To do theology naturalistically is to examine human experience and the meanings we make of it with the same intellectual discipline we bring to every other inquiry.
We begin with experience, but we do not assume that our first interpretation of an experience explains what actually happened. We distinguish the event itself from our perception of it, our explanation of it, and the meaning we subsequently confer upon it.
We ask what evidence supports our claims. Claims about reality—about what exists, what caused an event, or how the cosmos works—must remain accountable to the best available knowledge we have of the natural world. When evidence is incomplete, we acknowledge uncertainty rather than filling the gaps with supernatural explanation. If sufficiently strong evidence requires us to revise what we think we know, then we revise it.
We bring inherited religious traditions, texts, symbols, practices, and theological claims into the inquiry, not as authorities exempt from examination, but as records of human beings attempting to interpret experience and create shared meaning. We ask what those traditions were trying to say, what experiences gave rise to them, what cultural assumptions shaped them, and whether their explanations remain credible in light of what we now know.
We take religious experience seriously without assuming that the traditional explanation of that experience is therefore true. An experience of presence is evidence of an experience of presence; it is not, by itself, evidence of a supernatural being. A community's experience that Yeshua remained powerfully present after his death is evidence of that communal experience; it does not, by itself, establish that biological death was physically reversed.
Having examined the evidence and our interpretations as carefully as possible, we then ask what meaning we responsibly choose to confer upon the experience. Meaning is not exempt from discipline simply because it is made rather than discovered. We test the meanings we create for coherence, truthfulness, consequences, and their capacity to serve life.
Finally, theology returns to praxis. We live according to the meaning we have made, observe what follows, and allow new experience to challenge and revise our understanding.
The process therefore remains open and cyclical:
Experience → Question → Evidence → Interpretation → Meaning → Praxis → New Experience
Theology practiced in this way does not begin with God and ask how God explains the world. It begins with the world we actually inhabit and asks how human beings make meaning within it.