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Should Christians do Natural Theology?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 March 2010

Andrew Moore
Andrew Moore*
Affiliation:
Regent's Park College, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 2LB, [email protected]
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Abstract

Natural theology is enjoying something of a resurgence at present but this article seeks to question its place in Christian philosophy and theology. Antecedent natural theology accepts that it is necessary for Christian beliefs to be rationally warranted. Romans 1:18ff. is often cited in favour of natural theology. However, examination of this text shows that Paul argues here on the basis of a prior revelation. Not only does he not endorse natural theology but what he does say implies that arguments for a God's existence are not likely to lead to the God revealed in Jesus Christ. Such arguments are in any case tainted by the noetic effects of sin. It is therefore not clear that these arguments lead to the God of Christian belief who calls us to simple discipleship. Consequent natural theology holds that Christians are under an epistemological obligation to their surrounding culture to show that they are reflectively rational. But the arguments put up for this by Michael Sudduth ignore theological arguments which should bear on Christian epistemology. Apart from God's self-revelation we find ourselves sceptics, and natural theology is unable to overcome this. Historical research has shown the damaging effects that arguing from nature has had on Christian theology. So, for both theological and historical reasons, Christians need not accept the epistemological obligations imposed on them by unbelievers which lead them to do natural theology.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 63 , Issue 2 , May 2010 , pp. 127 - 145
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2010

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References

1 For the story of Flew's conversion, see Flew, Antony with Varghese, Roy Abraham, There is a God (New York: HarperOne, 2007)Google Scholar.

2 Sudduth's arguments take up issues of particular concern to Protestants, especially those influenced by Reformed Epistemology. This article does not consider the often substantially different case for natural theology presented by Catholics, but references to some of the relevant literature are contained in the notes; some of my arguments are, I think, applicable to that case.

3 In McGrath, Alister (ed.), The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 402Google Scholar.

4 This view predominates in analytic philosophy of religion and it is the principal subject of this article; however, natural theology (under more or less different definitions) can also be approached as a properly theological project. It is the varying assumptions between these two which underlie many of the differences and misunderstandings between Protestants and Catholics on the topic. For important, if controversial, discussions of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth respectively, see: Turner, Denys, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God (Cambridge: CUP, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Hauerwas, Stanley, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church's Witness and Natural Theology (London: SCM Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

5 The most frequently cited portion of Paley's argument might better be read not so much as for God but as a reductio ad absurdum to the conclusion that to deny a cosmic designer is to advocate atheism – which, Paley believes, any right-thinking person should wish to eschew.

6 See Sudduth, Michael Czapkay, ‘The Prospects for “Mediate” Natural Theology in John Calvin’, Religious Studies 31 (1995), pp. 53–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. p. 64.

7 Swinburne, Richard, The Existence of God (Oxford: OUP, 2004, 2nd edn), p. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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11 ‘The Ethics of Belief’, in his Lectures and Essays (London: Macmillan, 1879), p. 186, quoted by Alvin Plantinga in Plantinga and Wolterstorff, Nicholas (eds), Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), p. 25Google Scholar.

12 For a Catholic discussion of the biblical material, see Kasper, Walter, The God of Jesus Christ (London: SCM Press, 1984), pp. 65–79Google Scholar.

13 Swinburne, Richard, Faith and Reason (Oxford: OUP, 1981), p. 86Google Scholar.

14 All quotations from the Bible are from the New Revised Standard Version.

15 See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, II/1, pp. 118–21, and cf. CD I/2, pp. 306–7. Cf. Campbell's, Douglas ‘Natural Theology in Paul? Reading Romans 1.19–20’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 1/3 (1999), pp. 231–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a Catholic view, see von Balthasar, Hans Urs, The Theology of Karl Barth, trans. Oakes SJ, Edward T. (San Francisco: Ignatius Books, 1992), pp. 311–25Google Scholar.

16 Barth, CD II/1, p. 119, but cf. Hauerwas, With the Grain. On the apparent contradiction between Paul's affirmation of an objective natural knowledge of God in Rom. 1:20 and his apparent denial of it at 1 Cor. 1:21, see Käsemann, Ernst, Commentary on Romans (London: SCM, 1980), p. 42Google Scholar.

17 Von Balthasar states that to think that a knowledge of God apart from revelation could be appropriated ‘would smack of Pelagianism’ (Theology of Karl Barth, p. 322).

18 Cf. Rom. 8:5–8.

19 Cf. Eph. 4:17ff.

20 Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul to the Romans, trans. and ed. John Owen (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1948), pp. 72–3; cf. Institutes of the Christian Religion, I, v, 11ff. For the view that Calvin endorses natural theology, see Sudduth, ‘Prospects’. See also Helm, Paul, ‘John Calvin, the Sensus Divinitatis, and the Noetic Effects of Sin’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 43 (1998), pp. 87–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Steinmetz, David C., ‘Calvin and the Natural Knowledge of God’, in Oberman, Heiko and James, Frank (eds), Via Augustini: Augustine in the Later Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation (Leiden: Brill, 1991), pp. 142–56Google Scholar.

21 Mavrodes, George, ‘Polytheism’ in Senor, Thomas (ed.), The Rationality of Belief and the Plurality of Faith: Essays in Honor of William P. Alston (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 264Google Scholar. Mavrodes is referring to Swinburne's The Concept of Miracle (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 50. For a more recent account of his views on the divine attributes, see Swinburne's The Christian God (Oxford: OUP, 1994), pp. 150ff.

22 The Great Outdoors (April 2001), p. 136.

23 Hume, David, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Bell, M. (London: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 76Google Scholar. Hume is objecting only to the design argument and this leaves open the possibility that an argument of natural theology to the view that God is necessarily perfectly good might provide the needed assurance that God is not malign. Such arguments typically understand perfect goodness as ‘doing the best thing that one can’ (Mawson, T. J., Belief in God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), p. 57Google Scholar). But again the problem of creating Gods after one's own imagination arises: who are we to state what, from the deity's point of view, is the best for us? We might think that an unending life of bliss is the best for us and produce arguments to that effect that a God wills this, but perhaps this misrepresents the true (and by our lights, malign) deity whose view is that what is best for us is that we die cruel, lonely deaths.

24 Compare Barth's fierce ‘NO!: Answer to Emil Brunner’, in Brunner, Emil and Barth, Karl, Natural Theology (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1946), p. 75Google Scholar: ‘If one occupies oneself with real theology one can pass by so-called natural theology only as one would pass by an abyss into which it is inadvisable to step if one does not want to fall. All one can do is to turn one's back upon it as upon the great temptation and source of error, by having nothing to do with it and by making it clear to oneself and to others from time to time why one acts that way.’ This article might be seen as a warning of the presence of an abyss.

25 The quotations are from an Associated Press news report <http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=315976> and an interview published in the Winter 2005 issue of Philosophia Christi <http://www.biola.edu/antonyflew/flew-interview.pdf>. More recently, Flew seems to have changed his position slightly. Although in There is a God he writes as a deist, he concludes, ‘Is it possible that there has been or can be divine revelation? . . . [Y]ou cannot limit the possibilities of omnipotence except to produce the logically impossible. Everything else is open to omnipotence’ (p. 213; cf. pp. 92–3).

26 Alston, William P., ‘A Philosopher's Way Back’, in Morris, Thomas V. (ed.), God and the Philosophers: The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason (Oxford: OUP, 1994), pp. 27–8Google Scholar.

27 Suppe, Frederick, ‘Becoming Michael’, in Clark, Kelly James (ed.), Philosophers who Believe (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993), pp. 171, 170Google Scholar.

28 Ibid., pp. 172, 174.

29 Trigg explains that ‘[t]he whole point of an insistence on the role of rationality is that the objective nature of truth is upheld with its universal claim on everyone to believe it’ (Rationality and Religion, p. 181).

30 See O'Donovan, Joan, ‘Man in the Image of God: The Disagreement between Barth and Brunner Reconsidered’, Scottish Journal of Theology 39/4 (1986), pp. 433–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 ‘Prospects’, p. 65.

32 Ibid., p. 67.

33 In his article ‘Reformed Epistemology and Christian Apologetics’, Religious Studies 39 (2003), pp. 299–321, Sudduth has developed this point, but in connection with apologetics in general rather than consequent natural theology; see pp. 314–15.

34 For Paul, Christian cognitive proficiency consists primarily in a discernment of the will and call of God that leads to faithful witness and undivided worship. Rom. 12:1ff. suggests that this comes about by yielding one's embodied personhood to God, refusing conformity to this world, and being ‘transformed by the renewing of [one's] mind’.

35 Cf. Campbell, ‘Natural Theology’, p. 238. See also Westphal, Merold, ‘Taking St Paul Seriously: Sin as an Epistemological Category’, in Flint, Thomas P. (ed.), Christian Philosophy (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1990), pp. 200–26Google Scholar.

36 ‘Reformed Epistemology’, pp. 314–15. Sudduth is using Alvin Plantinga's epistemological terminology; see his Warranted Christian Belief (New York and Oxford: OUP, 2000).

37 Rom. 8:20; see further Cranfield, C. E. B., A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1975), pp. 411–12Google Scholar.

38 Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, trans. Krailsheimer, A. J. (London: Penguin Books, 1995), §417Google Scholar. Pascal was by no means isolated as an early modern figure in his views of the noetic effects of sin; see Harrison, Peter, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge: CUP, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Perhaps ‘common grace’ could be appealed to as a theological basis for our capacity to form beliefs that are adequate to get by in life – though with what degree of success would still be open to question.

40 See e.g. Rom. 12:1ff.; 1 Cor. 1:18–2:5; 2 Cor. 10:5; Eph. 1:3–14, 4:17–24; Col. 1:21ff., 2:6ff., 3:1ff.

41 Cf. Paul Moser's argument that ‘we do well to take the skeptical challenge seriously, in order to identify the limits of human reasoning. An important result will be increased wisdom and epistemic humility as well’ (‘Realism, Objectivity, and Skepticism’, in Greco, John and Sosa, Ernest (eds), The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 90)Google Scholar.

42 Cf. Gal. 2:20.

43 Cf. e.g. 1 Cor. 2:9–16.

44 1 Cor. 1:26–31.

45 See 1 Cor. 14:20, Eph. 4:11–14, Phil. 3:15.

46 ‘Prospects’, p. 67 (italics removed).

47 ‘Alstonian Foundationalism and Higher-Level Theistic Evidentialism’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 37 (1995), p. 37.

48 For this contrast, see Sudduth, ‘Reformed Epistemology and Christian Apologetics’, pp. 311–12.

49 ‘Alstonian Foundationalism’, pp. 37–8.

50 I am not arguing that Christians should not be reflectively rational, but against the suggestion that Christians are under a generic epistemological obligation to become so and that natural theology provides the correct materials and forms of argument for arriving at this state (cf. Sudduth, ‘Prospects’, p. 66). For example, Christians might show to themselves the reflective rationality of their faith by an Anselmian exercise in fides quaerens intellectum. For Anselm in the Proslogion this is an exercise of the sinful mind-at-prayer at work on revealed data and thus runs counter to the currently philosophically favoured priority of the ordo cognoscendi over the ordo essendi. And, further, since Anselm did not think that his faith required legitimation of the kind envisaged by Sudduth, it is doubtful whether Anselm's project of fides quaerens intellectum is correctly termed consequent natural theology. Wolfhart Pannenberg – who rejects natural theology – sees achieving a kind of reflective rationality as the task of dogmatic theology (see his Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1991), pp. 48–61).

51 ‘Alstonian Foundationalism’, pp. 38–9.

52 Cf. 1 Cor. 1:26ff.

53 ‘Alstonian Foundationalism’, p. 38.

54 This is the task of Christian apologetics – with which natural theology should not be identified. See Jean-Luc Marion's Pascalian meditation on ‘Evidence and Bedazzlement’ in his Prolegomena to Charity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), pp. 53–70.

55 See ‘Alstonian Foundationalism’, pp. 37–8.

56 Although part of the tradition of resurrection belief to which Paul appeals in 1 Cor. 15:4ff. includes Christ's having ‘appeared’ to witnesses, it remains the case that their testimony only relates to Christ's appearing; it does not relate to the substance of resurrection faith, i.e. that ‘Christ died for our sins . . . and that he was raised on the third day’ (1 Cor. 15:3, 4; emphasis added). Paul's appeal to the witnesses’ testimony therefore offers only circumstantial support for the reflective rationality of his belief that Christ's death and resurrection was the reconciling work of the triune God.

57 At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1987); Denying and Disclosing God: The Ambiguous Progress of Modern Atheism (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2004).

58 The quotation is from Clarke, Samuel, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (London: Botham/Knapton, 1738, 9th edn), p. 126Google Scholar. By ‘theism’ Buckley has in mind traditions of thinking about God and religion whose sources lie in the work of Descartes, Malebranche, Newton, and Clarke; see At the Origins, p. 33.

59 Denying and Disclosing God, p. xi.

60 At the Origins, p. 350.

61 Ibid., p. 343.

62 Ibid., p. 346.

63 Ibid.

64 Ibid., pp. 345, 346.

65 Ibid., p. 344. Buckley argues that Marin Mersenne (well-known to philosophers for his correspondence with Descartes) and Leonard Lessius were the original movers of the intellectual shift he charts.

66 See Denying and Disclosing God, pp. 1–24.

67 At the Origins, p. 345.

68 Pensées, §449.

69 For the impact of the new epistemological settlement on theology, see Marshall, Bruce, Trinity and Truth (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), esp. pp. 126–37Google Scholar.

70 I am grateful to the Philosophy and Theology Seminar of the Society for the Study of Theology, to the Systematic Theology Seminar at Oxford University, and to Peter Kail and Tim Mawson for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.