6 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
Calendar and the ritual apropriate to them. I am not using the word theology in either of these two senses of that word. I mean by theology natural theology’ which is the doctrine of God and the divine, as an integral part of the theory of nature. As traditionally understood there are three thesis which ‘natural theology’ propounds. (1) That God exists and is the author of what we call nature or universe (2) That God controls all the events which make nature and (3) God exercises a government over mankind in accordance with his sovereign moral law.
I am aware there is another class of theology known as Revealed Theology —spontaneous self disclosure of divine reality—which may be distinguished from Natural theology. But this distinction does not really matter. For as has been pointed out [2] that a revelation may either “leave the results won by Natural theology standing without modifications, merely supplementing them by further knowledge not attainable by unassisted human effort” or it “may transform Natural theology in such a way that all the truths of natural theology would acquire richer and deeper meaning when seen in the light of a true revelation.” But the view that a genuine natural theology and a genuine revelational theology might stand in real contradiction may be safely excluded as not being possible.
Taking the three thesis of Theology namely (1) the existence of God,
(2) God’s providential government of the universe and (3) God’s moral government of mankind, I take Religion to mean the propounding of an ideal scheme of divine governance the aim and object of which is to make the social order in which men live a moral order. This is what I understand by Religion and this is the sense in which I shall be using the term Religion in this discussion.
The second dimension is to know the ideal scheme for which a Religion stands. To define what is the fixed, permanent and dominant part in the religion of any society and to separate its essential characteristics from those which are unessential is often very difficult. The reason for this difficulty in all probability lies in the difficulty pointed out by Prof. Robertson Smith [3] when he says:—
“The traditional usages of religion had grown up gradually in the course of many centuries, and reflected habits of thought, characteristic of very diverse stages of man’s intellectual and moral development. No conception of the nature of the gods could possibly afford the clue to all parts of that motley complex of rites and ceremonies which the later paganism had received by
1 Natural Theology as a distinct department of study owes its origin to Plato-see Laws.
2 A. E. Taylor. “The Faith of a Moralist” p. 19.
3 The Religion of the Semites (1927)