A review of Natural Theology: Five Views, edited by James K. Dew Jr and Ronnie P. Campbell Jr (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2024)

Looking up at the external universe in all its terrifying infinity and sterility it would be all too tempting to agree with philosopher Bertrand Russell, his self-confessed disciple Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and others of like mind that the whole extra-terrestrial realm is little but a meaningless chaos where chance alone reigns supreme. Yet the nihilist sense of our having been involuntarily flung into the midst of some unchoreographed theater of the absurd is swiftly offset by observing the habitable zone of our own planet whose superabundance of vibrant life forms unarguably makes it a place of cosmic exceptionalism (albeit for reasons which might remain eternally debatable!).

Not Too Hot, Not Too Cold

The relatively recent understanding¹ of the fine-tuned nature of our planet as a kind of cosmic Goldilocks zone perhaps uniquely supportive of life has led to a considerable shift in many persons’ cosmological views and to a sharp reversal of the once dominant worldview typical of Russell’s generation in the first half of the 20th century. Although planet Earth is clearly not central in the spatial sense (being in Russell’s dismissive term a “cosmic backwater”) it certainly is so in the more substantive sense that we are the unique beneficiaries of the single location in the all the known universe on which all sentience and meaning is concentrated. That recognition, coupled with the new appreciation of an incomprehensible subatomic reality which quantum physics forced upon us in the last century, has proved revolutionary in challenging any tendency to complacency about the epistemic foundations of our knowledge. Hence the publication of the above volume is nothing if not timely. At a time when once confidently proposed materialist assumptions are being steadily eroded by modern physics and cosmology it is anything but hyperbole or special pleading for the two editors to claim, 

From cosmological discoveries about the universe’s beginning to the complexities entailed in atomic structures, recent discoveries have provided fresh and new reasons to think that divine causation is at play in the origins of the physical universe.²

Indeed, one might even argue further that the absolute disparity in existential status between our living cosmos and its surrounding chaos of jostling corpse planets prompts the inference that sentient life could not have developed without some form of foresight. The initial envisioning of things must then necessarily have also possessed the instrumental power to realize and enact its originary design by way of a selective abrogation of the laws of chaos reigning elsewhere in the universe.

Such a view might at first seem an improbable speculation yet it is not without scientific backing (however circumspectly that backing may be phrased!).³ For the stubborn fact of the matter is that in posing the hard question of how and why our unique planet came to be the way it is, there are no helpful indices pointing in any direction on the purely naturalistic continuum of understanding (beyond far-fetched thought experiments about a “multiverse” which are — and will remain — empirically untestable). Cosmologists are at a complete loss to explain “how we all got here.” 

Apologetic Resources

The volume under consideration is arranged in an admirably dialogic form which gives scope both to those who believe that natural theology “provides wonderful apologetic resources for the defense of faith” and those who, following the lead of famous 20th-century German theologian Karl Barth, feel that broad-brush observations of our terrestrial surroundings cannot form an alternative to the more specific revelation made manifest in the Bible. In this volume the first view is defended by Charles Talafierno in Chapter One, the chapter also including dissenting or modifying opinions by Andrew Pinsent, Alister McGrath, Paul Moser, and John McDowell. Chapter Two follows the same pattern with Andrew Pinsent leading the discussion, so to speak, whilst in Chapter Three Alister McGrath defends what he terms the “classical” conception of natural theology. This involves a nuanced view which takes on board Barthian objections but defends the place of natural theology within a specifically Christan context. The last two chapters contain dissenting views by Paul Moser and by John McDonnell in defense of the Barthian view. McDowell points to the problematical dimension of reasoning about God from the created order itself, believing this approach claims too much autonomy for humankind and risks misperceptions of the divine. Inferring aspects of the divine from our own perceptions should be a theological direction to be approached with some circumspection, and reason should never trump revelation, he cautions.

Historical Contextualization 

Not the least of the many virtues of this wide-ranging and fair-minded coverage of its subject is the succinct Introduction by the editors (pp. 1-11) with its clear historical contextualization. Their exposition inevitably acknowledges the old (but seriously intended) quip that “all subsequent philosophy has been but footnotes to Plato” since natural theology far predates the Christian tradition with which it has come to be associated in recent centuries. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato inferred that a mind must have been the cause of all other things. That God must be the (first) cause of everything that exists was a philosophic direction later taken up by Cicero and others in the Roman period and utilized by St. Augustine as a means of confirming the Christian worldview. Interestingly, the two editors point out that Augustine remained convinced that the pre-Christian Plato must have derived his theistic ideas (which Augustine commends) from a direct observation of Nature itself as a form of “natural revelation,” so to speak.⁴

Ecumenical Perspectives

From the point of view of Christian outreach, it is notable that St. Augustine did not believe that Christians were the only ones who could perceive the divine implications of the natural realm. In the high Middle Ages Thomas Aquinas too would use arguments from natural theology, recognizing that one might use neutral premises by which to arrive at an apprehension of the divine, so that one did not necessarily have to be a Christian to be a theist. Although St Anselm — like Karl Barth at a later date (and perhaps to some extent Alister McGrath in the present volume) — appealed to Anselm’s famous phrase fides quarens intellectum (faith seeking understanding) it is clear that others were in effect more inclined to invert the nouns in that phrase to reformulate it as intellectus quarens fidem (understanding seeking [grounds for] faith). That latter locution might in fact provide a better fit with today’s zeitgeist where ideas of ecumenicism and human universalism have achieved a moral ascendancy in the hearts and minds of many.

Charles Darwin and William Paley

When Paley published his Natural Theology in 1802 he was by no means the first to have written on the subject. As his modern editors illustrate, the subject had become something of a standard genre a good century before Paley came on to the scene. He had been preceded by John Ray in his The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691) where Ray essentially characterizes external Nature as god’s agent. By contrast, an earlier work by Samuel Burnet, Sacred History of the Earth (1684), had not attempted to promote the same theodicean assurances as Ray, for Burnet’s vision of the world was that of a spoiled paradise due to the fallen nature of mankind. Thomas Gisborne’s Natural Theology (1818) essentially reprises Burnet’s gloomy estimate of a fallen world where suffering and death had intruded on God’s original plan.

Placing such albeit important caveats to one side, however, we note that it was the Ray/Paley argument which most impressed Darwin’s immediate predecessors — to such an extent that Paley became a set text for study in the Cambridge University of the first decades of the 19th century. Darwin, by his own admission, was transfixed by the clarity and cogency of Paley’s expositions, as Knight and Eddy have described:

Darwin found it one of the few stimulating books he had read and wrestled with finding an alternative to Paley’s vision of Design. He found it in the hidden hand of natural selection: the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence.⁵

That characterization of natural selection has now become something of an idée reçue even though Sir Charles Lyell had warned Darwin (in company later with Alfred Russel Wallace) as early as 1860 that there was no such thing as natural selection, only natural preservation. Darwin’s ostensibly astounding discovery was in reality a misleading misnomer: it was not a discriminating force (or vera causa in 19th-century terminology) with the power to shape biological development but a more or less arbitrary statistic. Darwin accepted the stricture but, officially at any rate, not the heavy implication that his theory was a non-starter. Darwin’s modern successors too, for reasons best known to themselves, have chosen to overlook Sir Charles’s truly devastating verdict, a judgement which essentially jettisons the central plank of Darwinism as popularly understood. However, the truth, as they say, will out, and in his later years Darwin would be forced to backtrack on his original ideas and confess that biological development was unimaginable without a design(er). He even went so far as to refer to himself in a letter to a correspondent as a theist despite himself. In plain terms this was not a case of Darwin saying “Come back Paley, all is forgiven” so much as “Come back Paley, there is nothing to forgive.”

What effect will this book have? I have the feeling that it may be disregarded by “the usual suspects,” but it nevertheless presents us with a very well argued, presented, and edited volume which will be of great interest to open-minded readers. It certainly presents a very strong case in favor of the evidential/revelatory value of what the 19th century termed natural theology but for which I would prefer the term scientific observation.

Notes

1. See Brandon Carter, “Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology,” Symposium: International Astronomical Union 63 (1974), pp. 291-8. Is should also be noted that Cambridge professor William Whewell had come to similar conclusions in the 1850s.
2. Natural Theology, Five Views, p. 1.
3. Leading astronomer Paul Davies states that it is merely a semantic matter as to whether you conceive of the shaping force behind this providential arrangement as being the Christian God or some other unseen power for some agency there must have been. See for instance Davies’s God and the New Physics (London: Penguin, 1990) and The Eerie Silence: Searching for Ourselves in the Universe (London: Penguin, 2010).
4. They further point out that this mode of thought would have been no surprise to 17th-century British scientist Robert Boyle who, “believing that the work of science was a religious act, suggested that the natural order offered opportunities to gain insights and understanding about the Creator” (Introduction, p. 5).
5. William Paley, Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature, edited by Matthew D. Eddy and David Knight (Oxford: OUP, 2006), citation p. xxiii.