This paper aims to counter the recent opinion that there is a peculiar epistemology in the reformed Church which made it negative to natural theology. First, it is shown that there was an early and unanimous adoption of natural theology as the culmination of physics and the beginning of metaphysics by the sixteenth and seventeenth century philosophers of good standing in the reformed Church. Second, it is argued that natural theology cannot be based on revelation, should not assume a peculiar (...) analysis of knowledge and must not pass over demonstration. (shrink)

In this paper, I respond to Adolf Grünbaum’s charge that the cosmological problem to which the theological doctrine of divine creation would, if true, be a solution is really only a pseudoproblem. My discussion focuses on three questions: Why does the possible world that is in fact actual obtain, rather than any of the other possible worlds? Why does a possible world with the natural laws of the actual world obtain, rather than some possible world with a different nomological structure? (...) And why does a possible world in which some contingent things exist obtain, rather than the possible world in which nothing contingent exists? I argue that each of these questions can be understood in such a way that it avoids Grünbaum’s pseudoproblem charge. I also argue that the second and third questions give rise, if pressed, to problems that science cannot solve. Their ultimate answers are either appeals to inexplicable brute facts, which are not explanatory, or appeals to extrascientific explanations, which could be theological. (shrink)

Hypotheses about the shape of causal reality admit of both theistic and non-theistic interpretations. I argue that, on the simplest hypotheses about the causal shape of reality—infinite regress, contingent initial boundary, necessary initial boundary—there is good reason to suppose that non-theism is always either preferable to, or at least the equal of, theism, at least insofar as we restrict our attention merely to the domain of explanation of existence. Moreover, I suggest that it is perfectly proper for naturalists to be (...) undecided between these simple hypotheses about the causal shape of reality: contrary to the proponents of cosmological arguments, there are no decisive objections to any of these simple hypotheses. (I argue this case in detail in connection with objections offered by William Lane Craig; however, I believe that the case holds quite generally.). (shrink)