I. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY#
Throughout the history of Christianity various views have been advanced as to the proper or desired relationship between philosophy or philosophies and Christian theology.
Millard J. Erickson has summarized such views in a fivefold manner.
Christian theology should have no essential relation with or dependence upon (chiefly Greek) philosophy (Tertullian, Martin Luther, 1483-1546).
Christian theology “can be elucidated by philosophy” (Augustine of Hippo, using Neo-Platonism).
Christian theology can “sometimes [be] established [or proved] by philosophy” (Thomas Aquinas, using Aristotle, 384-322 B.C.).
Christian “theology may… be judged by philosophy” (Deism; e. g.,John Toland). Thereby some major Christian teachings were rejected.
Christian theology may have some of its content supplied by philosophy (Georg W. F. Hegel 1770-1831). With Hegel, Christian truths were subordinated to and absorbed into idealistic philosophy.
II. SOME DEFINITIONS OF “NATURAL THEOLOGY”#
Julian Victor Langmead Casserley (1909-78) set forth four different but legitimate definitions of the term “natural theology.”
A. “Any intellectual movement of the mind which is conceived to lie in a Godward direction… [or] a movement of mind which he [man] undertakes because he is a special kind of being-a being with an intellectual destiny which is oriented Godward.”
B. “Some sort of argument, based upon naturalistic premises, for the validity ofreligious behavior, for the existence of God or of a spiritual realm.”
C. “A theology of nature” or “an attempt to show that the theological categories of thought are adequate to the interpretation of nature and natural science.”
D. “The tracing of an analogy between… ’natural’ and ’evangelical’ experience,” such as in Joseph Butler’s (1692-1752) Analogy of Religion and George Berkeley’s (1685-1753) Alciphron.
In view of the forthcoming discussion of worldviews, it seems desirable and appropriate to construct yet another definition of “natural theology” that specifically relates to worldviews and to use that definition and Casserley’s second definition in the consideration of worldviews and theistic arguments.
The newly constructed definition is as follows:
Natural theology is the human effort on the basis of reason (not merely “technical reason,” but the totality of human powers and experience, including nature and history) to construct a worldview.
The various worldviews are to be seen in a very broad sense as expressions of natural theology.
III. REPRESENTATIVE WORLDVIEWS#
A. ATHEISM: THE DENIAL OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD#
1. History
Atheism can be traced to the Sophists and materialists of ancient Greece. It is found among the Jainists in modern India. There has been a Western tradition of atheism since the Renaissance. In the twentieth century it has been allied with Marxist-Leninism, and in the United States also it has become an organized movement.
2. Types
a. Practical Atheism
This is a lifestyle conducted as if there were no God. Perhaps this was the intention of the psalmist when he declared, “The fool says in his heart, There is no God” (14:1a; 53:1a).
b. Postulatory Atheism
In Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings one finds these words: “If there were no gods, how could I bear it not to be a god? Thus there are no gods.”
Here one finds a declaratory form of atheism which may not be more carefully delineated.
c. Theoretical Atheism
This is a more deliberate and formal effort to prove the nonexistence of God.
Exemplars include Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), the French literary figure who denied that God ever lived, and Madalyn Murray O’Hair, (1919-95) the militant, politically oriented American atheist.
3. Result
Under atheism, no knowledge of God in any positive sense is possible, and consequently there can be no revelation of God, only mistaken notions about nonexistent deity.
4. Critique
Atheism ignores or discounts the evidences of design in the universe, the import of widespread human testimony to religious experience, the strong evidence of human religious consciousness, and other considerations favorable to theism.
5. Value
Atheism represents “the right to protest against the element of untruth which clings to every human formulation of divine truth, the ‘all-too-human’ and godless element in all theology.”
B. MATERIALISM: MATTER OR SOME MANIFESTATION OF MATTER AS ULTIMATE REALITY#
1. History and Types
In ancient Greece Leucippus and Democritus taught materialism. In modern materialistic philosophy the focus has shifted from matter to energy.
Modern applications of the worldview of materialism include the regard for financial prosperity as the summum bonum and for modem technology and its many conveniences as the summum bonum.
Secularism, or the view that the only reality is that which pertains to “this age” (hoc saeculum) and “this world” (hie cosmos), is a variation of materialism.
2. Results
According to materialism, God is nonexistent, for personality is only a temporary state, and what is called “soul” or “spirit” is a phase of material existence. Religion is at best superstition, and ethics is expediency.
According to secularism life after death is neglected if not fully denied, and God is not needed to explain the entire world order.
3. Critique
Materialism cancels out one set of realities, the spiritual, so as to exalt another set of realities, the material. It fails to account adequately for the transphysical dimensions in human life; for example, mind, memory, will, and freedom. Likewise, it offers no explanation of design in nature.
4. Value
Materialism serves as a protest against the illusions of speculative argument, poetic imagination, dreams, visions, or hallucinations and as a witness to the tangible, though not ultimate, reality of what theists call the created order.
C. AGNOSTICISM: THE DENIAL OF THE POSSIBILITY OF KNOWING GOD WITH CERTAINTY#
1. History and Types
a. Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Philosophers
- Immanuel Kant
While allowing that human beings can know the “phenomenal” world, he denied that they can know with any certainty the “noumenal” world (Critique of Pure Reason).
Full attainment of human moral goals, however, necessitates life after death and therefore the positing of God, freedom, and immortality (Critique of Practical Reason).
- David Hume (1711-76)
He taught that any meaningful statement “must be either rational or subject to the control of the five physical senses.”
According to Hume, beliefs are “due to custom and instinct, not to reason,” and hence have no “certain and demonstrable character.”
- Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)
He argued that human minds are “necessarily shut out from a knowledge of ultimate reality,” for they are, being relative and finite, incompetent to apprehend the Absolute, even though humans may “have a sort of vague, indefinite assurance” that the Absolute exists.
- Auguste Comte (1798-1857)
His Positivism, which became a religion of humankind as well as a philosophy, assumed that knowledge is limited to phenomena and taught three “stages” of human history as a sociological law.
First, there was the theological stage, characterized by fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism.
Second, there came the metaphysical stage, which coincided with the Enlightenment.
Third, now humans are in the “positive” or scientific stage, wherein knowledge comes through the scientific method.
Moreover, the methods of knowing employed during the first two stages are now passe.
b. Logical Positivism
This philosophical movement arose from a seminar in 1923 at the University of Vienna led by Moritz Schlick and including Ludwig Wittgenstein ( 1889-1951) and Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-89).
It sought to limit meaningful or “representative” language to a priori or analytical or mathematical statements (e.g., “two plus two equals four”) and to a posteriori or synthetic or factually informative or scientifically verifiable statements (e.g., “[T]he stone in my left hand is heavier than the stone in my right hand.”).
Logical positivists allowed language to have a nonrepresentative or “emotive” usage (e.g., “Ouchi”), and for them theological statements rise no higher than the emotive level.
c. Scientism
Similar to Comte’s Positivism, scientism holds that the only valid knowledge is that which is derivable through the scientific method, that is, by observation, experimentation, and verification.
2. Critique
Agnosticism is self-contradictory, for it asserts “that there is an unknowable which cannot be known.” To know that it exists and that we cannot know it is considerable knowledge itself.
Furthermore, like atheism and materialism, agnosticism takes a reductionist approach to all spiritual reality.
3. Value
Agnosticism represents “the truth that man cannot know God by his own efforts” and “that all rational knowledge of God is to the highest degree hypothetical and uncertain.”
D. PANTHEISM: THE IDENTIFICATION OF GOD AND THE MATERIAL WORLD (“GOD IS ALL”)#
1. History and Types
a. Polytheistic Pantheism
This is a “nonreflective” and “naive” form of pantheism.
For it is of the essence of paganism to fail to make a distinction between God and the world; the transition from the creature to the Creator is fluid. Nature is deified and God is drawn into the natural sphere.
b. Reflective or Philosophical Pantheism
Baruch Spinoza (1632-77) held that God is the eternal, universal Substance and that extension and thought are his attributes.
c. Panentheism
This is a halfway house between pantheism and theism.
Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781-1832), its early exponent, sought to combine the absolutism of Schelling and Hegel and the subjectivism of Kant and Fichte. According to this view, “God richly pervades nature and man yet is not identical with either.”
2. Results
God, for pantheism,
is the impersonal intelligence and life which pervades the whole universe. God and nature are one… Nature is simply a passing phase or manifestation of the Infinite Reality which we call God… Therefore there is no personal God who transcends nature.
Thus God is known as nature.
For the pantheist, God cannot be personal, because personlity means self-consciousness, or the ability to differentiate the self from the not-self, and such self-consciousness is contrary to pantheism’s universality. Thus the Creator cannot be distinguished from the creature.
Prayer to God, the consciousness of sin against God, and the incarnation of the Son of God can have no objective reality under pantheism.
3. Critique
a. Pantheism does not deal adequately with the evidence for personality in God and/or in human beings.
b. Pantheism does not offer a better explanation of the origin and order of the world than does theism.
c. Pantheism can be seen as expressive of “an exaggerated doctrine of the divine immanence.
4. Value
Pantheism represents a “one-sided” development of the truth of “the omnipotence of the Creator” to the neglect of the relative independence of the creature. It is true that “God is the Ground of all” and the only one that exists in himself.
E. DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM: THE HISTORICAL INTERACTION OF OPPOSITE ECONOMIC FORCES AS ULTIMATE REALITY#
This worldview is a form of materialism, but it is materialism with “a purposive dialectic movement”.
1. Exponents and Historical Sources
a. Exponents
The leading exponents have been Karl Marx (1818-83) and Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1870-1924).
b. Historical Sources
Its dialectic (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) was derived from G. W. F. Hegel. Also from Hegel came the ideas that the rational is the real and that the state is the divine idea on earth.
Its materialism was derived from Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72).
Its concept of a goal at the end of history was seemingly derived from the Judaeo-Christian heritage.
2. Results
Under dialectical materialism there is no possibility of an ultimate spiritual Being and hence no possibility of his self-disclosure.
Economics is the foundation of truth as well as of society. Religion, ethics, and social institutions are part of its superstructure. Hence religion is determined by economics and can be called “the opiate of the people.”
3. Critique
Dialectical materialism shares the weaknesses of materialism and atheism, and its goal-oriented dimension can be better supplied by the Christian expectation of the last things.
4. Value
a. It represents the truth that humans cannot long survive without economic sustenance.
b. It represents the truth that history has meaning, for it has a goal or end toward which it is moving.
F. PRAGMATISM: THE MEANINGFULNESS OF AN IDEA DETERMINED BY ITS PRACTICAL RESULTS#
1. leading Exponents
Pragmatism is “perhaps the one distinctively American philosophy.” Its leading exponents were Charles Santiago Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), William James (1842-1910), the author of Varieties of Religious Experience, and John Dewey (1859-1952), who was a major influence on American education.
Dewey held to an “instrumentalism” which stressed the problem-solving and moral-development benefits of any idea.
2. Results
Pragmatism is not concerned with ultimate truth or reality but with the experience of utility and practicality. For Dewey, religion is valuable in “bringing persons together in a unity of communication, of shared life and shared experience.”
Other forms of religion which are not so useful should be rejected.
3. Critique
Erickson has raised three probing questions about pragmatism:
a. How ought expediency or practicality to be determined? Is not some value-system apart from pragmatism needed?
b. Does not pragmatism unduly limit “the realm of true statements”?
c. What is the needed or proper “time span for the evaluation of ideas”?
4. Value
Pragmatism offers a valid protest against speculative or abstract systems of thought that have little or no value for human life.
G. EXISTENTIALISM: TRUTH OBTAINABLE BY COMMENCING WITH THE CONCERNS OF THE SELF RATHER THAN WITH METAPHYSICS#
According to this worldview, existence is prior to essence, and thus by participating in existence one finds the mystery of existence, or truth.
Existentialism is irrational, individualistic, freedom-oriented, and subjective.
1. History and Types
a. Atheistic
Its leading exponent has been Jean-Paul Sartre.
b. Neutral, but Inclined to Atheism
This was the posture of Martine Heidegger (1889-1976).
c. Theistic
Its exponents include both its pre-twentieth-century pioneers and its twentieth-century exponents:
Blaise Pascal (1623-62), who stressed the knowledge of the heart
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55), who emphasized knowledge by appropriation
Karl Jaspers (1883-1969)
Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973)
2. Results
Existentialism rejects propositional truth and holds to existential truth, realized through the leap of faith.
For the atheistic type, human existence leads to the denial of the existence of God.
For the theistic type, human existence leads to faith in the God who acts, not God as Being.
This worldview “may be either a hindrance or a handmaid to faith depending on the point of pilgrimage in which one finds himself.
3. Critique
Erickson has focused three criticisms of existentialism:
a. It excessively subjectivizes truth, making it the “truth for me,” so that there is the danger that “the subjective experience becomes the end in itself.”
b. It “has difficulty supporting its values and ethical judgments.”
c. Its stress on “passion” may reflect “the anxiety of insecurity” and be utterly different from genuine Christian faith-commitment.
4. Value
a. Existentialism emphasizes as true the personal dimension of the human self in the apprehension and appropriation of truth.
b. Some of its themes parallel the themes of Christianity: the worth and uniqueness of human persons, “freedom and the necessity of choice,” the passionate involvement needed for faith and truth, and the absurdity and despair of unbelief or noncommitment.
H. PROCESS PHILOSOPHY: PROCESS AS THE ULTIMATE REALITY WITH CHANGE AS THE CLUE TO ITS APPREHENSION#
1. History and Types
a. Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 570-475 B. C.) taught that all reality is to be seen as a constant flux.
b. Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), British-born mathematician and philosopher, fathered the modem process movement.
Other philosophers espousing this worldview have included Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000) and Henry Nelson Wieman (1884-1975).
Theologians who have sought to combine process philosophy and Christian theology include W. Norman Pittenger, John B. Cobb, Jr., and David Ray Griffin.
2. Concepts
Process philosophers refer to “occasions of experience” as the “units of process… characterized by enjoyment.”
Present occasions have a “prehension” or “feeling” for previous occasions. There is limited, though not complete, incorporation of the past into the present, as through memory.
A “nexus” is “the group of connections in a society of actual occasions.”
3. Results
God, according to process thought, “participates in the reality of all else.” God’s Becoming is stressed more than God’s Being, at least by Hartshorne.
Defenders and critics differ as to whether this worldview can be an adequate base for the Christian revelation of God.
4. Critique
Erickson has raised four critical questions about this worldview:
a. What is “the basis of identity” in the “moments of experience” if “not in a substance or a person”?
b. “What is the basis for evaluating change?” Surely not all change is good.
c. “Is there no middle ground between” viewing “change as the basic reality” and viewing “ultimate reality” as “a static, immovable, fixed substance?”
d. “How long is a moment” (in the “moments of experience”)? “If there is an infinite number of these units,” can one properly “speak of them as units at all?”
5. Value
Process philosophy represents the truth that totally static apprehensions of reality are not adequate.
I. IDEALISM AND PERSONALISM: THE SELF OR PERSONHOOD, WHETHER DIVINE OR HUMAN, AS THE ULTIMATE REALITY#
Speculative or absolute idealism and personalism can be coupled because of their similarities, but they need to be treated separately because of their differences.
1. Speculative or Absolute Idealism
This worldview holds that the divine Self and the human self are identical, for the human self is a spark from the divine Self.
a. History
Later Hindu Vedantism, sometimes described as “Theopanism,” held to the identity of God and the human self and denied the reality of the external world.
The “I” philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) taught that all philosophical knowledge derives from “the one principle of the consciousness of the indivisible Ego.”
More moderate forms of idealism are to be found in the philosophical systems of Plato, Immanuel Kant, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716).
b. Results and Critique
Under absolute idealism God’s creation of human beings is denied, human sin as rebellion against God is denied, and any knowledge of “God” is essentially knowledge of the self. Various basic Christian teachings seem to be incompatible with absolute idealism.
c. Value
Absolute idealism represents the truths that:
There is a “divine self-testimony in the human spirit,” or that which we have earlier described as God’s self-disclosure through the inner nature of human beings.
“Man, as man, is always moved in his spirit by God.”
“Human existence cannot be severed from the divine self-revelation.”
2. Personalism
This worldview holds that the divine Person and the human person are akin or similar.
One may begin with a personal Spirit, who is the source of all things, and proceed to human beings as personal spiritual beings, or one may begin with human beings as spiritual persons and attribute personality to the ultimate reality.
a. History
Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817-81) set forth an anti-Hegelian “teleological idealism” with ethics as the “starting point” of metaphysics.
A succession of professors at Boston University, namely, Borden Parker Bowne (1847-1910), Edgar Sheffield Brightman (1884-1953), and Peter Anthony Bertocci (1910-89), together with Ralph Tyler Flewelling (1871-1960) of the University of Southern California, expounded “Boston Personalism.”
b. Results and Critique
Both God and human beings are manifestly personal according to personalism. This worldview tends to validate religious experience. Yet its monism makes it difficult for personalism to allow for sin, judgment, the two natures of Jesus Christ, and certain other Christian teachings.
c. Value
Personalism represents the truth of the kinship of human beings as creatures and God as the personal Creator. It gives philosophical support to the idea that human beings are made for God.
J. DEISM AND THEISM: ONE SUPREME SPIRITUAL BEING AS THE ULTIMATE REALITY#
Although Deism and theism are similar enough to be coupled, there are enough differences to warrant separate discussion.
1. Deism
This worldview is a religion of the one supreme spiritual Being known solely as Creator and Judge (Punisher-Rewarder) and known naturally.
a. History
The earliest exponent of Deism seems to have been Herbert of Cherbury. Among its eighteenth-century advocates were John Toland (1670-1722) and Matthew Tindal (1653?-1733) of England and Thomas Paine (1737-1809) in colonial America.
They posited that human beings had had a natural knowledge of God ever since their creation and denied the historical or special revelation of God.
More recent interpretations of the earlier Deism have stressed the Deist concept of the absentee Creator under the analogy of the watchmaker and the watch, but Deism was more extensive than this theme.
b. Results and Critique
Deism posits one supreme spiritual Being and hence is theistic. It, however, denies categorically any historical self-disclosure of God, whether in the faith of the Old Testament, in Christianity, in later Judaism, or in Islam.
The Christian doctrines of incarnation and redemption are incompatible with Deism. Deism, therefore, is a competitor of the great monotheistic religions, even though one may trace a certain indebtedness of Deism to the Judaeo-Christian heritage.
c. Value
Deism represents the truth of:
the transcendence of God at the expense of the immanence of God.
divine revelation through the creation at the expense of divine revelation through history.
2. Theism
This worldview is a religion of the one supreme spiritual Being, however he may act or be made known.
In a sense theism is more inclusive than Deism, and yet it can serve as an alternative to Deism.
a. History
There were aspects of theism in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. Theism has been a correlate of Christianity and Judaism.
Emil Brunner argued that theism has usually prevailed “only upon the foundation of Christianity.” It “has had a vigorous development only where the Christian theological tradition was living.”
b. Results
Theism posits one supreme spiritual Being. It has developed and utilized the theistic arguments for the existence of God. It has stressed that human beings are in the image of God.
Although it may confess to take into account only nonhistorical aspects of the knowledge of God, it has actually drawn upon the Judaeo-Christian heritage.
c. Critique
Anthony Garrard Newton Flew (1923-) has charged that theism has no adequate criterion for its falsification.
d. Value
Theism represents the truth of the existence of one supreme spiritual Being. It provides a philosophical framework for monotheistic religion without denying the claims relative to divine revelation through history.
IV. CHRISTIANITY AND WORLDVIEWS#
A. The existence and the prevalence of numerous contradictory worldviews, especially in the Western religio-philosophical tradition, serve as persuasive evidence that there is no single “natural theology”
B. Such worldviews vary considerably in respect to their possible compatibility with the Christian revelation of God.
Christian theologians and philosophers in the modem period from time to time have claimed that certain of these worldviews are quite compatible with the Christian faith claims; especially has this been said of theism, personalism, and theistic existentialism, although some have made this claim for process philosophy as well.
The degrees of effectiveness of such alliances between Christianity and specific worldviews will doubtless continue to be debated and reassessed.