Dabney on Natural Theology

R. L. Dabney’s Systematic Theology (1871) does not have an extensive prolegomena section by our most recent standards, and, as is evident from his references, these were the end result of lecture notes for his students on systematic theology. We would not expect to find very detailed analysis of natural theology. However, what is present in such a short space is illuminating and follows the classical tradition. This is not surprising when we consider Dabney’s more philosophical mind and his later appointment as professor of “mental and moral philosophy” at the University of Texas in 1883.

The Legitimacy and Scope of Natural Theology

Right after explaining that a science is “Knowledge demonstrated and methodized,” he says of natural theology that it “is a science … of at least some certain and connected propositions.” He roots this in Scripture (e.g. Ps. 19:1-7; Acts 14:15; 17:23; Rom. 1:19-20; 2:14) “and from the fact that nearly all heathens have religious ideas and rites of worship.”1 As to the division between “natural and revealed” so often used when covering this subject in a cursory manner, he says, “Theology is divided into natural and revealed, according to the sources of our knowledge of it; from natural reason; from revelation.”2

Dabney was well aware of fideist tendencies even in his own tradition. So he anticipates the usual misgivings in saying,

“Some old divines … seem to fear lest, by granting a Natural Theology, they should grant too much to natural reason; a fear ungrounded and extreme. They are in danger of a worse consequence; reducing man’s capacity for receiving divine verities so low, that the rational sceptic will be able to turn upon them and say, ‘Then by so inept a creature, the guarantees of a true revelation cannot be certainly apprehended.”3

One objection that is made to throw shade on the whole business of natural theology is that whenever it is done, the conclusions are as many as there are natural theologians. This is especially alluring when one uses the language of “pagan” as a modifying adjective. In a concise reply that prefigures Lewis' rationale in The Abolition of Man, Dabney says, “the differences of Natural theology among polytheists are a diversity in unity; all involve the prime truths; a single first cause, responsibility, guilt, a future life, future rewards and punishments."4

The Epistemology of Natural Theology

Given that Dabney thought much of the formation of ideas, we would expect him to weigh in on the question of how man obtains the natural knowledge he has of God. We cannot simply ask: Did he hold to innate ideas? The term can be ambiguous. Better to ask: What precisely does Dabney say is innate? He says,

“Not that religious ideas are innate: but the capacity to establish some such ideas, from natural data, is innate. Consider further: Is this not implied in man's capacity to receive a revealed theology? Does revelation demonstrate God's existence; or assume it? Does it rest the first truths on pure dogmatism, or on evidence which man apprehends? The latter; and then man is assumed to have some natural capacity for such apprehension. But if nature reflects any light concerning God, (as Scripture asserts), then man is capable of deriving some theology from nature.”5

Never one afraid to disagree with his contemporaries in the Reformed world, he takes Hodge to task on this point. Though he does not use the expression Common Sense Realism (such as Marsden, Noll, et al have more recently proposed that Hodge embraced), it is fairly clear that this is what Dabney has in mind. He says,

“With [Hodge], any truth is intuitive, which is immediately perceived by the mind. He dissents from the customary definition of philosophers [as Sir W. Hamilton] which requires simplicity, or primariness, as the trait of an intuitive judgment ... [i.e.] an intuitive truth is [a] one that is seen true without any premise, [b] so seen by all minds which comprehend its terms, [c] necessarily seen. Strictly, it cannot be said, that any intuitive truth is innate. The power of perceiving it is innate.”6

This becomes all-important in Reformed circles by the 1940s and afterwards, as the influence of Barthianism, Van Tillianism, and later on, Reformed Epistemology, begins to exalt the innate, the immediate, and the intuitive, so as to marginalize products of discursive reasoning as either “neutral territory,” “autonomous reason,” or “evidentialist demands” that one demonstrate before one can reasonably believe. If what was always meant by the sense of God being “innate” refers to ready-made ideas, well, then there is nothing left to make of biblical texts on man’s natural knowledge. This will do, and no natural theology can be justified beyond that. But this is not the way that the Reformed Orthodox saw things; and Dabney is one more case of a Reformed thinker as late as the end of the nineteenth century still holding to the classical understanding.

Evaluating the Natural Theological Arguments of His Predecessors

What is Dabney’s evaluation of the leading arguments made by Protestants before his time? Three figures come immediately into view. First, Dabney summarizes that natural theology of Samuel Clarke (1675–1729) as a posteriori—or, as Kant recently defined such arguments, “cosmological”—movement from something now existing to the necessity of something existing from eternity, and so forth in a nine-step argument. Yet the turning point from effects to supernatural causation follows from this:

“For, if at any time in the past eternity, there had been absolutely nothing, since nothing cannot be a cause of existence, time and space must have remained forever blank of existence.”7

One interesting feature of the subsequent steps is how several attributes even the Christian opponents of natural theology regard to be biblical are derived: eternality, immutability, aseity, infinity, omnipresence, intelligence, and free will. 

Further back, the Puritan John Howe (1630-1705) had set forth, in his Living Temple, a seven-step argument:

“1. Since we now exist, something has existed from eternity. 2. Hence, at least, some uncaused Being, for the eternal has nothing prior to it. 3. Hence some independent Being. 4. Hence that Being exists necessarily; for its independent, eternal, inward spring of existence cannot be conceived as possibly at any time inoperative. 5. This Being must be self-active; active, because, if other beings did not spring from its action, they must all be eternal, and so independent, and necessary, which things are impossible for beings variously organized and changeable; and self-active, because, in eternity nothing was before Him to prompt His action. 6. This Being is living; for self-prompted activity is our very idea of life. 7. He is of boundless intelligence, power, freedom, &c.”8

Dabney clearly approved of both arguments, calling the latter “perfect,” and both being of the a posteriori variety, which he also seems to think superior. That similarity to Aquinas may be one reason why his section on natural theology is not often discussed in Reformed literature of the latter twentieth century.

The third individual assessed is John Breckinridge (1797-1841) who developed a three-premised argument:

“1. Because something now is—at least the mind that reasons—therefore something eternal is. 2. All known substance is matter or spirit. 3. Hence only three possible alternatives; either, (a.) some matter is eternal; and the source of all spirit and all other matter, Or, (b.) some being composed of matter and spirit is the eternal one, and the source of all other matter and spirit. Or, (c.) some spirit is eternal, and produced all other spirit and matter. The third hypothesis must be the true one: not the second because we are matter and spirit combined, and, consciously, cannot create; and moreover the first Cause must be single. Not the first, because matter is inferior to mind; and the inferior does not produce the superior.”9

How does Dabney evaluate this? He exposes five problems, which I will summarize: 1. An idealist denies mind-independence, a materialist denies mind-superiority (so would not compel them at those points); 2. He has not proven that all must be either matter or spirit; 3. Other alternatives exist to the three given (Pantheism, Platonism, etc.); 4. it is not (and cannot be) shown that a being of matter-spirit cannot create per se (e.g. Christ could); 5. mere experience cannot show spirit creating, but matter not, since we have no such experience, being embodied.10

The Greeks and their Eternal Universe: Demonstration or Faith?

Like Augustine and Calvin before him, Dabney made the observation that, “This heathen theology [Platonism] is certainly nearest of any to the Christian, here, and less repugnant than any other to the human reason and God's honor.”11 After noting how Plato still had to resort to the eternity of all substance and the difficulty in refuting it, he points to two truths which do so: “that the very notion of the First Cause implies its singleness; and, more solidly, that the unity of plan and working seen in nature, points to only one, single, ultimate cause.”12 One wishes that Dabney would have elaborated on both of these points.

What he does instead is to imagine Plato's reply and then counters it, namely, that preexistent matter still requires a first cause, and, after all, “even omnipotence cannot work, with nothing to work on," an application of ex nihilo nihil fit, a mistaken application that, Dabney notes, Spinoza and Kant would later succumb to as well. That may make sense as far as it goes; and so he concludes only in saying, “It was from an accurate knowledge of the history of philosophy, that the apostle declared, (Hebrews xi:3,) the doctrine of an almighty creation out of nothing is one of pure faith.”13

He notes Clarke’s attempt to demonstrate that the universe cannot be eternal in that, “that which can possibly be thought of as existing and yet not necessary, cannot be eternal,” and that Howe had attempted the same. The latter (though Howe was earlier) was judged better. That is:

“Were matter eternal, it must needs be necessary . But then it must be ubiquitous, homogeneous, immutable, like God's substance; because this inward eternal necessity of being cannot but act always and everywhere alike.”14

Ultimately, Dabney commends the argument from authority in God's word for this particular difficulty.

In a few places, Dabney seems to signal that he does not accept as either valid or sound, the notions that an infinite actualization of things is impossible, nor that all of the universe is shown to be contingent. To the first, Dabney cites the mathematical reality that infinites are conceived as sets, or in abstraction (there may lie one difficulty), but also that eternity future will feature this very thing, each successive day being added to an infinite.15

However, the reader must be thinking, this seems to confuse the abstract concept of an infinity (a potentially infinite set), with an actually traversed infinity. If we combine the two ideas Dabney brings up, we should notice that the future duration involves one crucial difference. The traversed infinite series in the past implies that we have indeed arrived from that infinite duration, whereas the future state does not imply this, but denies "arrival," that is, any termination point of having been traversed.

It is only on the next page that the version of this held to by Turretin makes this very point, and Dabney gives his approval, saying:

“That which was, but is past, cannot be fairly compared with a future which will never be past. Again: a thing destined never to end may have a beginning; but it is impossible to believe that a thing which actually has ended, never had a beginning. Because, the fact that the thing came to an end proves that its cause was outside of itself. The last remark introduces us to a solid argument, and it is solid, because it brings us out of the shadowy region of infinity to the solid ground of causation.”16

A chapter later, in recounting the previous, he says, “no series made up solely of effects, each contingent, can, as a whole, be self-existent.”17 Hence, in the end, Dabney does hold to a demonstration of sorts against an eternal universe, but it must be framed just so.

As to the latter point, it is not that Dabney thinks that there is no recourse in showing the universe to be contingent, but that the defenders of Pantheism loomed so large that the position must be addressed with them in view. They evade the premises in the ordinary natural theological proofs by simply setting forth the whole as necessary, uncaused, etc. So the refutations must get more philosophical.

Dabney against the Moderns

As naive materialism was in its heyday in the middle of the nineteenth century, Hume was (as he has been against among the New Atheists) the favored philosophical father. How does Dabney refute Hume’s objection that such “design” as we see shows rather impotence and futility? In his Dialogues, Hume famously charged the idea of theistic design with both impotence and futility, the first because all contrivance exists because some actor could not achieve a thing but by these means, whereas maximal power would seem to require no means to its ends; and the universe is so filled with unintelligibility and suffering. Alexander's answer is on to something, calling the creation “the first miracle,” whereas for Chalmers' answer Dabney has no patience. At any rate, he concludes, “we have no experience of world-making” and “It is not from experience which teaches us that every effect has its cause, but the a priori reason.”18 Again, one wishes that Dabney would have drawn out how Hume errs in those two ways; but he was correct that the key is to not accept Hume's premises in the first place.

Clarke’s version of the cosmological argument was subject to Kant’s antinomy. Absurdly, it amounted to the same as Russell’s case against Aquinas—i.e. misconstruing the law of causality, which is more specifically that every effect must have a cause—not simply that any-thing must. The whole question is whether or not there is a First Cause, i.e. an Uncaused Cause, and so not an effect. Apart from this recognition, we are only begging the question. This all raises another question, namely, of whether Dabney understood the most basic problem with Kant. Most in the Reformed world after the influence of Van Til have not. Where they do criticize Kant, they make it a matter of autonomy (whether of the intellect or the will), or the problems of subjectivism or mysticism which result from banishing our whole religion down below into the phenomenal realm. They typically miss the whole critique part of The Critique of Pure Reason that sets all that up to begin with.

Dabney follows up his defense of Clarke against Kant by saying,

“I cannot too early utter my protest against Kant's theory, that our regulative, intuitive principles of reason are merely suggestive, (while imperative,) and have no objective validity. Were this true, our whole intelligence would be a delusion. On the other hand, every law of thought is also a law of existence and of reality. Knowledge of this fact is original with every mind when it begins to think, is as intuitive as any other principle of the reason, and is an absolutely necessary condition of all other knowledge. Moreover: the whole train of man's a posteriori knowledge is a continual demonstration of this principle, proving its trustworthiness by the perfect correspondence between our subjective intuitions and empirical truths.”19

He was on to Kant. In layman’s terms, if the “thing in itself” (Kant’s catch-all for the metaphysical essence of things) is beyond the reach of reason—if there is no objective field above and beyond finite minds which may then compare and communicate to each other about said objects, then it is not merely supernatural realities (God, the self, eternity, orthodoxy, etc.) that are eliminated. So too are all natural objects. So too are all theoretical constructs about said objects. So too is Kant’s claim—a claim precisely about the way the world is, outside of our minds, as it surely was meant to apply to all minds—that no finite mind may know or demonstrate that reality as it is in itself. The whole thing is a self-contradiction from root to branch. While Dabney understood that problem at the root, it is not clear to me that he grasped how pervasive the post-Kantian influence was becoming in the universities.

The last part of Dabney’s opening section on natural theology deals separately with Darwinian evolution. That was all the more necessary, given that the first edition of Systematic Theology was published only twelve years after The Origin of Species (1859). After pointing to the antiquity of the idea among the Greeks, he sets forth its basic modern tenets: 1. natural selection and survival of the fittest as the principles; 2. animal husbandry as the clearest analogy; and 3. slight, successive modifications over time as the results. The consequences to our thinking is irresistibly toward materialistic atheism, as no Creator is required for the directedness of such a process, not to mention to degrading of morality as common men will “regard themselves as still brutes.”20

As to the coherence of the theory itself, Dabney first addresses “natural selection,” a sophistry, since selection is, by definition, an intelligent activity. It is “metaphor, in place of induction.”21 The vastness of time needed is conceded by the evolutionist and thus he resorts to the new uniformitarian geology; but, says, Dabney, if this theory has anything to it, then this blind process ought to produce the fossils of “ten thousand nugatory experiments for every one that was an advance.”22 Yet this and other inconveniences to the hypothesis are not what we find. Of the analogy to breeder’s, what is it but intelligent design? And “Naturalists are familiar with the tendency of all varieties, artificially produced by the union of differing progenitors, to revert back to the type of one or other of their ancestors.”23

Finally, as to the means by which the theory is set forth, it departs from ordinary science with its “many yawning chasms between asserted facts and inductions; and many a substitution of the ‘must be’ for the ‘may be’ … The author of the scheme himself knows that verification is, in the nature of the case, impossible.”24

Dabney wrote this as one thoroughly unimpressed and holding that the old teleological argument still held sway.

He points out that teleological arguments are as old as Job and Socrates, though Paley has given it elegance and modern scientific backing. He also recognizes two potential "rival" arguments, the "metaphysical and the teleological arguments," yet only in passing.25 It is a shame that he did not distinguish here between the Thomistic variety, which is more metaphysical at least in speaking of goal-directedness per se and thus using the same sort of reasoning as in the cosmological argument, whereas Paley's is more inductive, a fact which Ed Feser points out with disapproval of the latter kind. It is not clear that Dabney is being that specific in his breakdown. In the end,

"Howe's is the comprehensive, Paley's the partial (but very lucid) display of the a posteriori argument. Paley's premise; that every contrivance must have an intelligent contriver, is but an instance under the more general one, that every effect must have a cause."26

Nevertheless the premises of the argument are bolstered by more examples, as Dabney supplies in his next chapter, not only from the physical world, but from cultural and even emotional "structures," to which he also adds intellect and conscience.27 In that last way, one can see that Dabney sees the moral argument as a kind of species or implication of the teleological.

“The moral phenomena of conscience present a twofold evidence for the being of God ... This faculty is a most ingenious spiritual contrivance, adjusted to a beneficent end: viz., the promotion of virtuous acts, and repression of the wicked ... But second: we shall find, later in the course, that our moral judgments are intuitive, primitive, and necessary; the most inevitable functions of the reason.”28

Thus the moral argument is, for Dabney, one part a function of the teleological and one part a section treated properly under anthropology and ethics.

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1. R. L. Dabney, Systematic Theology (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2002), 6.

2. Systematic Theology, 6.

3. Systematic Theology, 6.

4. Systematic Theology, 7.

5. Systematic Theology, 6.

6. Systematic Theology, 7.

7. Systematic Theology, 9.

8. Systematic Theology, 10.

9. Systematic Theology, 12-13.

10. Systematic Theology, 13.

11. Systematic Theology, 12.

12. Systematic Theology, 11.

13. Systematic Theology, 12.

14. Systematic Theology, 12.

15. Systematic Theology, 19.

16. Systematic Theology, 20.

17. Systematic Theology, 26.

18. Systematic Theology, 18.

19. Systematic Theology, 11.

20. Systematic Theology, 27.

21. Systematic Theology, 28.

22. Systematic Theology, 28.

23. Systematic Theology, 29.

24. Systematic Theology, 31, 32.

25. Systematic Theology, 13

26. Systematic Theology, 14

27. Systematic Theology, 15-16

28. Systematic Theology, 16.