natural theology

natural theology

• the theory that knowledge of God can be gained by the power of the human mind, e.g. reasoning about the natural world. Since God created the world, knowledge about God can be gained from studying it. This results in knowledge based on reason.

• Natural theology therefore requires both that God’s revelation is present in his creation and that human reason has the ability to discover it. This is typically a catholic view.

STRENGTH": calvin

• Argued that every person has a natural inbuilt sense of God (or deity). God has ensured that each one of us has a sense that there must be a God. This is called sensus divinitatis
  He this argues that those who say they are atheists are really going against their better judgement
  Calvin gives some evidence for this sensus divinitatis by saying that there is no civilisation that has ever existed that has not had a religious aspect

• - ‘There is no nation so barbarous, no race so brutish as not to be imbued with the conviction that there is a God’

  However, Calvin argues that this inbuilt knowledge of God is quite sparse. We can know that God is the Creator, and we know that we owe this God worship, but beyond this we do not know very much

  - Much knowledge about God has to be revealed, predominantly through the Bible

STRENGTH: aquinas

• catholic support

• Natural theology has its roots in Thomas Aquinas’s natural moral law. He emphasised man’s ability to comprehend certain truths about God from nature

• However, Aquinas was careful to distinguish what could be learned through ‘natural reason’ from doctrinal tenets. He said truths learned from nature are ‘preambles to the articles of faith’

• The Catholic Church believes that faith and reason work together. They are not contradictions. Our reasoning powers are another natural path to knowledge of God

• Paul asserts that “since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.

COUNTER to aquinas

• critics argue that these passages do not promote an independent epistemology of God, but rather highlight humanity’s culpability for ignoring God's evident presence.

• Karl Barth, one of the foremost 20th-century critics of natural theology, firmly rejected the idea that humans can know God through reason alone.

• In his Church Dogmatics, Barth claims that true knowledge of God comes only through divine self-revelation in Jesus Christ, not through abstract inferences from nature.

• Barth interprets Romans 1 not as a commendation of natural theology, but as a critique of humanity's failed response to general revelation.

• He asserts that the noetic effects of sin—humankind’s cognitive and moral fallenness—distort our capacity to perceive God through nature.

• Without the corrective lens of faith and the revelation of Christ, what humans “see” in nature is always filtered through a sinful perspective.

COUNTER to calvin

• critics argue that it risks diluting the uniqueness of Christian revelation and undermines the centrality of Christ.

• Theologians like Stanley Hauerwas argue that natural theology, by seeking common rational ground with other worldviews, compromises the particularity and scandal of the Gospel.

• From this perspective, Christianity is not a generic theism but a revelation of God in a specific historical narrative—culminating in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The Christian claim is not merely that “God exists” but that this God—YHWH, revealed in Christ—is the one true God.

• As 1 Corinthians 1:23 notes, “we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” Natural theology, critics claim, softens this offense in favour of generic philosophical theism.