Who's Afraid of the Unmoved Mover?: The Failure of Postmodern Evangelical Rejections of Natural Theology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In terms of Christian theology, natural theology is understood as that branch of human inquiry which seeks to discover knowledge about the existence and nature of God apart from sources of revealed theology (i.e. the Bible, the person and work of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, and various forms of prophecy). Knowledge of this kind is based on the validity or suggestive power of arguments made from observations of the natural world, human experience, and necessary truths. Various argument forms are employed including deduction, induction, and inferences to the best explanation. Closely related to natural theology is the practice of positive apologetics, where the arguments of natural theology and other aspects of Christian theology are defended rationally, with the claim, either explicit or implicit, that the doctrines and practices of Christianity correspond to reality, are internally consistent, and are existentially viable. The Evangelical philosophers James K. A. Smith, Myron B. Penner, and Carl A. Raschke claim that most forms of natural theology are dependent on modern conceptions of reason, truth, and language. Marshalling postmodernism's critiques of foundationalist epistemology, the correspondence theory of truth, and referential semiotics, these authors argue that Evangelicals should reject natural theology. Appeals to common ground in nature to demonstrate or infer the existence of God will fail because these appeals are beholden to modernity's outmoded grounds for knowledge. Moreover, because of their dependence on modernism, natural theology and apologetics are often hindrances to authentic Christian faith. According to these authors, notions like objectivity, neutrality, and rationality are various forms of idolatry, and any philosophical dependence on knowledge informed by these values will be a kind of idolatry. I ask this key question: Do these postmodern Evangelical philosophers provide sound objections to natural theology? I explicate the objections to natural theology made by Carl A. Raschke, James K. A. Smith, and Myron B. Penner and show that their objections fail by employing primarily analytic philosophical strategies and, on occasion, biblical and systematic theology regarding the issues of truth, rationality, general revelation, and evangelism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.029 | 0.060 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".