In Defense of Natural Theology: A Post-Humean Assessment

by James F. Sennett (Editor)

The shadow of David Hume, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, has loomed large against all efforts to prove the existence of God from evidence in the natural world. Indeed from Hume's day to ours, the vast majority of philosophical attacks against the rationality of theism have borne an unmistakable Humean aroma. The last forty years, however, have been marked by a resurgence in Christian theism among philosophers, and the time has come for a thorough reassessment of the case for natural theology. James F. Sennett and Douglas Groothuis have assembled a distinguished team of philosophers to engage the Terence Penelhum, Todd M. Furman, Keith Yandell, Garrett J. DeWeese, Joshua Rasmussen, James D. Madden, Robin Collins, Paul Copan, Victor Reppert, J. P. Moreland and R. Douglas Geivett. Together this team makes vigorous individual and cumulative arguments that set Hume's attacks in fresh perspective and that offer new insights into the value of teleological, cosmological and ontological arguments for God's existence.

Genres: Philosophy

336 pages, Paperback

First published October 4, 2005

Reviews

[Steven H]

A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS CRITIQUING HUME’S CRITIQUES OF NATURAL THEOLOGY

The editors wrote in the Introduction to this 2005 book, “The most prominently launched attacks against the whole idea of NT [Natural Theology], as well as the most common criticisms of traditional arguments like the teleological, cosmological and ontological arguments, are directly reminiscent of those presented in [Hume’s] Dialogues [Concerning Natural Religion]. These include… the catch-all criticism… that (even if sound) the NT arguments do noon prove enough---they do not prove the existence of the God of theism…. So we offer the present volume as a direct confrontation with Hume’s legacy concerning NT. This confrontation takes place on two levels. In the four chapters of part one the general Humean program is explained and challenged … In part two nine different NT arguments are defended against the criticisms of Hume and Humeans.” (Pg. 13-15)

Keith Yandell states, “I have argued here that Hume in fact did not kill natural theology---he did not show that the natural theological enterprise of trying to give proof or evidence for the belief that God exists is a hopeless endeavor, beyond the realm of justified effort…there is no good reason to hold those views, and very good reason to reject them. The idea that Hume dealt a deathblow to natural theology is sheer fiction. The degree to which natural theology succeed is the degree to which its arguments are valid, have true premises and are persuasive to their auditors. Hume’s critique does no show what that degree is---it will have to be decided on its own merits.” (Pg. 81)

James Sennett points out, “I submit that no other religious tradition has undergone the philosophical scrutiny that theism has… True, the sympathies of the Western intellectual tradition were firmly with theism throughout the Middle Ages… [But] even in the officially safe confines of scholastic philosophy, rigorous challenges to and careful philosophical explications of the most fundamental theistic claims still abounded… Second, we have not been anywhere near the relative security of the High Middle Ages for many centuries. The challenges to theism just since the Enlightenment have easily outpaced the scrutiny afforded any other tradition through its entire existence… Yet throughout two millennia of critical examination and over two hundred years of top flight antagonistic criticism, there have nor arisen refutations sufficient to compel all thinking peoples to reject them... This history or survival and thriving in the face of intense criticism sets theism apart from all other world religious traditions.” (Pg. 93-94)

Douglas Groothuis states, “[Richard] Swinburne that Hume’s objection that there may be many designers instead of one designer seems to break on the rocks of the regularity and unity of the universe, which is more simply and better explained on the basis of one designer, not many finite designers. The latter would be far less likely to cooperate to the degree required to produce the kind of universe we observe.” (Pg. 110)

Garrett J. DeWeese and Joshua Rasmussen conclude, “Now, a first cause that is essentially an omnipotent free agent is not yet the Christian God, a God of holiness and love, mercy and justice. But such a first cause is far more than Hume’s doddering, superannuated deity or committee of demigods. With this conclusion, we have answered ‘Hume’s stopper’ and have seen that the [Kalam Cosmological Argument] is indeed a viable piece of natural theology, especially when combined with other theistic arguments in a cumulative case argument.” (Pg. 149)

Robin Collins says of the “If the universe needs a designer, so does God” argument, “The first response… is to point out that [none of the critics]… offer any argument for the central premise of their objection, namely, that the designer of an artifact must be at last as complex as the designed artifact. Moreover, their claim is certainly not self-evident. But I do believe that their claim has some initial intuitive plausibility … However, this intuitive plausibility may not be much help. Atheists will not wish to infer a general principle from these cases, since this would force them into denying the adequacy of evolution based on unguided chance plus natural selection to account for the organized complexity of life, and instead would force them into hypothesizing some cause of this complexity that was itself as complex as life.” (Pg. 188)

Paul Copan says of the Moral Argument, “Hume’s strictly sentimentalist (and thus reductionistic) account of morality negates the possibility of making objective moral claims. Moreover, given that Hume’s methodology leads to skeptical conclusions about beliefs in general … the same pertains to his beliefs about morality as well. If Hume is correct, then it is by sheer accident that he is correct since anyone’s beliefs just are what they are.” (Pg. 210)

This book will be “must reading” for those seriously studying philosophical apologetics, or (particularly) wanting arguments against Hume.

[Ben Holloway]

Of all philosophers in the western canon, David Hume is perhaps the most persuasive. Much of his work was irreligious and aimed at dismissing the project of natural theology, "the attempt to provide rational justification for theism using only those sources of information accessible to all inquirers, namely, the data of empirical experience and the dictates of human reason" (from the introduction).

The impressive line up of those who remain unpersuaded by Hume mostly gather around a single defensive strategy - to show that there are forms of argument that escape Humean criticism, most notably inference to the best explanation (IBE). Since Humean criticism is mostly aimed at purely inductive arguments, arguments from analogy, and deductive arguments, many of the authors in this volume believe that IBE provides a way around the criticism. If they are right, then this book would be sufficient to close the chapter on the demise of natural theology. The question is: are they right about IBE? On this it is not clear. The problem of the book is that no one takes time to defend IBE itself from criticism. One important way to object to IBE is to say that it is only justified by appeal to induction. If so, then it fails to avoid Hume's criticisms.

One exception to the consensus on IBE are Keith Yandell's two essays. Yandell is not new to Hume and much of what he says can be read in his book on Hume, Hume's 'Inexplicable Mystery'. Yandell provides an alternative way to refute Hume. Why think Hume's criticisms get off the ground in the first place? Yandell argues that if Hume has the right epistemology and theory of language, then the criticisms of natural theology follow. However, Yandell argues that Hume is wrong about how we know and form concepts and so none of his criticisms follow. Consequently, natural theology is safe from Humean criticism.

This is a worthy volume and shows just how persuasive Hume's critique was and still is.

[Jonathan]

In Defense of Natural Theology aims to fill a need in Christian philosophical literature: a decisive counter-attack on Hume’s assaults on natural theology. To accomplish this, the editors have called upon this impressive team of scholars.

Within the scope of their book, James Sennett and Douglas Groothius and their team have vigorously and compellingly answered David Hume’s attacks on natural religion. Any reader, originally convinced or cowed by Humean ideas, who carefully works through the arguments in each essay, will be forced to seriously reassess his original philosophical commitments or fears. As proponents of natural theology, the editors and authors reveal a classical approach to apologetics. Accordingly, they spend more energy on marshalling reason and evidence to build a case for Christian theism, than on disputing the epistemological rules of the game.

Although the editors briefly mention Reformed Epistemology as a rival apologetic approach, readers who are aware of or sympathetic to this approach would have been helped by at least a brief explanation of how natural theology is justified epistemologically. In his discussion of humans as “epistemically contextual beings” Victor Reppert nearly gives away the whole natural theology enterprise when he states that “for some people natural theology will not be a necessity” (268). This sort of transparency about the relative and person-dependent value of natural theology would have made Douglas Geivett’s “cumulative case argument” even more compelling.

I found several essays to be very difficult reading. I wish the authors had somehow made their ideas more accessible.