In Defense of Natural Theology: A Post-humean Assessment

The shadow of David Hume, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, has loomed large against all efforts to prove the existence of God from evidence in the natural world. Indeed from Hume’s day to ours, the vast majority of philosophical attacks against the rationality of theism have borne an unmistakable Humean aroma. The last forty years, however, have been marked by a resurgence in Christian theism among philosophers, and the time has come for a thorough reassessment of the case for natural theology. James F. Sennett and Douglas Groothuis have assembled a distinguished team of philosophers to engage the task: Terence Penelhum, Todd M. Furman, Keith Yandell, Garrett J. DeWeese, Joshua Rasmussen, James D. Madden, Robin Collins, Paul Copan, Victor Reppert, J. P. Moreland and R. Douglas Geivett. Together this team makes vigorous individual and cumulative arguments that set Hume’s attacks in fresh perspective and that offer new insights into the value of teleological, cosmological and ontological arguments for God’s existence.

James F. Sennett (Ph.D., University of Nebraska) has taught philosophy at Northwestern College, Pacific Lutheran University, Palm Beach Atlantic University, McNeese State University and Lincoln Christian College, and is the author of Modality, Probability, and Rationality: A Critical Examination of Alvin Plantinga’s Philosophy. The editor of The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader, he has published articles in such professional journals as Philosophia Christi, Faith and Philosophy, Journal of Philosophical Review, Cross Currents, Religious Studies and International Journal for Philosophy of Religion.
Douglas Groothuis (Ph.D., University of Oregon) is professor of philosophy at Denver Seminary in Denver, Colorado. He has published articles in such professional journals as Philosophia Christi, Themelios, Christian Scholars Review, Inquiry and Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society. He is the author of several books, including Unmasking the New Age, Confronting the New Age, Revealing the New Age Jesus, Truth Decay and, in the Wadsworth Philosophers Series, On Pascal and On Jesus.