Abstract

In this article I expound some of the main criticisms by David Hume and Immanuel Kant against the legitimacy of natural theology, the philosophical activity of presenting arguments for or against the existence of God. The aim is not to contribute to the scholarship in history of philosophy, but as a starting point for describing the main lines of Richard Swinburne’s approach to natural theology in terms of inductive probabilistic arguments. His proposal has been part of a current philosophical movement of re-establishing the argumentative debate on the existence and nature of God, an area that has been growing in quantity and quality since the 1970’s.

Highlights

  • Richard Swinburne is best known for his proposal of giving a new shape to the traditional enterprise of providing arguments for the existence of God

  • I attempted to describe the main arguments by Hume and Kant against natural theology, which were very influential in the 19th and 20th century academic philosophy

  • My contention was that the criticisms by Hume and Kant as construed above do not justify the idea that natural theology is not a legitimate field of philosophical enquiry anymore, since the modern scientific revolution

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Summary

Introduction

Given the prevalence of the sceptical approach, we can say that the aim is to show that arguments for the existence of God are all doubtful, and that the uncertainty they generate can be harmful to religious practice This is so because, just before the final declaration of who won the debate, Philo asserts that a sceptical attitude regarding the limits of human reason takes the educated man to revealed religion. These are problems to this type of argument, but may be taken to be a challenge to all a posteriori inferences which aim to draw a conclusion about the existence of God. The second problem mentioned in the previous paragraph took Hume to raise many different alternative hypotheses to theism in order to explain the origin of the physical universe. Let us have a look at what Kant objected to natural theology

Kant and the critique of natural theology
Natural Theology in a New Form
Answering Hume
Answering Kant
God as a necessary being and doing without the ontological argument
Concluding Remarks

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