Must Natural Theology Yield Only Insufficient Conclusions?

In my upcoming doctoral dissertation, there is a chapter on theological objections to natural theology. Note that these are not philosophical objections. While there is some overlap, these theological objections are not the sort of thing that a skeptic would care about. Rather, these represent the sort of misgivings that Christians have voiced about natural theological arguments. The concern here is with how natural theology would allegedly distort the view we have of God or His revelation even if (or when) one comes to faith and begins to start doing the rest of their theology.

I have classified these into seven distinct categories, as follows:

(1) “Inconclusive” or “Insufficient” Objections; (2) “Warranted Belief” Objections; (3) “Intuitive over Discursive” Objections; (4) “Greater Than Scripture” Objections; (5) “God of the Philosophers” Objections; (6) “Noetic Effects of Sin” Objections; and (7) “Humble Apologetics” Objections.

In this installment, I will address that first category, and I will do so in two parts as it takes two forms.

Inconclusive for a Christian’s Faith

The first form may be summarized in this way: Natural theological arguments are inconclusive, and so are insufficient as a ground to infallible truth or the certainty promised in Scripture.

No less a thinker than Pascal voiced this form in a very practical way:

“The metaphysical proofs for the existence of God are so remote from human reasoning and so involved that they make little impact, and, even if they did help some people, it would only be for the moment during which they watched the demonstration, because an hour later they would be afraid they had made a mistake.”1

Although I would hate to disagree with a mind as brilliant as Pascal, I must push back with some common sense and experience.

Are the lines of reasoning that natural theology employs really so “remote from human reasoning”? No doubt there are parts of some arguments that seem to fit that description. Yet who does not observe motion and causes? And have we not all heard the cry, “Who gets to decide!” about a moral disagreement? Is the average person so incapable of grasping the difference between a necessary thing and contingent thing, or between ultimate ends and subordinate ends? All of this is what we might call the “stuff” of natural theology’s material. So while granting Pascal’s genius, we may recall that even the very gifted and virtuous have their axes to grind, and a few treasured straw men stored in their closets.

About that other matter Pascal brought up—namely, how easily we forget when we leave the natural theology discussion. Oh? It might also be said: How easily we forget just how many other things we easily forget! Do we not also easily forget when leaving Scripture atop our table? The Apostle James seemed to think so. Remember that man who is a hearer only and not a doer? He “is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like.” (1:23-24). It would seem, then, that this failure to recall is not unique to natural theology.

Now, all of this can be framed as an understandable lament, but as a serious objection to natural theology it is ill-informed. First and foremost, it is a category confusion with respect to infallibility and certainty.

As an adjective modifying the word “truth,” infallibility is a quality proper to God in His communicative act and to God’s word in its substance and designs.

The Bible nowhere teaches that our arguments will be infallible about anything—even our arguments about His infallible word. Moreover, our capacity to grasp a demonstration suffers under the same fallibility, even though the logic may be perfectly valid and sound. The imperfections of the signed do not determine the perfection (or lack thereof) in the signaler or the sign. That would be to view reality backwards.

However, there is another dimension to this form of the objection. It may be that many natural theological arguments are as valid and sound as they claim. And yet we wonder: What good is that to real people if they do not produce a certainty in the belief of their audience? Here again, there is a misapplication of Scripture’s teaching.

Now it concerns the promise of certainty.

Therefore, we must make a distinction between objective certainty and subjective certainty. It is the latter that refers to the levels of strength in one’s own belief that a thing is the case. The former is potentially a misnomer because it is really being used as a synonym for necessary truth—that is, a truth the opposite of which is logically impossible, such as that, “Reality exists.” Then there are negative analytical statements such as “There can be no square-circles,” or positive analytical statements such as “Every effect has a cause.”

Whether natural theological statements, like traditional metaphysics, can deliver on such necessary conclusions and be more than a merely formal relationship—that is, their conclusions really are demonstrating the truth about what is—has been hotly debated ever since the infamous Enlightenment attacks on natural theology by the likes of Hume and Kant.

But no one, on either side of that discussion, has ever been confused as to whether arguments about the contingent matters of history and science yield conclusions that are necessary in themselves.

That is because only necessary being is absolutely necessary. When we call other things “necessary,” we are speaking of a consequent necessity. A thing is absolutely necessary if it is necessary in itself—that is, it is necessary in all possible worlds. A thing is consequently necessary because, though its necessity is a precondition for something else to be, yet this necessity is still consequent upon something else still more necessary. In short, something that possesses the quality of a consequent necessity is, in itself, contingent. It is only necessary relative to that consequence for which it is prerequisite.

Thus, if Paul was an apostle, then it was necessary that he witnessed the risen Christ. However this prerequisite to apostleship was not necessary in itself. It was no more absolutely necessary that Christ reveal Himself to Paul than for God to create Paul in the first place. Only God is necessary in Himself. If we put things in this way and were talking about a different subject, virtually no Christian would disagree.

The trouble is that in recent years, apologetics has imported the anxieties of the modern Christian into its method-making. The “merely probable” is made the enemy of certainty. Matters of soteriology and pneumatology have been conflated with epistemology. The Bible does indeed promise us certainty in our faith; but it makes this promise about subjective certainty—that is, the sense in our own hearts that Christianity is absolutely true. The Holy Spirit accomplishes this as part of the process of salvation.

This does not change the fact that evidential matters in apologetics (e.g., the evidence that the text has not been corrupted, that the empty tomb went uncontested, that the disciples could not have orchestrated events to fulfill prophecies, etc.) always regard contingent matters in the created world. This implies that they are all always, irreducibly about things that need not have been. God did not have to create a world. He did not have to send His Son. He did not have to communicate His word.

In these things there is no absolute necessity laid upon God, which is to say that these things are not necessary in all possible worlds. That means that no logical proof can find them out. One appeals to evidence for the contingent things. In the case of God’s existence one is dealing with the strictest sort of necessities; yet when dealing with the reason for belief about things contingent on God as God, then that which belongs to the contingent realm is unavoidable. Evidence is not proof, and proof is not evidence. They are two different orders, or “levels,” of rational persuasion.

When we speak of “probability” in such contexts, we are not speaking of a level of certainty a believer ought to have regarding them as true. We can be absolutely certain that they are true. But when we abstract any one part of evidential apologetics from the totality of how the Holy Spirit brought us each to faith—that is, when the question is specific to a particular reason for believing in one “unit” of that evidence—each reason will depend upon others, and those grounds upon still others.

The modifying adjective “probable” is actually not fixed to one’s subjective certainty at all. Rather, it is addressing an abstracted object of the mind (i.e., data) and speaking of “the probability that x, given a, b, c …” with the understanding that finite minds will never scratch the surface of that actual set of relevant conditions or “givens.” This is no defect in truth, and no good reason for diminishing one’s certainty. It is only to recognize the straightforward division between that which is necessary and that which is contingent, and to fix our methods accordingly.

Now my subject is specific to natural theological conclusions and not the whole of apologetics. Why then take this roundabout tour into overall method? One reason is that some of this confusion is derived from the “all or nothing” dimension of the Van Tillian epistemology. In that framework, particular truths are so interconnected to the whole truth that a failure in one’s method is perceived wherever we allow our hearers to work from common notions, one truth at a time. Similarly, with respect to certainty, one’s personal belief is suspect to the degree that one’s sense of certainty is incommensurate with the demonstrative claims of the truth communicated.

This is a great confusion. It conflates the modes of being (e.g., necessary, contingent, possible, impossible) and corresponding methods (e.g., demonstrative and probabilistic) with the state of one’s levels of faith or certainty in belief.

Herman Bavinck wrote much on the subject of certainty in faith and reason, and was not always clear himself.2 John Owen was more rigid, and, for that reason, must be read with great care to isolate our exact question from other matters he was treating.3   

Insufficient for the Christian God

The second form may be summarized in this way: Natural theological conclusions are insufficient as to their specific content, demanding only a general, or non-Christian, theism.

While general theism is considered inadequate by some, it is considered antithetical by others.

Van Til understandably stated that “Any other sort of god is no God at all,” but then infers from this that “to prove that some other sort of god exists is to prove that no God exists.”4

This simply does not follow—not in the way that Van Til meant it.

Of course it is true that “any other sort of god is no God at all,” so that if one really is putting that “god” in the place of the true God, then it would follow that the true God would be negated. But that sort of begs the whole question, doesn’t it? Is such a conclusion in fact doing so?

First, anyone who reads Van Til beyond just a few excerpts will know that what he means by this “other sort of God” is precisely the “Romanist” or “Arminian” apologetic that borrows from the philosophical tradition of the Greeks. So when “non-revelational” natural theology is operating, whatever conclusion is derived will be equivalent to what those pagans meant. It will be derived by autonomous reason.

Second, this same idea also assumes the straw man that a conclusion of natural theology implies only that referent signified by the lone term in the conclusion. And this error is not confined to the Van Tillians. Many otherwise intelligent authors have planted their flag here. This has been called “the Gap Problem,” in that there is “a gap between the statements that there is a First Cause and that there is a God.”5

In other words, since the conclusion to the argument says only one, two, or a few things about God, that is “not the God of Scripture.” Why? Because the God of Scripture is “not Aristotle’s unmoved Mover,” or something of the sort. The leap is then made from the truth that Thomas used the same term for the same reason as Aristotle, on the one hand, to the implication that there must be the fullest—let us say, univocal—sense between Aristotle’s use and Aquinas’s use, on the other.

All of this is wrapped up in those conclusions.

But by that standard, no biblical statement would be true about the God of Scripture, since these statements are, for the most part, also only about one, two, or a few attributes at a time. Thus the critics are also guilty of special pleading.

The most infamous example of this fault-finding can be seen in criticisms of the conclusions given by Aquinas. One might ask about his five ways: Is God not more than a First Cause, a Prime Mover, a Necessary Being, or a perfect Essence or Goal-Director, or however we want to shorthand those conclusions?

Yes, indeed, the classical apologist ought to answer. God is so much more than those—but then we should ask: Would you say that He is less? Are you saying that He is not the First Cause. Is He then the second? Then God is an effect. Likewise, do you want to say that God is moved by the creature, contingent upon the creature, a degree in participation with some greater being, a means to an end greater than Himself?

“No, no,” our objector will predictably reply, “It is not that He is less. It is that the unbeliever means something very different by these words.” Perhaps it is because it is borrowed from a pagan thinker. “Certainly Aristotle—from whom Aquinas derived much of his lingo and conceptual scheme—meant something different!”

Many replies could be imagined. But among them should be one from Scripture itself. So too did those pagans on Mars Hill come to mean something very different than Paul in those words of their poet that the Apostle quoted (Acts 17:28). And yet there he was appealing to that common ground all the same. What does it mean to be God’s “offspring”? Certainly something different to a pagan. But how different? I can hardly begin to correct the pagan about what we ought to mean by descending from God if I have no idea of cause in common with the pagan. And it is precisely from this common ground that Paul operated with those Greeks. Offspring at least has to mean that the divine comes first, the human second—the Creator first, the creature second, the spiritual first, the material second, and so forth.

It may be countered that we are speaking of conclusions and not merely premises. So whatever we may have in common with the unbeliever’s natural knowledge of God, it is the one-dimensional conclusion we are blaming. These singular conclusions are of such a bare theism that they barely amount to a theism at all.

Against this, Douglas Groothuis offers a common sense perspective:

“While the effectiveness of each kind of theistic proof must be evaluated individually, the savvy apologist can combine several types of arguments to form a cumulative-case argument for theism that is stronger than the force of any argument taken by itself.”6

In other words, the sort of person who makes this objection could really use a small dose of imagination. Perhaps we too easily fall victim to the fact that these arguments are cursory in nature. At some point, they have to be. There are chapter-long arguments that require an attention span too expansive for the average reader. Sometimes they are stated in the most concise form for no other reason than to introduce the subject matter.

It would be a rather uncharitable reading of Aquinas or Paley, for example, to suppose that their arguments were intended to claim that the referent “God” contains only the sense of a Prime Mover or a Cosmic Watchmaker. Such intellectual laziness is all the more inexcusable when one reads Thomas’s five ways. Even if we restrict each of the five arguments to concluding in a single divine attribute, we have before our eyes, without having to turn our page, five divine attributes. This ought to prompt some reflection that, perhaps, adding premises might also imply an addition of conclusions.

In the Puritan Richard Baxter’s Reasons of the Christian Religion, he infers no less than eighteen divine attributes from the works of God in creation. To be specific, this was a single argument, each attribute following others already proven.7 I invite my reader to get a hold of Baxter’s work, and, if it is less offensive to receive this from the Reformed tradition instead of from Aquinas, the classical apologist will have done his work. A contemporary example of the same for the present reader may be found in Edward Feser’s Five Proofs for the Existence of God. Every single argument examined by Feser is drawn out with a many premises, and, unsurprisingly from what we have seen, many conclusions—an increasingly fuller picture of what must be true about God.

Moreover, the great works on theology proper are teeming with this very sort of reasoning. Richard Muller’s assessment about typical late seventeenth century theology proper sections is that, “there is no obvious movement here into metaphysics strictly so called or into natural theology. The rational argument remains within the framework of the biblical language.”8 Joel Beeke and Mark Jones trace the same lines in saying, “the attributes of God are closely related to the question of God’s being, for if the attributes are God’s perfections then we are able to deduce from them what sort of being God is.”9

If this is standard in works of theology—that is, to seamlessly move, by inference, from one divine attribute to another—then the burden of proof is on the critic to show how this cannot easily be done from the end of one concise natural theological argument to the beginning of another, or even by way of immediate inference from one conclusion to another. The objection is actually a bit embarrassing when one takes the time to think it through.

Open up to any section in Charnock’s Existence and Attributes of God or Mastricht’s second volume of the Theoretical-Practical Theology, just to take two examples.10 The reader will, sooner or later, come across instance after instance of natural theological reasoning. In other words, not merely words, but concepts, not explicitly set forth in Scripture, utilized to show how if divine attribute A is the case, then it follows that divine attribute B, C, or D must also be the case.

That is all natural theological reasoning is. One is discovering truths about God via the nature of things, or, as Paul put it, in the things that have been made. Though the substance of logic—necessary relations—are uncreated and known in the divine mind, yet such created things include our created minds and reasoning processes. Hence this more contemplative theology, whether in apologetics or in our systematic theology, is grounding divine truth in elements of those created natures.

The argument that theistic demonstrations are insufficient because they yield one truth at a time is therefore blameworthy on two counts: first, it does not adequately show why this is problematic to begin with; second, it depends upon confining all such demonstration to only the most concise forms.

Concluding Thoughts on Our Conclusions

In asking the question, Does natural theology yield insufficient conclusions? I might first pose a counter-question: Insufficient for what? What exactly is the questioner expecting natural theology to “do,” and what has he or she been told by its proponents? Or is it perhaps only from its critics that the questioner has formed this very restricted notion? Conclusions are provisional after all. They are not straitjackets from which we cannot emerge to take that next step.

Observe that in both forms, the whole focus is on the “failure” of natural theological reasoning to produce some form of adequate belief in the Christian God. But we must ask—and all the more so if the person we are asking is a Calvinist—Is this ever the task of Christian speech? Even in our evangelism when the exact content of the gospel is being communicated, is it the specific choice of our words (even if Scripture words) or our reasoning about the gospel, that has the power to produce belief? Not at all.

Whatever the causes in our own mind, we are often selective in our suspicions over what is unspiritual and ineffective. This first class of theological objections against natural theology is special pleading. If one’s conclusion about God “falls short” of the doctrine of the Trinity, so, incidentally, does the average Evangelical speech about the Trinity.

If the First Cause is “light years” away from the cross of Christ, then, by all means, make that beeline to the cross! But you will find it more difficult to speak about the Son of God in this way if the person to whom you preach the cross is not a theist in the first place. If that co-worker who borrowed your copy of Mere Christianity means something different by “good” than Lewis did, much less than what God’s law in Scripture does—well, then, correct him! But you will find no audience to speak into if you did not begin to speak at all.

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1. Pascal, Pensées (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 57.

2. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, Volume One: Prolegomena (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 76-82; 571-78; cf. The Certainty of Faith (Paideia Press, 1980).

3. John Owen, The Works of John Owen, Volume IV (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1967), ; cf. Sebastian Rehnman, Divine Discourse: The Theological Methodology of John Owen (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002); and “John Owen on Faith and Reason”, in Kelly M. Kapic and Mark Jones, ed., The Ashgate Research Companion to John Owen’s Theology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2012), 32-39.

4. Cornelius Van Til, Christian Apologetics (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2003), 39.

5. Alexander R. Pruss, “The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd, 2012), 25.

6. Douglas Groothuis, Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2011), 173.

7. Richard Baxter, Practical Works, Volume 2: An Alarm to the Unconverted (Ligonier, PA: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 1990), 12-15. 

8. Richard Muller. Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Volume Three, (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 302.

9.  Joel Beeke and Mark Jones, A Puritan Theology (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2012), 60.

10. To see how both Charnock and Mastricht relate divine immutability to a host of other attributes reasoning on the basis of natural theology, see my essay entitled, “Immutability and the Coherence of Theology Proper in Stephen Charnock and Petrus van Mastricht.”