Natural Theology

Understanding Natural Theology

The Intelligent Design movement generally emphasizes that ID is a scientific, not a theological idea. However, ID is also conceived of as revealing a connection between theology and science. Scientific evidence for the existence of some designer behind nature is seen as evidence consonant with the Christian doctrine of creation. In the Christian tradition, such connections between Christian doctrines and publicly available evidence have traditionally been explored under the name of natural theology. It will therefore be important to connect my analysis of the ID movement’s thought to the concept of natural theology.

According to John Hedley Brooke, “natural theology is a type of theological discourse in which the existence and attributes of the deity are discussed in terms of what can be known through natural reason, in contradistinction (though not necessarily in opposition) to knowledge derived from special revelation.”¹⁴⁹ However, as Brooke goes on to point out, the definitions of “natural reason” and “revelation” have been understood differently in differently cultures and different times.¹⁵⁰ Broadly speaking natural theology speaks of knowledge of God available through human observation, memory and rational intuitions, as well as arguments based on them.¹⁵¹ There are other definitions of natural theology, and the relation of natural theology to theologies of nature is much discussed. I will return to this issue at the end of chapter 2.4.

The Historical Importance of Natural Theology

Natural theology has a long history. The idea of natural knowledge of the divine can already be found in the Greek philosophies of nature as well as in the Bible and in the writings of many Church Fathers. The standard biblical proof text for natural theology has long been Romans 1:20: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are

148 For a good defence of realism in Christian theology, see McGrath 2002.

149 Brooke 2002, 163-164.

150 Brooke 2002, 164. A more thorough discussion of the change of the concept of ”reason” and the influence of this change on theology can be found in Turner 2002.

151 Plantinga 2011, 48.

without excuse.” Acts 14:17 states that God “has not left himself without testimony: He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy.” These and other passages like them do not present arguments for the existence of God, but some idea of the common availability of knowledge of God nevertheless seems to be present.¹⁵²

Although some early Christians took a negative attitude to philosophy, many early Church fathers nevertheless took a positive attitude to natural theology and tried to find connections between Christianity and Greek philosophy.¹⁵³ For example, Augustine writes that “though the voices of the prophets were silent, the world itself, by its well-ordered changes and movements, and by the fair appearance of all visible things, bears a testimony of its own, both that it has been created, and also that it could not have been created save by God, whose greatness and beauty are unutterable and invisible.”¹⁵⁴Here Augustine says that the order of the world is evidently created by God, and that this could be known even without the prophets. In many places the Church Fathers also support their views with philosophical arguments. ¹⁵⁵ However, in their writings, faith and reason are arguably conceived as a holistic unity rather than making a sharp distinction between the deliverances of reason and the deliverances of faith.¹⁵⁶ In the Middle Ages, natural theology was developed further by theologians such as Anselm (1033-1109), Bonaventure (1221-1274) and Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274).¹⁵⁷

The closest parallels to the design arguments of the ID movement come from the arguments of early modern scientists rather than from classical or medieval though, however. Sir Isaac Newton’s (1642-1727) design arguments were based both on the harmonious order of the natural laws and the solar system as well as the order in biology.

The apex of this pre-Darwinian natural theology is typically thought to be the design arguments of William Paley (1743-1805) in his Natural Theology: Or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (1802). While Paley focused on the biological evidences for design, thinkers like James Hutton (1726-1797) and Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) focused attention on the system of nature as a whole, Hutton on the geological processes which maintain the Earth’s fertile soil and Priestley on the role of vegetation in maintaining the quality of air.

The laws of nature were viewed as the supreme designer’s harmonious design.¹⁵⁸ In this British fusion of natural science and natural theology, it was believed that the natural sciences provided powerful support for belief in God.¹⁵⁹

152 For analyses on Biblical natural theology, see Barr 1993 and Rowland 2013.

153 Ferguson 1999.

154De civitate dei, XI, 4.

155 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, II: 1-9; Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and Resurrection, chapter 1; Augustine, On Free Will, 2.12.33. I have found these examples through Swinburne (2004b, 536).

156 McGrath 2001, chapter 6; Kirjavainen 1984. On the evolution of the concept of reason see Turner 2002.

157 See further Hall 2013 and Feser 2008.

158 Brooke 2002, 170. Natural theology also provided a way of defending the legitimacy empirical science in theological terms: God had created a rational world and had meant for humans to study and understand it.

Natural theology united Christians of several different persuasions (Brooke 1991, 2002).

159 Brooke 1991, see also McGrath 2009b.

Philosophical and Scientific Critiques of Natural Theology

Modern times also brought new challenges to natural theology. In traditional Christian natural theology knowledge of God found through reason was not thought to be in any way better than that received through the Church and through faith. However, the religious conflicts following the Reformation made many long for some universal criterion for adjudicating between competing religious truth claims. The success of the natural sciences gave hope of the possibilities of human reason to work as such a universal arbiter. Natural theology was also sometimes separated from the broader web of Christian beliefs. Deism, a religion of reason rejecting revelation and the authority of the Church as sources of knowledge, was born. Most of the Enlightenment philosophers who were critical of religion (such as Voltaire, 1694-1778, and Thomas Paine, 1737-1809) were deists who practiced natural theology and believed in the existence of a Creator God. The number of deists was smaller than has often been later stated, but they have exercised great intellectual influence.

The relationship of faith and reason has been problematized far more often after the Enlightenment.¹⁶⁰

In later discussions the critiques of natural theology made in the 18^th and 19^th centuries has often been seen as devastating, though it has never caused natural theology to disappear.

There have been three main lines of critique against natural theology: philosophical critique, scientific critique and theological critique. In this chapter I will only give some broad outlines of this critique. Since many of the philosophical and scientific critiques of natural theology are repeated in the discussion on Intelligent Design, they will be analysed more in the course of the coming chapters. However, the relevance of theological critiques of natural theology to Intelligent Design has not been discussed as much. I will thus discuss natural theology and the general relation of faith and reason in chapter 2.5.

The most influential philosophical critiques of natural theology and the design arguments have been presented by the Scottish sceptical philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) and the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Hume analyses the arguments of natural theology and comes to the conclusion that they do not prove anything very certain about the original cause of the cosmos. At most it might be said that the cause of the cosmos bears some distant similarity to a human mind. For Kant, reading Hume’s arguments was like waking up from a “dogmatic dream.” His Critique of Pure Reason is sustained critique of natural theology. Kant comes to the conclusion that one cannot say anything about a transcendent Creator based on the phenomena included in human experience. The design argument can at most show the existence of some sort of “architect” of the universe, a conclusion insufficient for religion. In his later works Kant grounds belief in God as necessity for the operation of “practical reason” rather than the arguments of natural theology.¹⁶¹

160 Barnett 2004, Harrison 2002, Livingston 2007.

161 Chignell 2009.

Scientific critiques of natural theology have been made particularly on the basis of Charles Darwin’s (1809-1882) evolutionary theory. Prior to Darwin’s theory, the dominant explanation for the complex adaptations of species was divine design. Thus Isaac Newton believed that the structure of the eye was obviously made by a designer well versed in the principles of optics. But Darwin’s theory offered a way of explaining the adaptations of species on the basis of his theory of natural selection, without reference to design. Darwin’s theory was silent about the origin of life and the laws of nature, however, and the wider teleology of the laws of nature became the new focus of natural theology. Many saw biological evolution as simply God’s way of creating the species.¹⁶² Nevertheless, atheistic interpretations of Darwinism were also presented, and they continue to be common. As noted, Dawkins’ argument that evolutionary theory makes it possible to be an “intellectually satisfied atheist” is quoted prominently in ID literature.¹⁶³

Philosophical ideas often associated with natural science have also played a part in the waning of natural theology. Within the natural sciences, mechanistic explanations in terms of laws and natural factors have been highly valued from the beginning. Already one of the important fathers of modern natural science, Francis Bacon (1561-1626), argued that the Aristotelian explanations in terms of purposes are not very helpful for science. Rather, science seeks understanding which is useful for achieving technological mastery over nature.¹⁶⁴ For Bacon the mechanistic universe studied by science was indeed the purposeful creation of God, and testified of the greatness of God. However, over time, it became possible to argue that mechanistic nature indeed is all that exists, and talk of divine purposes is also meaningless outside natural science.¹⁶⁵

As I will show in chapter 8, the ID theorists often argue that restricting natural science to a search for merely natural explanations will over time indeed tend to lead to a naturalistic worldview. That is, methodological naturalism will tend to lead to metaphysical naturalism.

However, in practice many methodological naturalists are indeed simultaneously believers in divine purposes and natural theology. Already before Darwin, many theologians and religious believers believed that the Creator’s glory is apparent in the way he works in the universe through natural laws.¹⁶⁶

162 McGrath 2009, chapter 7.

163 Dawkins 1991, 6; Loesberg 2007, 107-108. The title (How to be an Intellectually Fulfilled Atheist (Or Not)) of Dembski & Wells 2008 even uses Dawkins’ words directly. The work counters Dawkins’ atheism by arguing against evolutionary theory.

Scholars have differed on the relative importance of the Darwinian and Humean critiques of the design argument. Sander Gliboff (2000) argues that the Humean critique together with pre-Darwinian speculations about evolution is enough to dismiss the design argument, and Dawkins thus wouldn’t have to give up his atheism even if he were living before Darwin.

164Novum Organon, Book II. It can be argued that Bacon misunderstands the Aristotelian system of four causes.

However, it remains true that this understanding of science is common in modernity (Feser 2008, 174-180).

165 Brooke 1991, chapter 4.

166 See Numbers 2003 for one account of the complex historical development of methodological naturalism. On the complexity of the interaction between Darwinism and teleological ideas, see Ruse 2003 and Bowler 2009.

These works also discuss the important social and cultural background of the development.

Rather than methodological naturalism as such, the combination of methodological naturalism and scientism can form the basis for rejecting all natural theology. Suppose that natural science is our only (or overwhelmingly best) way of gaining reliable knowledge or justified beliefs, and natural science can never speak of metaphysical and supernatural things. This implies that the traditional arguments of natural theology are meaningless, since they are by definition outside naturalistic science and arguments outside science are not reliable.¹⁶⁷ This type of scientism is influential in the contemporary discussion, and I have critiqued it chapter 2.3.

Theological critiques of natural theology were made already prior to Darwin. For example, Neo-Protestant theology following in Kant’s wake rejected natural theology on philosophical grounds, and attempted to find another way to ground theological claims. But the critique of natural theology presented by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) has possible exerted even greater influence. Barth worried that all natural theology inevitably subordinates theology under some outside criterion, and so theology becomes a servant of fallen human reason. The God of the philosophers is inevitably different from the Trinitarian God of Christianity, and so natural theology ends up corrupting Christianity. According to Barth, theology must stand on its own foundation, the revelation of God. Barth’s critique of natural theology was not based on just academic concerns, but also on a fear of the practical consequences of accepting natural theology. Nazi-friendly theology had the same problem of subordinating theology to human reason and ideological concerns.¹⁶⁸

The Renaissance of Natural Theology

Despite the critiques, natural theology has never disappeared. Barthian theological critiques of natural theology have not had much traction in the Catholic Church, for example.¹⁶⁹ Since the renaissance of analytic philosophical theology starting from the 1960’s, natural theology has also been making a comeback. The arguments of natural theology have many modern defenders and the traditional critiques are no longer necessarily seen as conclusive.¹⁷⁰ University presses are publishing large tomes on natural theology like the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (2011) and the Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology (2013).

Though there are many forms of modern natural theology, the one closest to Intelligent Design is related to philosophical theism, theism meaning belief in the existence of the

167 One influential way of defending this sort of scientism has been logical positivism, dominant in Anglo-American philosophy in the 1930s to 1960s but now considered refuted. The logical positivists argued that all metaphysical philosophy and theology was meaningless since it did not satisfy the verification criterion of meaning, according to which all meaningful statements which are not a priori truths must be verifiable empirically. See Wolterstorff 2009.

168 See Brunner & Barth 2002 [1934], White 2010, and Holder 2012 for more on this discussion.

169 See Turner 2004.

170 Prominent defenders and critics of natural theology agree on this point. For example, see the evaluations of Humean and Kantian arguments by Swinburne (2004a, 2011) and Philipse (2012).

Creator of all things who is personal, immaterial, eternal, perfectly free, omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good.¹⁷¹ The relationship of the Intelligent Design movement’s design argument to theism is a complex issue, which will be explored in the coming chapters. However, traditionally the design argument is one of several theistic arguments for the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent deity who created the universe and whose providence watches over it.¹⁷² The cosmological argument, for example, portrays God as the necessary ground of our contingent being. It is based on the classic question “why is there something rather than nothing”?¹⁷³ Many of the theistic arguments are metaphysical and not dependent on the empirical findings of natural science in the way the ID movement’s design arguments are.

Whereas many critiques of natural theology assume that the project fails if there is any way to deny the conclusions of the theistic arguments, modern natural theologians typically see even modest conclusions as significant. Perhaps it is too stringent to demand that any useful natural theology must provide certain and deductive proofs of God’s existence whereby all who hear the proofs will be throughoutly convinced. Very few things in natural science, philosophy or everyday life can be known with such certainty. An argument may provide good evidence for the existence of God even if it doesn’t meet this stringent standard.¹⁷⁴ Thus Richard Swinburne, perhaps the best-known contemporary natural theologian, argues in his work The Existence of God only to the conclusion that the probability of theism being true is over 50 percent after considering several cumulative arguments which each raise the probability by some amount. The arguments from religious experience then finally raise the probability above 50 percent.¹⁷⁵

Another strategy for defending natural theology from critique has also been to redefine it. The typical division is between natural theologies and theologies of nature.¹⁷⁶ Whereas natural theology seeks to speak of God based on human reason and experience and start outside religious traditions, theologies of nature start from within a religious tradition such as Christianity and then seek to form a theological interpretation of nature in dialogue with the natural sciences. Theologies of nature do not seek to establish the existence of God through any supposed neutral starting point, but can find resonance and correlations with Christianity and human culture. However, the precise border between these different approaches can be difficult to determine. Theologian Alister McGrath is a theologian of nature by these definitions, but he himself calls his enterprise natural theology. McGrath’s basis for this is his desire to join into the Christian tradition of natural theology and not be constricted by definitions of natural theology made in the time of Enlightenment.¹⁷⁷ Both

171 Swinburne 2004a, 7.

172 Plantinga 1990 [1967], chapter 4.

173 For an interesting defence of the reasonability of this question, see Turner 2004.

174 Plantinga 1990 [1967], ix-x.

175 Swinburne 2004a. Swinburne’s probabilities are based on his extensive use of Bayes’ theorem to quantify as far as possible the signifance of the different lines of evidence for theism.

176 The distinction comes from Ian G. Barbour (1997, 100).

177 McGrath 2008, Padgett 2004.

theologians of nature and natural theologians can also refer to the same evidence, such as cosmic fine-tuning, as supporting religious belief.¹⁷⁸