, my criticism is only superficial. So, I'll do one better.
A large number of theistic philosophers share my opinion on this - hence the innumerable schisms within Abrahamic religions. Those philosophers looked at their religion, found inconsistencies in it, and forked it.
The problem is that the survivors of those schisms (Catholicism, Eastern orthodoxy, Russian orthodoxy, the Anglican church, Protestantism in its many flavours, Sunni Islam, Shiite Islam, etc, etc, etc) did not survive because of their logical or intellectual rigour, or because they were more consistent or coherent then the parent branch that they splintered off from. They survived because they won political, violent power struggles. They survived because might made right. They survived because some influential autocratic warlord was personally swayed by their ideas, and imposed his will on his subjects and neighbours.
Less successful heresies (that, to me have about as good a claim at providing strong, coherent, self-consistent philosophies and world-views as their parent religions) have gone extinct. Not because their arguments or ideas were bad, but because they didn't have enough spear-tips, sword-points, and gun-muzzles behind them.
This sort of selection process does not seem to be like it leads to accurately determining which of these systems survived because they are actually strong, coherent, self-consistent, and which survived because they were better at killing heretics.
[1] My impression of religion is that it tends to identify its inconsistencies and incoherentness, and neatly package it into a black box that it does not engage with, and expects you to have faith. You get a highly self-consistent system, as long as you don't look inside the box.
Actually, in many cases, they survived because neither side won the power struggle. E.g., Both sides of the Chalcedon(/Ephesus) schism, the East-West Schism, the Protestant/Catholic schism, the Old Catholic/Catholic schism , the Catholic/Anglican schism (even in England), the reverse schisms between the Uniate Churches and their previous Church of the East/Oriental Orthodox/Eastern Orthodox communities, etc. survive.
From my understanding of European history, that didn't happen because their rhetoricians and intellectuals sat down to peacefully hash things out over tea and crumpets. They didn't survive because of the strength of their arguments - but because of the economics behind them, and because of the caprices of the particular personalities involved.
I'm willing to accept that in the past two centuries, these processes of religious selection have changed substantially [1] - but the fact that this entire argument is painted in the framework of major religions that were established long before the end of European religious wars leads me to believe that 'how religions splintered in 500 AD' is far more relevant for surveying the modern religious atlas than 'how religions splintered in 1900 AD.'
[1] As long as we close our eyes to that Sunni-Shiite thing that's still on-going, and is likely to keep going for the foreseeable future.
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/
[1]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/#Go...
Axiom 1) All comments by whatshisface are right.
Theorem 1) This comment is right.
Proof: Whatshisface wrote this comment.
That's a proof in the mathematical sense and there's nothing wrong with it in that way, but that it has nothing to do with the truth of the theorem.
I'm not sure what you want to achieve by focusing on this topic. You just saying you don't agree with the axioms in the article, right? So just say that.
If you're asking "What happens to us after we die?" then the church has as good an answer as anyone, because nobody's bringing any hard evidence to the table.
If you're asking "How should I act and think to be a good person?" then religion has some ideas - some of them really good ideas, like the golden rule - but it's a huge question touching on almost everything. And some of today's questions require a lot of extrapolation over and above the words of the bible.
If you're asking natural philosophy questions, like "what is lightning" or "what do we need to do to prevent future flooding" then you probably won't reference religion at all (except perhaps when you get back to moral questions, like if your flood defence displaces people)
If we're in the business of bad-faith expositions of positions we disagree with, what's so attractive about the alternative that unfathomable aeons ago nothing exploded into something that coalesced in such an improbable way that a bunch of incredibly complicated chemical reactions happened (with no known mechanism for selection, mind you) to produce a biological organism capable of assembling electrons transmitted through the aether to another organism that could make snarky replies?
I'm sure you can reduce nearly any argument into silly-sounding caricatures of itself, but it's not a useful method for actually understanding what's true (or if truth even exists).
What you will find there is that we know that the Bible is an amalgam of a script that was pieced together by many, many human authors. It is trivial today to tell because we can cross-reference Koine Greek versus translations and authors chose different words consistently for the same concepts.
So, no. Not really beyond the natural/physical world at all. Just one lie of many competing lies.
(1) These two statements seem to me to be incompatible. We live in the natural world. If something "outside the natural world" (whatever that nonsensical statement means) affects the natural world, then surely it's partly part of the natural world?
(2) It is not my business to define what e.g. christians believe, but if I am not mistaken the actual resurrection of an actual man is quite central. How is this not a (bold!) claim about the natural world?
So "beyond the natural world" would be shorthand for alternatives to naturalism; the idea there are rules that govern the 'natural world' beyond natural laws or things that can be measured or observed scientifically.
The resurrection is a prime example of rules "beyond the natural" impacting our natural world.
(No, "god did it" isn't an explanation.)
If this is all that 1000++ y.o. religions can muster, I say good riddance, laughable attempts at explaining the world.
The Discourse on the Method of Descartes, in which his famous phrase je pense, donc je suis occurs also includes a preceding segment where he considers whether he can know anything at all, or whether he's a disembodied consciousness fed false information by evil demonic powers (if you will, the "Matrix hypothesis"). He rebuts that hypothesis with a simple assertion that a just and loving God wouldn't allow such an arrangement of events to be the true nature of reality.
Depending on your bent, that can either allow the discourse to continue or put the brakes completely on it.