Romans 1:19–20 cannot be read to address only the divine activity of natural revelation, but also demands the human element. That is what we mean by the natural knowledge of God. However, the objection against the human side may reframe itself, granting some natural knowledge, yet still prohibiting discursive reasoning as a source, or, allowing that, it may still consider formal demonstrations to be illegitimate.

It must be remembered that it is not only the Van Tillian tradition that emphasizes this immediacy of natural knowledge. Reformed Epistemology wanted to challenge the “various Enlightenment epistemological assumptions that have tended to militate against the possibility of immediate knowledge of God.”1 Unlike other views that have strong fideistic tendencies, RE has a high view of general revelation, but it recasts general revelation in a way that privileges immediate knowledge of God and de-emphasizes the mediate knowledge of God, whether that mediation come through philosophical arguments or the accumulation of evidence. It does not invalidate these, but it considers them to be less than decisive.

We must also introduce here Michael Sudduth’s distinction between “natural theology α” and “natural theology β,” the former being that which is known immediately by natural revelation, the latter being the result of rational demonstration.

I find this to be a helpful shorthand, and therefore I will use “natural theology β” here to refer to demonstrative natural theological, regardless of who is making the objection.

Sudduth describes the modern Reformed landscape on this matter:

“First, some historians and theologians of the Reformed tradition have appealed to the innate idea of God as grounds for either rejecting natural theology β or regarding it as unnecessary. Secondly, since the nineteenth century there has been a trend in Protestant theology to take the naturally implanted knowledge of God as intuitive or immediate and to place it in opposition to natural theology β.”2

Unsurprisingly, then, both John Baillie and Alvin Plantinga may be brought back as representatives of this objection.

With all of that in mind, let us consider there to be one basic argument here, which can be stated in slightly different words.

Two Forms of the Argument against Discursive or Demonstrative Natural Theology

First, there is the claim that additional discursive reasoning or arguments are either unnecessary, illegitimate, or both. Consider this brief form:

1. Natural knowledge only entails an innate sense (NTα).

2. Natural knowledge only entails principles (NTα), not conclusions (NTβ).

3. If 1 or 2 is true, NTβ is unnecessary.

4. If 1 or 2 is true, NTβ is illegitimate.

As a hybrid of 3 and 4, using his own terminology, Sudduth recounts the rationale of Baillie who argued that NTβ is superfluous. Hence we have to consider a second form of the criticism.

1. NTβ is useless to anyone who does not in fact have NTα already.

2. NTβ is superfluous to anyone who does have NTα already.

3. But all men do have NTα already. 

4. Therefore NTβ is superfluous.

Baillie rests his case upon a straw man fashioned in the very first words of the relevant chapter: “It has been the prevailing habit of Western philosophy to regard the existence of God as a conclusion, the truth of which is not known to us until we establish it by means of argument.”3  In other words, Baillie makes the mistake in historic theology that we already saw Schreiner make in biblical commentary. Each express the notion that demonstrative natural theology necessarily implies (or at least has been predominately conceived in such a way) that the natural knowledge of God arises entirely from such demonstrations and that creating this knowledge de novo is the purpose of this rational exercise.

Innate Knowledge and “Intuitionist-Only” Models

It was mentioned that Plantinga places a functioning cognitive faculty at the core of his view of warranted belief. For most, this faculty does not imply an extensive innate knowledge but rather a natural capacity. Herein lies the difficulty. What matters in this model is that the knowledge obtained by this faculty “is not arrived at by inference or argument ... but in a much more immediate way.”4 When the knowledge of God arises in us, upon viewing the grandeur of nature, it is important to Plantinga that we do not think of this as an inferential act from premises to conclusions. What matters is that the belief is basic, and thus it must spontaneously arise. In this way,

Plantinga is motivated to give epistemic permission for Christians to be rationally warranted in their faith, yet in a way that downplays the epistemic obligation that used to be claimed for natural theology—that is, the obligation that such arguments placed on the unbeliever. This may be helpful in order to make the distinction between “knowing Christianity to be true and showing Christianity to be true,”5 and seeing how reason plays its ministerial role in each. However, RE goes further than this in its critique of classical apologetics, restraining reason to such an extent that the role it plays in demonstration from one mind to another is very minimal.

Sudduth explores the “exclusive immediacy interpretation of Calvin,” that is, the theory that Calvin’s doctrine of natural knowledge of God “involves no inferential element at all.”6 This view is a general umbrella under which we find several modern thinkers drawing on his notion of the sensus divinitatis as “a knowledge by direct acquaintance.”7

Note that this is not always a denial that there is a kind of knowledge gained through media and argumentation, but it does always deny that we first “arrive at belief in God by way of argument or inference from other beliefs.”8

While Paul Helm seems to agree with this framework, he is qualified in commenting, “it is not obvious that Calvin is saying that each human being is directly aware of God in this manner.”9 He adds that, for Calvin, there is a general “lack of interest in discursive proofs for God’s existence as the basis for religious epistemology,” and yet the knowledge of God that results from that most basic sense “is propositional in content rather than a person to person awareness of God.”10

As we have seen, Reformed theologians have held to some innate knowledge of God, however, as Turretin said, one can only be said to be born with that which is potential, since “it is certain that no actual knowledge is born with us.”11 Specific to this third objection, what we are considering is the notion whether any real knowledge can be at once identified and yet not discursive.

For Scott Oliphint,

“The Enlightenment influence has caused some to reformulate the terms of natural theology. It has caused some to understand that, while there may be a cognitio insita, in which we all have some inkling of a divine Creator, there is also and more importantly (for natural theology) a cognitio acquisita, which employs natural reason to ascertain the existence and perhaps something of the character of a god.”12

It is telling that Oliphint refers to such a conclusion as “a god,” but he is even more clear in marginalizing any acquired natural knowledge as a product of the Enlightenment. Only a “revealed” natural theology can involve acquired knowledge.

In distinguishing between divine knowledge, which “is a sure judgment of truth, without any discursive process, by simple intuition,” Aquinas said of human knowledge that it “forms a sure judgment about a truth by the discursive process of his reason,” and even that “human knowledge is acquired by means of demonstrative reasoning.”13

Suppose that there is an intuition that may be called true knowledge of God. Our actions of reflection, articulation, and especially defense of that idea will certainly be discursive. If we cannot perform these actions upon the idea, then it is not clear what to make of such knowledge. On the other hand, if we can perform these actions upon the idea, then it would seem that we would possess a greater natural knowledge of the idea than by intuition alone. 

The substance of these arguments rests on an unproven either-or premise, that such knowledge is either innate or acquired without remainder. “All this may lie inclosed in the primary intuition,” Hodge suggested, “but it needs to be brought out and established.”14 In other words, even if we grant the extreme intuitionist position, that the natural knowledge of God is always gained intuitively, any account of what this knowledge is will involve inference. This is true even if the account is reflection in one’s own mind.

Perhaps the one raising the objection is allowed one more refinement.

He may now admit the pervasiveness of inferential reason, but then say that it is precisely formal demonstration that is illegitimate, unnecessary and superfluous. However, we must press a question that is by now becoming familiar: Illegitimate, unnecessary, and superfluous for what? Surely one cannot say that the demonstration is adding something illegitimate and yet superfluous. If it is superfluous, then it adds nothing.

Whether it is necessary in these contexts seems to fall back again on the warranted belief concern. But then it just bears repeating that the classical position does not insist that demonstrations are necessary for a particular mind to reasonably believe either in Christian theism or even a general theism. It also does not insist that such demonstrations are necessary as a foundation to a rational Christian theological project. What this begins to suggest is that natural theology may be rationally demonstrative toward the end of expanding our knowledge of God, and that such an expansion may have use both in apologetics and dogmatics.

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1. Michael Sudduth, The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2009), 82.

2. Sudduth, The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology, 58.

3. John Baillie, Our Knowledge of God (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), 107.

4. Alvin Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 35, cf. 64-65.

5. William Lane Craig credits Plantinga for this insight in “Classical Apologetics,” Five Views on Apologetics, ed., Steven B. Cowan, ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), 28.

6. Sudduth, The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology, 60; see 59 for the distinction between “sufficient immediacy” (SI) and “exclusive immediacy” (EI).

7. Dewey Hoitenga, Faith and Reason from Plato to Plantinga (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), 150; cf. T. H. L. Parker, Calvin's Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1959), 9, n.1; Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 171-7;

8. Sudduth, The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology, 60.

9. Paul Helm, Faith and Understanding (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 180.

10. Helm, Faith and Understanding, 181.

11. Francis Turretin, Institutes, I.1.3.1.

12. K. Scott Oliphint, Reasons for Faith: Philosophy in the Service of Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2006), 9-10.

13. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Pt. II-II, Q.9, Art. 1.

14. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, I:202.