Five Views on Natural Theology

KEVIN HARRIS: Let’s look at a review of a recent Five Views book on Natural Theology written by Louis Markos of Houston Christian University.^[1] He writes,

In their struggle to make the God of the Bible real, rational, and relevant to modern and postmodern people, many, if not most, have adopted some form of C. S. Lewis’s two-step apologetical method. First, establish common ground with secular non-believers who do not recognize the authority of Scripture, the claims of religion, or their own personal need for salvation and use that common ground to point to the existence of God. Second, move from the existence of a good God who created the universe to the God of the Bible by appealing to a wide range of sources, including the Bible, the resurrection, and Christian philosophy and theology.

He then points out that this was Paul's basic method in Acts 17. Any comments on that two-step approach?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I think it's misleading to attribute this to C. S. Lewis. This is the classic approach to Christian apologetics. Christian apologetics is composed of natural theology (which are arguments for the existence of God) and then Christian evidences (which are evidences that the God proved by natural theology has specially revealed himself in Jesus). This is the method followed by Thomas Aquinas and by William Paley and their apologetics. So I think this is a classic approach.

KEVIN HARRIS: We'd like to urge listeners to get a copy of your and J. P. Moreland's Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology. But for those who need a refresher, please define natural theology for us.

DR. CRAIG: Natural theology is that branch of theology which seeks to provide justification for belief in God's existence apart from the resources of authoritative divine revelation. If these arguments do appeal, for example, to the Bible in any way, it would do so only insofar as they are human, literary, or historical documents. It would not appeal to them as inspired authoritative texts. The natural theologian tries to give arguments to rationally justify Christian belief without appeal to divine authoritative revelation.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next Louis writes,

The reputation of natural theology in the church has risen and fallen over the years, but it has shown something of a resurgence over the last two decades.

I'm surprised that the reputation of natural theology has risen and fallen over the years. It seems like a no-brainer to me – that natural theology would be always prominent. But apparently not. And apparently Karl Barth and others were responsible for knocking it off the table for years.

DR. CRAIG: Oh, that's absolutely right. Dialectical theology espoused by Barth and existential theology espoused by Rudolf Bultmann had no place for natural theology; indeed, no place at all for the role of reason in justifying or understanding Christian truth claims. These were very arational approaches to faith. Either just believing on the authority of the Word of God or believing on the basis of existential experience. So for a long time natural theology has been eclipsed. And it's not just in the 20th century. Really this goes back to David Hume and Emmanuel Kant. Among European theologians in particular, the long shadows of Kant and Hume still hang over German theology. It's widely believed that it's impossible to provide any sort of argument or evidence to warrant belief in the existence of God. Fortunately, in this country, as you know, and in England and other anglophone countries, there has been a tremendous resurgence of Christian philosophy in our day. Accompanying this resurgence in Christian philosophy has also come a resurgence of interest in natural theology.

KEVIN HARRIS: This recent book, Natural Theology: Five Views, was edited by James K. Dew Jr. and Ronnie P. Campbell Jr. Charles Taliaferro, an emeritus philosophy professor from St. Olaf College, presents the contemporary view – the one held by most of the current advocates of natural theology.

Here is how Taliaferro defines that view: “natural theology is the philosophical reflection on God based on reasoning that does not rely on revelation (or revealed theology). Unlike revealed theology, which may presuppose the truth or reliability of the Christian Bible, natural theology develops a philosophy of God based on observations about the cosmos.”

Taliaferro’s hero is Richard Swinburne, the chief figure in the resurgence of natural theology

Is Swinburne the main guy in this area?

DR. CRAIG: Well, it might be fair to say that he was the springboard for this resurgence, but I would no longer characterize him as the main figure. Alvin Plantinga, for example, really stunned the Christian philosophical world by his paper, “Two dozen or so arguments for God's existence,” in which he did a dazzling tour of theistic arguments that he thought were worth exploring. Since Plantinga gave that lecture, Trent Dougherty and Jerry Walls have edited a book of essays called Two Dozen (or so) Arguments for God: The Plantinga Project in which the essayists contribute their thoughts to each of the arguments that Alvin Plantinga had suggested needed to be worked on. I was a participant in that because Plantinga had a catchall category at the end of his two dozen arguments called “and so on.” And that's where the poor kalam cosmological argument was relegated. It didn't get much attention from Al, but Walls and Dougherty said the kalam cosmological argument needed to be in this book, and so it got included in the catchall category “and so on.” So Plantinga, I think, has been a major figure in this resurgence as well.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next Louis writes,

Taliaferro explains well the ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments, as well as an argument from consciousness, but the one that interests him the most is the first. His approach, like that of many contemporary apologists, is abductive, for he seeks not to prove theism but to show that it, as opposed to naturalism, best accounts for the evidence presented to our senses and our reason. He also makes it clear that natural theology is a first phase that leads the way to discussion of the Bible and deeper Christian matters.

The abductive approach?

DR. CRAIG: This is an argument or inference to the best explanation. You typically begin with some body of data to be explained, and then you compile a pool of live explanatory hypotheses that would account for that data. And then you weigh these hypotheses using certain criteria like explanatory power, explanatory scope, ad hocness, degree of plausibility, and so forth, and argue for one of these hypotheses as the best explanation. So, for example, an abductive approach to the moral argument would be defended by David Baggett who begins with the assumption that there are objective moral values and duties. He doesn't try to prove it. He just begins there, and then asks, “What hypothesis would best explain this fact?” And he argues that there is no better explanation of the objectivity of moral values and duties than the hypothesis of theism. Now, it really surprises me that Louis would say that Taliaferro favors this abductive approach and that his favorite argument is the ontological argument because the ontological argument is typically characterized as precisely the opposite of that sort of approach. The ontological argument is an attempt to deduce the existence of God from the very possibility of his existence. So I'm not sure if Louis has really understood Taliaferro on this score.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next, Andrew Pinsent, a Catholic priest and director of Science and Religion center at Oxford, presents the Catholic view. Louis writes,

Quite shockingly, Pinsent reveals that, according to one “of the canons of the First Vatican Council in 1870…one places oneself outside of the Catholic faith if one denies that it is possible to know by natural reason alone that there is one true God. This definition makes no judgment about any specific proofs for the existence of God, or whether there are in fact any adequate proofs. But the canon does define that the existence of God can be known with certitude from created things and by the light of natural reason, placing the existence of God firmly within natural theology”

That sounds a lot like Romans 1.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, the First Vatican Council reflected a Catholic Church that was much more conservative than the Roman Catholic Church is today. They declared that it is de fide; that is say, it belongs to the faith affirmed by Roman Catholics that there are arguments for the existence of God (whatever they may be) that warrant the belief that God exists.

KEVIN HARRIS: Alister McGrath of Oxford offers the next view. Louis says,

McGrath . . . accepts the definitions of Taliaferro and Pinsent but puts them in a fuller, more nuanced historical context that encompasses “both ‘a natural theology’ and ‘a theology of nature.’” He identifies four facets of this wider view: 1) “a theology that comes ‘naturally’ to the human mind…without divine revelation”; 2) “a form of reasoning, independent of revelation, that reflects on the theistic entailments of the beauty or complexity of the natural world”; 3) “a specifically Christian way of seeing or understanding the natural world”; 4) “the intellectual outcome of the natural tendency of the human mind to desire or be inclined toward God.”

. . .

His concern, he explains, “is not to criticize this specific approach: I seek merely to point out that it is part of a spectrum of possibilities and is thus neither the only approach to natural theology nor its normative form.”

In light of that, maybe you can talk about your own approach.

DR. CRAIG: In my approach, I think that there are a wide variety of good arguments for the existence of God. In that respect, I agree with the great German Enlightenment philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. So I have defended the cosmological argument from contingency, the kalam cosmological argument from the finitude of the past, the argument from the applicability of mathematics to physical phenomena, the fine-tuning argument for the existence of a transcendent designer of the universe, and a moral argument for God as the best explanation of objective moral values and duties in the world. And, finally, the ontological argument for a maximally great being based upon the very possibility of such a being. These provide a very broad range of arguments for God's existence. I think what one can say is that the theistic hypothesis explains a startlingly wide range of the data of human experience in a very powerful way, and that therefore this hypothesis has a great deal to commend it.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next, Paul Moser of Loyola College,

proposes and propounds a natural theology argument for the existence of God grounded in our experience of conscience that has much merit.

1. Necessarily, if a person is directly acquainted, in the moral conviction of conscience, with a guiding character of perfect moral goodness toward perfect agapē, then this results from the morally authoritative power of an intentional agent of perfect moral goodness.

Bill, I didn't give you a chance to read this book, but can you comment on what Moser seems to be driving at? Does it relate to a person naturally having a grasp of moral values and duties and beyond?

DR. CRAIG: Yes, this was the most surprising contribution to learn about for me because Paul Moser has traditionally been very hostile to natural theology. He has not at all been sympathetic to this approach, and yet it sounds as if here he's offering some sort of a moral argument for the existence of an intentional agent of perfect moral goodness on the basis of our moral conviction. So that would be a very welcome essay indeed.

KEVIN HARRIS: Finally, Louis is not real happy with John McDowell’s view. McDowell is a theology and philosophy professor from Yarra Theological College, Australia who basically holds Barth’s view. Louis complains that McDowell treats Barth as if he were “above reproach” and his view on natural theology is “proven.” It’s summed up:

”We possess no analogy on the basis of which the nature and being of God as the Lord can be accessible to us.”

That’s from Church Dogmatics. Louis says,

If you buy that assertion, which I do not, Barth and McDowell’s arguments may carry some weight. But it is a flimsy thread indeed for a natural theology denier to stand on.

Several things to talk about there. I do want to know what Barth means by there not being an analogy.

DR. CRAIG: I thought this was such an interesting comment because I have been at theology conferences where Karl Barth is quoted as if he were the Bible! As if whatever he says is absolutely authoritative and to be believed. And it just drives me up the wall because Barth is so irrational and subjectivistic. The influence of Barth upon contemporary theology is in many ways woeful. Now, Barth denied that we have any analogy of being between God and us. That is to say, predicates about God – even like “God exists” – have a different meaning altogether than those predicates when they're implied to creatures. People like Thomas Aquinas said even if our terms are not univocal in their meaning when applied to creatures and to God, at least there's an analogy so that when we speak of God as loving it's at least analogous to what you and I mean when we say that a person is loving. But Barth – his view of God's transcendence is that God is wholly other. He is incapable of being grasped by the categories of human thought and therefore there is no analogy of being between God and us which makes meaningful discourse about God really impossible, even though Barth writes his multi-volume Church Dogmatics in which he has lots of things to say about God. So I agree with Louis here that this Barthianism is a flimsy thread to use as a denial of natural theology, and yet it still persists. I just got a communication via email from a German theological student named Yoseta who is doing her doctorate in theology in Germany, and she said that her professor (she calls them “hermeneutical theologians”) are in the Barthian camp and therefore recognize no analogy of being between God and creatures. Indeed, they think that God may just be a sort of hermeneutical idea in our minds, not something that actually exists in reality! Well, you can imagine what that does for Christian theology and for the church if that's what our professors of theology believe and teach.

KEVIN HARRIS: By the way, I don't think I mentioned that this article by Dr. Markos is in the Worldview Bulletin. Paul Copan and the team, I wanted to give them a shout out. As we wrap it up, talk about the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology and how our listeners who may consider it for their library will benefit from it.

DR. CRAIG: A few years ago, J. P. Moreland and I conceived the idea of having a multivolume series on the principal arguments for the existence of God. We approached Wiley-Blackwell about the idea. Well, they were not interested in having a series of books each dedicated to a different argument, but they did say, “Why don't you go ahead and edit a one volume book of essays each giving the best defense of that argument that is available today?” So J. P. and I picked the persons that we conceive to be the absolute best proponents of these various arguments and we said, “You have unlimited space to develop your argument. So if you want to take 50, 80, 100 pages, go for it.” And Wiley-Blackwell was good with it. So, as a result, this fantastic volume on natural theology was published which I think remains a treasure trove for the best statement of arguments like the argument from contingency, the argument from fine-tuning, the kalam cosmological argument, and so on and so forth. So that is a volume, if you're interested in natural theology, that you might access with the codicil that this is not for beginners. This is written for fellow philosophers and theologians; it is written for academics. So it's not where you, as a beginner, would want to jump in if you're just getting into natural theology. You would be better advised to begin with a simple book like Lee Strobel's Case for a Creator, say, which would give some of the arguments.

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