![]() Natural theology was never about ‘proof’ as we have come to understand it. Natural theology advocates were not writing to merely dissuade atheists their foils were other religious believers whose doctrinal or denominational differences might be arbitrated by the public evidence of empirical science. If the first thing you learned about natural theology was that it was wrong, the second should be that you didn’t really learn about natural theology – you learned a truncated version rooted in historical misunderstanding.ĭuring the past millennium, the arguments for natural theology were about much more than proving God’s existence. The problem is, reducing natural theology to a question of proof loses much of what it stood for. The central question of natural theology, they affirmed, was this: Can a God, creator, or ‘Intelligence’ be proven to exist? This is the version of natural theology we inherit today. The opposing sides in the courtroom could agree on only one thing. All of this came to a head in 2005, during the Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District court case in the US, which determined whether intelligent design could be taught in a Pennsylvania school’s biology classes. These groups, including evangelical Christians in the US, claimed that the fault was not in natural theology’s inherent logic, but in the out-of-date scientific examples that informed its argument. By the early 1990s, even antievolutionists were latching on to a version of this argument. Dawkins wrote that there was compelling evidence and logic behind the natural theology arguments of previous centuries – particularly those made popular by the British clergyman and philosopher William Paley in 1802 – but that these arguments had been rendered obsolete by Charles Darwin’s accounts of living creatures that were not designed. Just under a decade later, Richard Dawkins wrote The Blind Watchmaker (1986), which also took aim at arguments that God was revealed through the natural world. QED.’ ‘Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.Īdams’s fantastical parody of the design argument came at a time when natural theology was increasingly regarded as both obsolete and absurd. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. For Adams, its existence served as the definitive disproof of a deity: The argument goes something like this: ‘I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, ‘for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’ ‘But,’ says Man, ‘the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. This improbable living creature could provide instant universal translation to anyone who placed it inside their ear canal. ![]() ![]() I remember the British author Douglas Adams’s depiction of the Babel fish in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979). The very grounds of natural theology became something worthy of parody. And by the late 20th century, even those who rejected this secular world had started to turn away from natural theology: in the United States, evangelical Christians and other groups looked to the Bible, not nature, to justify their values. The idea that God’s existence could be proven by simply observing life on Earth – that divine presence could be found in human eyes, the wings of bees, the order of orchids or the movements of the planets – seemed archaic in a secular world where science reigned. The first thing I learned about natural theology was that it was wrong.
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