In Defense of Natural Theology: A Post-Humean Assessment Book

In Defense of Natural Theology aims to fill a need in Christian philosophical literature: a decisive counter-attack on Hume's assaults on natural theology. To accomplish this, the editors have called upon this impressive team of scholars.

Within the scope of their book, James Sennett and Douglas Groothius and their team have vigorously and compellingly answered David Hume's attacks on natural religion. Any reader, originally convinced or cowed by Humean ideas, who carefully works through the arguments in each essay, will be forced to seriously reassess his original philosophical commitments or fears. As proponents of natural theology, the editors and authors reveal a classical approach to apologetics. Accordingly, they spend more energy on marshalling reason and evidence to build a case for Christian theism, than on disputing the epistemological rules of the game.

Although the editors briefly mention Reformed Epistemology as a rival apologetic approach, readers who are aware of or sympathetic to this approach would have been helped by at least a brief explanation of how natural theology is justified epistemologically. In his discussion of humans as "epistemically contextual beings" Victor Reppert nearly gives away the whole natural theology enterprise when he states that "for some people natural theology will not be a necessity" (268). This sort of transparency about the relative and person-dependent value of natural theology would have made Douglas Geivett's "cumulative case argument" even more compelling.

I found several essays to be very difficult reading. I wish the authors had somehow made their ideas more accessible.