Theology / Cosmology

Theology: the kind of cosmology, older than science, where the imagination plays with unnatural causes.
Cosmology: what happens to theology after science buds and orthodoxy slips a bit.

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In the mid-1980s, in the midst of writing my third novel, I found myself compiling a notebook of definitions, comments, insights, sarcasms, ironies ... which I (ironically) titled my Semantic Dictionary. Dictionaries have evolved as alphabetical listings of word definitions; Semantics studies meanings. (In my mind and in the minds of many another semioticist the symbol must be distinguished from the "thing" symbolized: the truck exists in space and may weight several tons; the word "truck" exists only in mental space: it weighs nothing (and the truck that the boy imagines in his head also weighs nothing and has no extension in space)). Never mind whether it's a good title, that's how I titled it, intending to develop it further and to offer it for publication. (I never learn, do I?)

I still have that notebook somewhere (unless the FBI took it when they arrested me and riffled through all my stuff). In 1995 my first homepage appeared online (several years after my first business website) and I found myself jotting new Semantic Dictionary entries, eventually collecting them into their own folder in my Teaching section of Knatz.com.

This morning I jotted the above statements about theology and cosmology. They have a Semantic Dictionary flavor to them. I post them here but now also begin to translate K.'s Semantic Dictionary to my PaulKnatz blog (here at BlogSpot.com).