Natural theology
Natural theology is the project of using reason and observation — without appealing to revelation or scripture — to establish conclusions about the existence and nature of God.
The term is Thomas Aquinas's in effect (though not in name): his Five Ways in the Summa Theologiae are the canonical examples, arguments from motion, causation, contingency, degrees of perfection, and design, each intended to show that the existence of God can be demonstrated by unaided reason. Natural theology contrasts with revealed theology, which starts from sacred texts and traditions that are accepted on authority.
The most famous modern natural theologian was probably William Paley, whose 1802 Natural Theology opened with the watchmaker analogy: if you found a watch on a heath, you would infer a watchmaker; the complexity of living things is far greater than a watch; therefore they too require a designer. Darwin read Paley as an undergraduate and later said that the argument had once convinced him completely. His Origin of Species (1859) undercut Paley so decisively that design arguments from biology have struggled ever since, though design arguments from cosmology — the fine-tuning of physical constants — took up some of the slack in the twentieth century.
Natural theology remains a live program in contemporary Christian philosophy. Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, and William Lane Craig have all developed sophisticated versions of the cosmological and teleological arguments using modal logic and probability theory. The argument from fine-tuning has been particularly influential, though it faces challenges from multiverse hypotheses and from careful analysis of what counts as "fine-tuning" in the first place.
For a secular reader, natural theology is the part of the religion-versus-science debate that actually rewards close attention. Fideism and presuppositionalism refuse to play the game; natural theology insists on playing and is willing to be judged on the strength of its arguments. That makes it worth engaging with on its merits rather than dismissing.
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Related terms
- FideismFideism is the view that religious belief does not need — and sometimes cannot receive — rational justification, because faith is either prior to reason or operates on a different plane from it.
- PresuppositionalismPresuppositionalism is a Christian apologetic method that argues the existence of the Christian God must be assumed at the outset, because without that assumption no reasoning — including the atheist's — can get off the ground.
- DeismDeism is the view that a god created the universe and established its laws but does not intervene in it afterwards, ruling out miracles, revelation, and ongoing providence.