Are people ‘without excuse’ when looking at the natural world?
At the Second Festival of Theology, Will Jones explored the role of natural theology in belief. He writes:
Is God optional? You know – is it a take it or leave information technology kind of matter whether or non God is there? Our culture certainly thinks it is. Most people today seem to call up that God is something that y'all might reasonably believe in or not, a matter of faith, non reason or logic. Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker'southward Guide to the Galaxy famously had God disappear in a 'puff of logic' for inadvertently proving that he exists by creating the Babel Fish. For, says Man, 'it's a dead giveaway isn't information technology?' And if God has proven that he exists, then, the argument runs, he has left no room for faith, without which he is zero. This idea of needing to exit room for faith goes back to at least Immanuel Kant in the 18th century, who advanced the then radical idea that God'due south existence could not be demonstrated by pure reason simply required a step of faith beyond what ordinary man reason could bear witness.
Such an thought was radical then because up till that time most thinkers – and not just Christians – had held that God's existence could exist known equally sure fact considering information technology was logically necessary to explain the universe as we know it. The Greek pre-Christian philosophers Plato and Aristotle, for instance, had argued that God must exist because there must be an absolute reality that stands behind the shifting forms of nature, a Being in whom subsists the eternal intelligible realm of perfect society and goodness, a offset cause and a pure form. Hither, for example, is Plato, in a passage strikingly redolent of scripture:
God, as the onetime tradition declares, belongings in his mitt the beginning, middle, and end of all that is, travels according to his nature in a straight line towards the accomplishment of his finish. Justice ever accompanies him, and is the punisher of those who fall short of the divine law. … Every homo ought to brand up his mind that he volition exist 1 of the followers of God… And he who would be dear to God must, as far equally is possible, exist similar him and such as he is.
Modern thinkers, including many scientists, take farther argued that God is necessary to explain the universe because without a divine designer it is impossible to account for how finely tuned the laws of nature are for the emergence of life and, nigh pertinently, humankind – a fine-tuning that even not-theist scientists like Stephen Hawking admit. Many also point out that a scientific materialist business relationship of nature has nevertheless to come upward with any plausible mode of explaining the existence of things like consciousness, free will and morality – phenomena bones to our human being experience, and notoriously catchy to squeeze into any materialist world view.
This idea that human beings can, through the use of their ordinary rational faculties, exist confident of the being of their Creator is one endorsed in scripture. Psalm 19 declares that 'the heavens declare the celebrity of God', and Paul in Romans 1:18-20 argues that people are 'without alibi' for their sinful neglect of God, since 'what tin can exist known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. E'er since the cosmos of the globe his eternal ability and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.' James points out that even the demons believe in that location is one God – 'and shudder' (James 2:19).
Nonetheless despite this unmistakable endorsement in scripture, and a long and distinguished history of Christian thinkers engaging with natural theology, many Christians in the terminal century or so have bought into what we might telephone call the Immanuel Kant-Douglas Adams way of thinking. Karl Barth, for case, the eminent early xxth century Reformed theologian, uttered a famous 'Nein!' to natural theology. And although his more carefully stated position came with nuances not always appreciated past those who follow him, at that place tin be petty doubt that large parts of the Reformed and Protestant tradition in which he was such a major figure have jettisoned any real confidence in the theological insights of natural reason. This mirrors similar developments in the wider culture, as the gap between the outlooks of Christians and those without organized religion has widened into what can simply exist described as a yawning gulf. Nonetheless for Christians the logic that animates natural theology has never changed.
The crucial stardom on which the possibility of natural theology rests is that between general revelation and special revelation. Special revelation is what God has revealed of himself and his purposes in human history and which, Christians believe, has been authoritatively captured in the words of Holy Scripture. Full general revelation is what God has made generally available nigh his nature and purposes to all people through rational reflection on, to use Paul'due south words, 'the things he has fabricated'. Since from a Christian point of view both types of revelation reveal truths about God and his creation, the two cannot be in conflict, and if they appear to be then the conflict needs to be resolved, by revisiting either the estimation of scripture or the meaning and accuracy of the empirical data.
A vexed question here is whether full general revelation tin save a person. Clearly conservancy comes only through Jesus Christ, his apologetic death and life-giving resurrection. And all those who repent and put their trust in Jesus receive forgiveness of sins and life in his proper noun. The question is whether it is merely people who accept the do good of special revelation in the form of the Gospel who can share in this salvation, or whether God makes provision for people who never hear the Gospel but answer positively to such revelation as they receive. Cornelius' vision in Acts ten, in which an angel assures him that his prayers have been heard and his alms 'remembered earlier God', and Peter's subsequent declaration that 'God shows no partiality,' and 'in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is adequate to him' (Acts 10:31-v) suggest there is telescopic in God's grace for salvation in Christ via general revelation, at to the lowest degree for those who have had no opportunity to hear the Gospel. This may be supported by Paul'southward teaching that God, 'who is non far from each one of united states of america,' has caused people to search for him 'and perhaps grope for him and find him' (Acts 17:27), while in his divine forbearance he has 'passed over the sins previously committed' (Romans 3:25) and 'disregarded the times of homo ignorance' (Acts 17:30). And of grade at that place is the status of Abraham and others of God's people before Christ. But despite these tantalising intimations we have to acknowledge there is no clear educational activity on this, and it seems God is content to give us only hints about how he will handle those whom the Gospel has not reached, while nosotros are to get on with preaching the Gospel.
Simply in whatever case, one thing we can say with confidence is that full general revelation serves as an important precursor to the Gospel in human being culture, preparing human minds and hearts to receive the message of conservancy in Christ. Another central aspect is that it is the ground on which all people can come up to a shared agreement of the meaning and significance of homo life, on a level sufficient at least for civic friendship and mutual endeavour.
In this regard, nosotros can note that full general revelation shows usa not merely God's existence but besides some of his purposes in creation. Many of these purposes we encounter equally the natural law. The part of this law governing rational human conduct we know of as the rational moral law. In Romans 2:14-16, Paul explains how God has written his police force on the hearts of all people, and how their consciences testify to this revelation in and through their nature. Yes, humanity is fallen, and human reason is wounded and prone to mistake and bias. But fifty-fifty in this fallen, wounded land our reason can, with sufficient care, be expected to attain to many correct conclusions about God and his purposes, his laws.
Time permits me to give only a couple of examples here to illustrate how this procedure works, though the examples are perhaps the nearly pertinent at the present day. The showtime is the key insight that human beings bear the epitome of God. This paradigm of God appears in Genesis 1:26-7, at the creation of humanity, so it is clearly part of special revelation. But information technology is also found outside scripture, in a number of aboriginal writers, so is besides part of the general revelation. Information technology appears, for instance, in Plato, where he contends that the rational soul possessed by humans uniquely bears the imprint of the divine nature. And it is a prominent theme in Stoic philosophy, with the Roman statesman Cicero writing of human beings equally having 'what tin can truly be chosen a lineage, origin, or stock in common' with the divine, then that 'the same moral excellence resides in man and in God, and in no other species besides.' The Stoics regarded the divine Reason, or Logos, to govern the world – an thought we observe picked up in the Gospel of John, where it is identified with Christ – and humanity to be, within nature, the supreme partakers in that divine Reason.
How, without scripture, do these thinkers know that humanity so closely resembles the divine? It is considering human beings possess a rational mind, a mind which information technology is evident from the order of nature must be of the aforementioned kind of affair possessed by the Creator of the creation, by which he conceived and ordered his creation. This is why homo beings are the only part of nature which can know of God and know God and understand his ways insofar every bit he has revealed them to us.
A 2d very topical example is the recognition that humanity is created as a sexed fauna, male person and female, and that this basic duality is fundamental to our nature equally God has designed it. Important moral principles ascend from this sexually differentiated human condition, firstly out of basic respect for the divine design, and secondly because of the weak and dependent condition of the human offspring that effect from the sexual union of male and female. There is a bones moral requirement, for instance, to safeguard the beginnings of human life in its extreme weakness and dependence, and also to ensure that each new man receives the best opportunity to succeed in life through the attentive care of both its mother and father. The main outworking of these observations is the promotion and protection of the establishment of wedlock.
It is clear that both of these key ethical principles – the significance of the prototype of God and of marriage – are being heavily eroded in our civilization, whether through aggressive agendas to legitimise the destruction of dependent human life, exist it very immature, very old or disabled, or the near continual assaults on the sanctity of the married family. But should this really exist any surprise when God himself has been side-lined and presumed to exist irrelevant in mod order? How, after all, can human being beings be recognised as made in the image of God if God's beingness is regarded equally highly questionable? Or how can God'southward design of male and female person and his prescription for the best context for welcoming new human life exist honoured if human being beings are not thought to conduct any divine design at all? Without God it is little wonder that individual subjective experience has begun to take precedence over the Creator'southward purposes.
Abandoning God has consequences. That applies not only on an individual level merely likewise on a social level. Non-believers cannot know God similar believers know God, as their heavenly Father and their Saviour in Christ. But they can know nearly God. They tin know what Plato and Cicero knew: that without God there is no foundation for the truth about humanity and our place in the world and how we ought ideally to exist. For on what else, also the transcendent pattern of our Creator, could human being identity and ideals be objectively grounded? What is left of usa if nosotros are just the incidental by-production of an unintended procedure of gene replication, emerging purposelessly from the slime that happened to have accumulated on some solitary rock among the endless stars?
Western civilization has been moving towards being postal service-Christian and post-God for a long time now – at to the lowest degree since the French Revolution of 1789. Atheism, along with its more diffident cousin agnosticism, have been growing steadily since then in social reach and cultural penetration, while the general revelation of God and his purposes has been progressively side-lined. God is dead, declared Nietzsche, and many have nodded in agreement. The world thinks it can do without God and his purposes, that information technology tin can office just fine with a postmodern, postal service-Christian, post-God vision centred on the subjective feel of the sovereign individual. Merely as Christians we know that despite all its promise of liberation from the shackles of history and nature that is a recipe only for disorder, disillusionment and despair. One of the not bad gifts that we as Christians bring as we appoint with our society is not only the special grace of the Gospel of salvation, but also a fresh clarity nearly the common grace that is ours to share as the human race. Simply is it a gift that our social club will ever be pleased to receive again? The future, of course, is in God's hands. All nosotros can do is keep on offering this gift to those around united states, belongings it out to a world ready on going its own way. In doing this nosotros aspire to that perfection that Jesus calls united states of america to in faux of our heavenly Begetter – the God who 'makes his sunday rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous' (Matthew 5:45-8).
Come up and recall near Christian Promise and the Stop of the World at the teaching morn on tenth November 2018.
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