Towards an Intellectual History of Natural Theology - As READ - 12 Dec 2011

7/31/2019 Towards an Intellectual History of Natural Theology - As READ - 12 Dec 2011

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TOWARDS AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF NATURAL THEOLOGY

RUSSELL RE MANNING

CENTRE FOR HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE,MEDICINE AND TECHNOLOGY,RESEARCH

SEMINAR

12DECEMBER 2011

What is natural theology? In what follows today I want to investigate this disarmingly

simple question and propose something of a tentative answer.

In the first section, I want to consider the preliminary question of how best to go about

identifying natural theology, that is to say I am concerned with the methodological

question of how best to approach such a quest. In short, my proposal is that we have to

be very wary of latching onto analytic or conceptual definitions of natural theology,

which too frequently raise more questions than they answer and serve only to a fixed

and inflexible framework on a dynamic and highly differentiated tradition of thought, or

better perhaps 'way of thinking.' Instead I propose that the nature (as it were) of natural

theology is best approached via the route of intellectual history rather than analytic or

conceptual definition. In my second section, I will consider the background to a

particularly significant chapter in the history of natural theology, namely seventeenth-

century England.

SECTION I-DEFINING NATURAL THEOLOGY

You might well be thinking at this point why am I making such a fuss about defining

natural theology? Surely, we all know what natural theology is; indeed every theology

undergraduate knows what natural theology is. James Barr, for example in his fine 1993

book based on his Gifford Lectures, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology, doesn't hang

around. Rather than worrying about the intellectual history of natural theology he

simply gets straight on and defines it (on page 1):

Traditionally, natural theology has commonly meant something like

this: that by nature, that is, just by being human beings, men and women have

a certain degree of knowledge of God and awareness of him, or at least a capacity


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for such awareness; and this knowledge or awareness exists anterior to the

special revelation of God.'1

Barr is clearly referring to the long-established tradition of defining natural theology

against so-called 'revealed theology'. This approach is typically developed in terms

(already indicated by Barr's title) of the contrast between the 'two books': nature, the

book of God's works, is the subject of natural theology whilst the book of God's words

Scripture is the subject of revealed theology. The two, the implication seems to be, are

different disciplines with different source material, and, it seems, an autonomy one from

the other; they may or may not come to similar conclusions, they may, or may not, be

given equal standing and the one may be anterior to the other, but we must never in

Francis Bacon's words, 'unwisely mingle or confound these two learnings together.'

After all, 'what has Athens to do with Jerusalem'?2 Significantly however, Bacon's

estimate of the 'difference between the visible marks that God has stamped upon the

surface of the earth, so that we may know its inner secrets, and the legible words that

the Scriptures, or the sages of Antiquity, have set down in the books preserved for us by

tradition' marked a radical departure from the established practice of hermeneutical

theology for which, as Foucault puts it, 'the truth of all these marks whether they are

woven into nature itself or whether they exist in lines on parchments or in libraries is

everywhere the same: coeval with the institution of God.'3 An important consequence of

the Baconian 'sharp distinction' between the knowledge yielded by the interpretation of

the two books is that it becomes possible to define natural theology against revealed

theology in such a way that the two are presented as separate and autonomous

disciplines, which then stand in some sort of relation one to the other be that

complementary or antagonistic.

For reasons which I don't have time to go into today (and anyway am not sure I have

really fathomed [importance of role of hermeneutics see Peter Harrison, The Bible,

Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (2001)]), this natural/revealed contrast

has firmly established itself as the essential starting point for an understanding of the

character of natural theology. It is, however, not a helpful point of departure. By

contrast, an historical approach to defining natural theology suggests instead that

1James Barr,Biblical Faith and Natural Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 1.

2Tertullian,Heretics 7.

3Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences 2nd edn. (Routledge, 2001).


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natural theology is best defined not as a body of knowledge distinct from the systematic

reflection upon revelation but an attitude or way of thinking about the divine. In this

sense, what marks natural theology out from other forms of theology (other attitudes to

or ways of thinking about God) is not so much the source of its knowledge of the divinebut rather the manner of the thinking and a sense of what the point of that reflection is.

To make hopefully a little more sense of this suggestion, let me turn, for a moment to

in Werner Jaeger's words, 'the origin of natural theology and the Greeks.'4 As he puts it:

'the speculations of the pre-Socratics about the Divine displayed a

decided singleness of character in their intellectual form, despite their diversity

of aspects and the multiplicity of their points of departure. Their immediate goal

was the knowledge of nature or of Being. The problem of the origin of all things

was so comprehensive and went so far beyond all traditional beliefs and

opinions that any answer to it had to involve some new insight into the true

nature of these higher powers which the myths revered as the gods. In the all-

creative primal ground of becoming, no matter how much this idea was further

particularised, philosophical thought had always discovered the very essence of

everything that could be called divine. All the individual features and forms of

the gods with which the mythological consciousness had occupied itself becamedissolved in it, and a new conception of deity began to take shape.'5

He continues to affirm that 'if we ask upon what this new evaluation is based, we find

that the real motive for so radical a change in the form of the godhead lies in the idea of

the All (toolon, to pan).'6 As a result, nothing finite or limited has 'any right to the title of

divinity': a thought which in turn leads to the first searchings of natural theology.

Natural theology, then, in this original sense is not simply 'talk about the gods' but the

struggle to say anything at all fitting to the true nature of the divine. Crucially, however,

this struggle did not take the form of an abstraction away from finite things but instead

that of an engagement with nature; it is, Jaeger declares, a 'fact that whenever the

Greeks experienced the Divine, they always had their eyes on reality.'7 Physics,

metaphysics, and theology belong unavoidably together and it is precisely this holistic,

4Werner Jaeger begins the 1947 published version of his 1936 Gifford lectures, The Theology of the Early Greek

Philosophers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1947) with the claim that the book might well have this alternative title.5

Jaeger (1947), 172.6Jaeger (1947), 173.

7Jaeger (1947), 173.


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inclusive, synthetic attitude that is characteristic of that approach of natural theology

that Jaeger describes as 'a specific creation of the Greek mind':

'Theology is a mental attitude which is characteristically Greek, and has

something to do with the great importance which the Greek thinkers attribute to

the logos, for the word theologia means the approach to God or the gods (theoi)

by means of the logos. To the Greeks God became a problem.'8

This problem of God raised by the pre-Socratic concern for the absolute lies behind the

classic distinction between three types of theology: mythical, physical, and civil.

Augustine reports this distinction, which he attributes to the first century BC Roman

writer Marcus Terentius Varro, although it is clear that this is a distinction that Varro

himself derives from a well-established Greek tradition.9 Augustine cites Varro's

description:

'They call one kind of theology fabulous (mythicon), and this is chiefly

used by poets; another natural (physicon), and this is used chiefly by

philosophers; another civil (civile), and this is what the people in the various

countries use....

As to the first of the three I mentioned, there are in it many inventions

that are inconsistent with the dignity and the true nature of the Immortals. Such

are the tales that one god was born from a head, another from a thigh, another

from drops of blood, that gods have been thieves, and adulterers, and have been

slaves of men. In a word, herein is attributed to the gods everything which might

be attributed not only to mankind, but to the most degraded of mankind....

The second is that on which the philosophers have left us many books,

wherein they discuss the origin, dwelling-place, nature, and character of the

gods: whether they came into being in time or have existed from all eternity:

whether they are derived from fire, as Heraclitus believes, or from numbers, as

Pythagoras holds, or from atoms, as Epicurus supposes; and so on with other

theories, the discussion of which is more easily tolerated within the walls of a

lecture-room than out of doors in public....

8Jaeger (1947), 4.

9Augustine, City of God, VI.5.


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The third sort is that which it is the duty of citizens in states, and

especially of those who are priests, to know and to put into practice. From this

we learn what gods are to receive public worship and from whom; what

sacrifices and what other rites are to be performed and by whom....

The first sort of theology is best adapted to the theatre (ad theatrum), the

second to the world (ad mundum), the third to the state (ad urbem).'10

Augustine censures Varro for succumbing to the pressures of a social conformity in his

endorsement of civil theology in spite of his obvious (to Augustine at least) inclination

towards the natural; for his own part, Augustine himself is unequivocal:

'Some gods are natural, others established by men; and concerning those

who have been so established, the literature of the poets gives one account, and

that of the priest another both of which are, nevertheless, so friendly the one to

the other, through fellowship in falsehood, that they are both pleasing to the

demons, to whom the doctrine of the truth is hostile....

So then, neither by the fabulous not by the civil theology does any one

obtain eternal life. [For the one sows base things concerning the gods by feigning

them, the other reaps by cherishing them; the one scatters lies, the other gathers

them together; the one pursues divine things with false crimes, the other

incorporates among divine things the plays which are made up of these crimes;

the one sounds abroad in human songs impious fictions concerning the gods, the

other consecrates these for the festivities of the gods themselves; the one sings

the misdeeds and crimes of the gods, the other loves them; the one gives forth or

feigns, the other either attests the true or delights in the false.] Both are base;

both are damnable.'11

To put the contrast in a slightly different (and less polemical) way, we might identify the

three different types of theology described by Varro as indicating three alternative

attitudes towards the task of theology. The point of mythical theology is to tell stories of

the gods; it has an educational function in preserving the narratives of a particular

religion tradition. What is important to note here is that in spite of the creative and

imaginative character of this poetic theology, its primary purpose is to re-tell or re-




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narrate an established or given set of stories. This is theology as repetition. By contrast,

the purpose of civil theology is resolutely practical; its aim is to maintain the pax

deorum and to ensure that the institutions of the state reflect their divine origins. Civil

theology is political and moral theology; it is as Hobbes put it 'not philosophy but law.'As such it is important to note that the primary concern of such a theology is with the

secular and its primary purpose is to regulate human affairs in accordance with an

established religious tradition. Against both these intentions the aim of natural theology

the theology of the philosophers is rather in a sense simply to be concerned about

God. This concern, or worry, about God is, in an important respect, gratuitous. Natural

theology is concerned about God for its own sake simply because the attempt to think

about God compels and invites free and unconstrained reflection. God is an irresistible

problem for thought. At the same time, of course, this sense of natural theology is in

Varro's terms best adapted to the world; God is of concern because the thought of God is

unavoidable to the philosopher seeking to make sense of his world and his place in it.

Such a natural theology is the culmination of the philosophical engagement with reality,

an engagement that transcends reductive naturalism in the ventured hope that, in the

words of the Cambridge Platonist John Smith, the whole of this visible universe be

whispering out the notions of a Deity. Yet, as Smith continues, we cannot understand it

without some interpreter within,'12 namely human reason, or logos that disclosive

power that gives confidence that these speculations whilst always risked and never

finally accomplished are nonetheless not in vain, but rather transformative and even in

some sense redemptive. And yet, we should be wary of an over-hasty conclusion that

this ispure human reason, unaided and autonomous.

As a further speculation here, I want to suggest that a fourth type may usefully be added

to this tripartite scheme of mythic, natural and civil theology. For want of a better term,

I shall call this type 'faithful theology' (pisticon?) [amongst the alternatives 'fideistic'

comes with too much pejorative baggage attached, which I do not intend, and 'pistic'

just sounds too silly!] By this type of theology, I want to indicate what might be called

the theology of the believers; it is, to follow Varro's formula, best adapted to the church

(ad ecclesia). This theology is above all dogmatic or creedal; its aim is to explicate the

contents of a religious tradition. In contrast to the mythical type of theology, this is not

simply a repetition but an exegetical attitude best encapsulated in Anselm's famous

12John Smith, Of the Existence and Nature of Godreference from Louise Hickman


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'motto' of 'faith seeking understanding.' Of course, this type of theology is often

described precisely as 'natural theology' from Anselm's aim in the Proslogion 'to prove

in a single argument the existence of God, and whatsoever we believe of God' (Preface)

to Anselm's admission that the proposition 'God exists' 'is not self-evident to us; butneeds to be demonstrated by things that are more known to us' (ST I.2.1) to name the

two most obvious examples. However, the key distinction that I want to make between

this type of theology -faithful theology- and that which I am designating as natural

theology (in my stricter sense) is in the goal of the respective approaches. Faithful

theology takes as its starting point a certain definition of God and aims through its

analysis to remain true to its initial assertion; natural theology by contrast has no

dogmatic starting point from which to begin and which serves to constrain (or perhaps

better contain) its reflections, instead on this view natural theology is better

characterised as the search for a definition of God, a quest which it knows can never and

will never be fulfilled.

NB: this designation would include the systematic theologies of Tillich and

Schleiermacher, as much as the self-designated dogmatic theology of Barth, although

both Tillich and Schleiermacher do at times more closely approach natural theology (in

my sense) than Barth ever does. The key point, is that these theologies are, from the

outset undertaken from within what Tillich calls the theological circle; on the basis of

a commitment to a certain ecclesiology, rather than a commitment to revealed as

opposed to natural sources of their theology. Another way of putting this, deliberately

echoing Heidegger, is to characterise this approach as a positive theology, where the

positumthat what is given for theology is not primarily revelation, but faith (without

of course denying the centrality of revelation to any form of theology). As Heidegger

puts it:

theology itself is founded primarily by faith, even though its statements and

procedures of proof formally derive from free operations of reason.13

This is, of course, not to deny the philosophical sophistication or rigour of Anselm or

Aquinas (or of their successors in what is increasingly calling itself analytical

theology) far from it. However, it is to suggest that this approach entails a

significantly different estimation of the character and role of philosophy for theology. At

13Martin Heidegger, Phenomenology and Theology in John D. Caputo (ed.), The Religious (Blackwell, 2002),

p. 57.


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the risk of committing heresy, let me remind you of Bertrand Russell's gloriously

allergic conclusion to the discussion of Aquinas in his History of Western Philosophy:

'There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like

the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is

not engaged in an enquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in

advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is

declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for

some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on

revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not

philosophy, but special pleading. I cannot, therefore, feel that he deserves to be

put on a level with the best philosophers of either Greece or of modern times.'14

Russell is, of course, undoubtedly mistaken in his dismissive view of Aquinas'

engagement with philosophy as a kind of 'pick and mix' exercise of opportunistic self-

justification, combined with smug dogmatic indifference. He is also I am sure all here

would agree wrong in his denigration of Aquinas' philosophical acumen. But, he does

have an important point: Aquinas' starting point is not that of the Platonic Socrates, who

begins in awe and wonder knowing nothing and whose philosophical journey

culminates in the achievement of a learned ignorance, it is rather that of a faithful

believer, whose sacra doctrina aims to treat 'all things...under the aspect of God' (ST

1.1.7) and which itself is subalternated to God's own knowledge of himself. To return to

my previous distinction: whereas natural theology is in search of God, striving towards

a definition of God, faithful theology is the attempt to understand a God already in some

sense known (and certainly known to himself), it aims to expound upon its received and

adhered to definition of God. Bertrand Russell is correct in as much as it does seem clear

that Aquinas and the Platonic Socrates do have different estimations of the scope and

ambition of philosophy within theology; this difference is partly, I suggest explained bymy distinction between 'faithful' and 'natural' theologies.

If natural theology is the theology of the philosophers, a lot depends clearly on the

understanding of philosophy involved. My suggestion is that it is helpful at this point to

introduce a further distinction, namely what might be described as two alternative

philosophical tendencies within natural theology: the Platonic and the Aristotelian.

These approaches can be characterised as on the one hand contemplative and14Bertrand Russell,History of Western Philosophy (Routledge, 1946,1961), 453-4.


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imaginative, apophatic and aesthetic (Platonic) and on the other empirical and

argumentative, cataphatic and scientific (Aristotelian). Of course, these are broad-brush

characterisations and would require a lot more detailed justification than I have time

for here, but the general outlines of this distinction should be clear enough and iscertainly one with some distinguished defenders I mention three, in chronological

order: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Paul Tillich, and Pierre Hadot.

In a famous passage from his Table Talk, dated to 1830, Coleridge declares:

'every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist. I do not think it is possible that

any one born an Aristotelian can become a Platonist; and I am sure that no born

Platonist can ever change into an Aristotelian. They are two classes of men

beside which it is next to impossible to conceive a third. The one considers

reason a quality or attribute; the other considers it a power. I believe that

Aristotle never could get to understand what Plato meant by an idea.'

He continues, laying his cards clearly onto the table:

'Aristotle was, and still is, the sovereign lord of the understanding, and never

could raise himself into that higher state, which was natural to Plato, and has

been so to others, in which the understanding is distinctly contemplated and, as

it were looked down upon, from the throne of actual ideas, or living, inborn,essential truths.'15

Ploughing the same furrow, Paul Tillich suggested a distinction between what he calls

'two types [Wege] of the philosophy of religion' the ontological and the cosmological.16

'the first, the Platonist and idealist method, approaches the divine through

immediate consciousness or awareness of the transcendent ontological ground.

The second, the Aristotelian or Thomistic path, tends to use evidence of the

cosmos as the basis for an inference to a Divine architect. Augustine's books IX

and X of De Trinitate serve as an example of the first kind that considers God

through the spirit, and the Five Ways of Aquinas, which considers God through

the world, as an example of the second path.'17

15See A. J. D. Porteous, 'Platonist or Aristotelian?' in The Classical Review 48:3 (1934), pp. 97-105; 97.

16 Paul Tillich, 'Zwei Wege der Religionsphilosophie' in GW14 vols. (Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlags., 1959-

1974), V (1964), pp. 122-137 and 'The Two Types of the Philosophy of Religion' in The Theology of Culture(New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 12-19.17Douglas Hedley, Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 32.


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In a similar vein Pierre Hadot in his wonderful book The Veil of Isis. An Essay on the

History of an Idea of Nature, distinguishes between Promethean and Orphic 'attitudes' to

the relations between humanity and nature. Hadot writes,

'I shall place the first attitude the one that wishes to discover the secrets of

nature, or the secrets of God, by means of tricks and violence under the

patronage of Prometheus, son of the Titan Iapetos, who, according to Hesiod,

stole the secret of fire from the gods in order to improve the life of mankind, and

who, according to Aeschylus and Plato, brought man the benefits of technology

and civilization....Promethan man demands the right of dominion over nature,

and in the Christian era, the story of Genesis...confirmed him in his certainty of

having rights over nature....I dedicate the other attitude towards nature to

Orpheus...allud[ing] to the seductive power which, according to legend, singing

and playing the lyre give Orpheus over living and nonliving beings. Orpheus thus

penetrates the secrets of nature not through violence but through melody,

rhythm, and harmony. Whereas the Promethean attitude is inspired by audacity,

boundless curiosity, the will to power, and the search for utility, the Orphic

attitude, by contrast, is inspired by respect in the face of mystery and

disinterestedness.'18

Whilst the topic of the place of theology in the thought of both Plato and Aristotle is

clearly another massive one, let me just give a brief indication of how I propose the two

tendencies identified above through Coleridge, Tillich and Hadot are related to their

respective approaches to theology. Against the majority of modern and contemporary

estimations of Plato's philosophical 'independence' from religion, which reflect more

the prejudices and opinions of the commentators than of the subject of their

interpretations, I suggest that Plato's philosophy cannot be thought of apart from his

theology. Even this form of expression, however, is misleading: natural theology is not a

part of philosophy for Plato it is what philosophy becomes in its highest and most

exalted form. It is here that the crucial distinction between Plato's natural theology and

that of his most famous pupil must be made. The central defining characteristic of the

Aristotelian estimation of natural theology is as the culmination of philosophy in the

sense of its being the highest (or first) part of philosophy. For this, Aristotelian model,

natural theology is that part of philosophy that is concerned with the divine. For Plato,

rather, philosophy culminates in natural theology in the sense that it realises its full

18Pierre Hadot,The Veil of Isis. An Essay on the History of an Idea of Nature, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge,

MA: The Belknapp Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 95-6.


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character as human rational enquiry into the nature of humanity and the cosmos when

it recognises that this endeavour is already theological. It is for this reason that it is

possible to speak of the identity of natural theology and philosophy for Plato not in

sense of a bringing together of two alternative (and potentially antagonistic disciplines)but rather as the acknowledgement of the fundamental interchangeability of theology

and philosophy. The true philosopher is the lover of God. By contrast, as Aristotle

develops his understanding of natural theology, particularly in the Metaphysics, it is

clear that he regards philosophy as subsuming theology. For the Aristotelian natural

theology, the stress on the principle of divine transcendence is redoubled, but with a

curious domestication: the divine cannot be within the world -but- the divine is

effectively thought of in terms of an external cause or unmoved mover as a thing

alongside the world. It is here that we find the roots of the conception epitomised by

Aquinas of philosophical natural theology as a handmaiden to sacra doctrina (or

faithful theology) and the effective dissolution of what Tillich identifies as the

Augustinian synthesis of the two absolutes of religion and metaphysics.

With this suggestion, I hope to distinguish two 'types' of natural theology and to use the

idea of the fluctuating fortunes of the Platonic and Aristotelian tendencies to account for

both the variations in the manifestations of natural theology from ancient Greece to the

present day and the fundamental coherence of those different varieties of natural

theology in very different historical contexts. To anticipate for a moment my sweeping

'master-narrative' of the intellectual history of natural theology, my proposal is, in brief,

that natural theology, as a way of thinking, has its origins in Greek philosophical thought

and that from the basic conditions presented by the pre-Socratic cosmologist-

theologians two distinctive tendencies emerge which are developed into two closely

connected, and indeed frequently interweaving (often in the same theologian!), strands

of natural theology. The first, the Platonic, is derived from Plato and brought to full

expression in the neoPlatonic tradition, in both its pagan (Plotinus and Porphyry) and

its Judeo-Christian (Philo, the Alexandrinian Fathers and Augustine) formulations. The

second, the Aristotelian, is of course derived from Aristotle and then developed in

combination with Stoic influences by the Roman natural historians Galen, Pliny and

Cicero, and then, of course, later incorporated into a Christian context by Albert,

Aquinas, and the later Scholastic tradition. To continue for a moment with these overly

generalising comments, I propose the rise of a Renaissance Christian Humanism,


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initially in Florence and then in England, can be characterised by a retrieval of Platonic

forms of natural theology over and against the otherwise dominant Aristotelian

Scholasticism. It is, I propose only by considering the early modern natural theology of

the 'philosopher priests' such as Ray, Boyle and even Toland in the context of arevived theological Platonism, in both the Hermetic, mystical tradition of Giordano

Bruno and Nicholas of Cusa, as well as the 'politer' forms of philosophical mysticism of

the Cambridge Platonists, that a full assessment of the character of their natural

theology can be given, and that it can be most clearly distinguished from previous and

subsequent expressions. It is, indeed part of my wider thesis that the centrality of

Platonism for natural theology in the modern period diminished significantly as the

eighteenth century progressed, largely under the impact of an anti-metaphysical turn in

philosophy leading to an uncomfortable for Platonic natural theology, that is

combination of a strong philosophical agnosticism and an increasingly dominant

empirical materialism, a position epitomised by David Hume. In this context, natural

theology underwent a dramatic transformation, the full significance of which has not

been properly appreciated. From the expansive and speculative philosophical theology

of the latitudinarian natural theology, the eighteenth century saw the rise of the

dogmatic, positivist and empirical natural theology of Hume's Cleanthes and William

Paley. For the sake of completion, I would add that it is this Aristotelian natural

theology (obsessively focused on the argument from design) that comes fatally into

conflict with Darwinian evolutionary naturalism, whereas it is the remnants of the

Platonic strand (importantly reinvigorated under the influence of German Idealism

itself clearly a latter-day form of theological neoPlatonism) that is most able to

accommodate the new science of evolution and indeed ironically to ensure the

persistence of notions of teleology within evolutionary theory. The Aristotelian strand

on the other hand tended more towards reactionary forms of non-scientific natural

theology or, emboldened by the widespread early-twentieth-century critiques of all

forms of metaphysical thinking, morphed into the rationalist forms of arguments for the

existence of God that we know as natural theology within the Anglo-American analytic

tradition of philosophy of religion. As a final word, I propose that we remain confronted

today with a choice between broadly Aristotelian and broadly Platonic styles of natural

theology. On the one hand, the apologetic analytical natural theology of William Lane

Craig et al alongwith the 'new vision' for natural theology of Alister McGrath are both


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(predominantly at least) within the Aristotelian strand, whilst the anti-naturalistic

proposals of the science-and-religion theologies of Jack Haught and Philip Clayton

belong, along with the more recent work of cultural-theologians such as Douglas Hedley,

David Brown, Mark Wynn and Mark C. Taylor, to the Platonic tendency. [5000ww]

Section II

Natural Theology at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford, Cambridge, Deism)

The importance of the renaissance of theological Platonism for early modern scientific

natural theology has not been sufficiently recognised. This is, of course, partly a direct

result of the under-recognition of the significance of Platonism for modernity in general;

a neglect that the unquestioning acceptance of the myth of the rise and fall of natural

theology can only encourage. According to this inaccurate yet widespread myth,

consistent with and indeed encouraged by what John Hedley Brooke has called 'the

simplicity thesis' of the relations between science and religion, the rise of early modern

natural theology (and its subsequent fall) can easily be accounted for as the result of a

combination of the very real rootedness of modern science in Christian theology with

the equally real inevitability of scientific autonomy. Summarised by Laplace's famous

reply that he no longer has any need for the God hypothesis, the view of early modern

natural theology as an inevitable yet time-limited stage in the development of an

independent science retains a wide popular appeal, as testified by the success of

Richard Dawkins' polemics against 'Enlightenment natural theology' and the ubiquity in

undergraduate exam scripts of the metaphor of early modern natural theology as 'the

adolescence of modern science' (the science it is suggested really is independent of its

religious parent and yet for the time being at least remains content to stay within the

safety of the parental home). On this view, early modern natural theology is nothing

more than the half-way house between medieval intellectual theocracy and autonomous

science.

As has been made increasingly clear by recent research, however, the motivations and

contents of the natural theology of this period are inseparable from the context of the


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social and political concerns of this tumultuous era of Republic and Restoration, as well

as the inevitable religious debates that such circumstances produced. Less attention,

however, has been paid to the extent to which the varieties of early modern natural

theology are indebted to a philosophical context within which a revived theologicalPlatonism looms large. As Sarah Hutton notes, the neglect of the significance of

Platonism for the seventeenth century amongst historians of philosophy is partly the

result of an uncritical acceptance of the clamour of the iconoclastic 'moderns'

themselves; a tendency that is reinforced in institutional and disciplinary

specialisations. As she writes, according to the standard intellectual history of the

seventeenth century,

'the key century in the story of modernity...Platonism drops from

view....To give a recent example: in the seventeenth-century volume of the

Cambridge History of Philosophy, Platonism figures as part of the intellectual

background of the period. It is as if philosophy comes of age in that century

shedding the classical props supplied by the humanists of the Renaissance....As a

clear product of the ancient world, Platonism has been left, unproblematically,

beyond the pale of modernity.'19

This exclusion of Platonism is particularly unfortunate as an appreciation of its role in

the philosophical context of early modern natural theology is uniquely able to give the

lie to the view of Enlightenment natural theology as simply the 'settlement' of

Newtonian physics with a Christian theological supplement, or indeed as Christian

theology repackaged in the language and logic and authority of the new natural

philosophy. Instead as Stephen Gaukroger has argued (amongst a wealth of other

things) in his recent bookThe Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping

of Modernity 1210-1685:

'The kind of momentum that lay behind the legitimatory consolidation of

the natural philosophical enterprise from the seventeenth century onwards, a

momentum that marked it out from every other scientific culture, was generated

19Sarah Hutton, 'Introduction' in Douglas Hedley and Sarah Hutton (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity

(Ashgate, 2007).


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not by the intrinsic merits of its programme in celestial mechanics or matter

theory but by a natural-theological imperative.'20

Gaukroger's argument here is that 'the nature of the natural-philosophical exercise was

transformed and provided with a unique vindication and legitimacy' precisely by the

philosophical-theological development of a resurgence of a Platonic solution of theology

and natural philosophy that had been held apart within the predominantly Aristotelian

Scholasticism. Far from a desperate attempt to hang onto the coat-tails of the upwardly

mobile scientific revolution, early modern natural theology instead becomes

acknowledged as effectively enabling the rise and confirming the authority of the

scientific culture of modernity:

'The combination of revelation and natural philosophy the two books

superimposed into a single volume, as it were produced a unique kind of

enterprise, quite different from that of any other scientific culture, and one that

was largely responsible for the subsequent peculiarity of the development of

science in the West. This peculiarity rests in large part on the legitimatory

aspirations that it takes on in the course of the seventeenth century.'21

Echoing Tillich's narrative of the collapse of the Augustinian Christian Platonic natural

theology provoked by the introduction of Aristotle in the thirteenth century, Gaukroger

identifies what he calls 'the Aristotelian Amalgam' characterised by Aquinas' 'attempt to

keep separate foundations and sources for Aristotelian philosophy and Christian

theology, but, given this, to attempt then to reconcile them in the form of an

Aristotelian/Christian amalgam.'22 According to this account, the Augustinian synthesis

of natural philosophy, metaphysics and theology is undone: natural philosophy and

theology are prized apart and re-related back to each other through the mediation of

20Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture. Science and the Making of Modernity 1210-1685

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), p. 507. See also: 'a good part of the distinctive success at the level of

legitimation and consolidation of the scientific enterprise in the early-modern West derives not from any

separation of religion and natural philosophy, but rather from the fact that natural philosophy could be

accommodated to projects in natural theology: what made natural philosophy attractive to so many in the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the prospects it offered for the renewal of natural theology. Far

from science breaking free of religion in the early-modern era, its consolidation depended crucially on

religion being in the driving seat: Christianity took over natural philosophy in the seventeenth century,

setting its agenda and projecting it forward in a way quite different from that of any other scientific culture,

and in the end establishing it as something in part constructed in the image of religion.' 23.21Gaukroger (2007), 507.

22Gaukroger (2007), 77.


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metaphysics, which becomes an autonomous (and in an important sense evacuated)

third between the two. 'In Aquinas, it is theology and natural philosophy that have their

own distinctive contents. Metaphysics stands above them because it is an abstraction

from them, and as an abstraction it enables us to discern the distinctive features of thetwo domains. Aquinas uses it as a way of connecting theology and natural philosophy,

and the skill comes in trying to develop these two in their own directions while keeping

them consonant with one another.'23 Significantly of course it was Aristotle's philosophy

both his natural philosophy and his metaphysics that Aquinas made use of in this

'settlement', both because he had to, on account of the obvious points of incompatibility

between Aristotelian philosophy and the highly platonised Christian theology he

inherited, such as the eternity of the world and the immortality of the soul, and because

he could, given Aristotle's philosophical preference for empiricism and his metaphysical

tendency towards analytical abstraction. The settlement held and there are very good

cultural-political reasons why it did until disrupted by the renaissance retrieval of

Platonism (and it should be noted, varieties of Stoicism and Epicureanism) in Italy in the

latter half of the fifteenth century that once again attempted to mesh natural

philosophy, metaphysics and theology together.

Clearly, now is not the time to tell this whole story, it is enough to note that the result of

this destabilising of the Aristotelian amalgam was the emergence in early modernity of

various forms of resurgent metaphysics that in their different ways broke through the

barriers imposed on natural philosophy and theology by the Aquinian settlement that

are clearly visible in the Renaissance humanists but also in the self-designated

iconoclastic moderns, in particular Descartes and Spinoza. It is in this context that the

first great flourishing of modern natural theology in the late-seventeenth and early-

eighteenth century must be seen. With Gaukroger, I want to suggest that it is this

interpretative framework, or intellectual worldview, that plays an important part in

facilitating the emergence and consolidation of early modern science as the dominant

authority. This is importantly different from Mary Jacob's view of what she calls 'the

Newtonian settlement', as well as Michael Buckley's influential account of the origins of

modern atheism in the fatal rush of early modern natural theologians to embrace the

developing scientific natural philosophy. Both rather see early modern natural theology

as consequent upon the rise of early modern science and, effectively as intellectually

23Gaukroger (2007), 80.


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vacant; for Buckley early modern natural theology cedes all aboriginal theological

authority to that of natural theology (and hence to physics). By contrast, my suggestion

here is that it is the Aquinian demarcations that are ceded by the early modern natural

theologians in favour not of a reduction of theology to natural theology to naturalphilosophy to physics (with the inevitable dire consequences for theology) but in favour

of a metaphysical natural theology that draws to various degrees on a richly

metaphysical natural philosophy.

The problem of the decline of theological authority is thus not to be located here but

rather in a shift that occurs through the eighteenth century in which metaphysics was

once again constrained, not this time in favour of an alternative authority namely that

of received religion (although for some this was the case) but in favour of an emphasis

upon the epistemological turn of Descartes and Locke culminating in the anti-

metaphysical empiricism of Hume and the equally anti-metaphysical 'critical

philosophy' of Kant. The position of Hume and Kant, long famed as the destroyers of

natural theology, is thus reaffirmed but with an important twist. Hume and Kant

represent the completion of the demolition of a particular strand of natural theology,

the metaphysically rich, Platonically infused natural theology of the seventeenth

century, in the place of which emerges an eighteenth-century scientific-physicalist

natural theology that imitates the anti-metaphysical natural sciences that it comes to

depend on. For this sort of natural theology as Hume himself portrays it in his

Dialogues in the character of Cleanthes God is thought of in terms of a slightly exalted

first efficient cause and the focus of attention come to rest firmly on the application

supported by various scientific insights of arguments from design to prove the

existence of God.

What is ironic here is that it is Hume and Kant's rejection of the legitimacy of such

philosophical arguments to the task of proving the existence of God that coincides

precisely with the resurgence of such attempts. What is lost here then is not natural

theology - this re-forms itself as attempts within the anti-metaphysical strictures of

Hume and Kant to counter their sceptical or agnostic conclusions. What is lost though is

the rich metaphysical/Platonically inspired 'awe-struck' natural theology of the late

seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. So, for example, Paley, far from an

anachronistic survival of an already moribund tradition, represents a strikingly up-to-

date engagement with Hume. Paley's 1802 Natural Theologyis throughout an extended


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reply to Hume's Philo. For Paley, the existence of God can in fact be established on the

basis of the evidence of natural design; the hypothesis can be confirmed via empirical

demonstration. It is interesting to note that on this view it is not the Humean-Kantian

philosophical objections that fatally undermine this project of natural theology, indeedin an important sense it is their Copernican revolution in philosophy that enables and

sustains such a natural theology even to recent times, witness for example the debate

between Richard Swinburne and J. L. Mackie. Instead it is developments within the

natural sciences themselves and in particular Darwinian theories of evolution by

natural selection that sound the death knell for this style of anti-metaphysical scientific

natural theology by providing an alternative and scientifically preferable explanation

for the apparent phenomenon of design in the world.

How different this 'Aristotelian' natural theology is from the three main styles of

(Platonic) natural theology of the late seventeenth century the Oxford 'scientist

priests' of 'the Invisible College' (and later the Royal Society), in particular John Wilkins,

Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke; the Cambridge Platonists and 'men of latitude', in

particular John Ray, Henry More and Ralph Cudworth; and the Deists or 'free-thinkers',

in particular John Toland and Matthew Tindal. An unexpected grouping perhaps, but

what I suggest all three styles of natural theology have in common is a rich constructive

metaphysics and a confidence to ascend to 'lofty metaphysical heights' thanks to their

synthetic conviction of a deep unity of reality (estranged but not separated from the

transcendent God upon whom all that is is dependent) and to their 'high' view of reason

as so much more than Hume's 'little agitation of the brain that we call thought.' What

the Oxford natural philosophers, the Cambridge Platonists and the Deists have in

common, I venture, is such a conviction in the differentiated oneness of all that is the

universe in an intimate participation in the ultimate, as well as a confidence in the

capacity of human reason (variously aided by scientific and aesthetic or imaginative

endeavour) to lift the veil of mystery to make the awesome reality of the divine

apparent to all whilst, of course, maintaining the distinctive transcendent alterity of that

God. Of course, they also differ markedly as to the extent to which their natural

theologies are explicitly Platonic and as to the means by which they go about realising

them. They also differ significantly as to how much of their projects can be salvaged by

their successor eighteenth-century natural theologies; a factor which plays an


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important role in their recognition within the standard myth of the rise and fall of

natural theology in modernity. [7300ww]

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Towards an Intellectual History of Natural Theology - As READ - 12 Dec 2011