Natural Theology of Herman Samuel Reimarus

Abstract

Hermann Samuel Reimarus, an eighteenth-century German philologist and theologian, authored in the last two decades of his life fairly popular works on physico-theology. He proposed two proofs for the existence of God, a version of cosmological proof in which he rather ineptly struggled with the problem of infinity, and physico-theological proof in which he focused on the world of animals – animal anatomy, physiology, and the animal way of life – to show that without the assumption of God as the Creator the phenomena in the animal world cannot be meaningfully explained. Such investigations were important for Reimarus for eschatological reasons, although he did not discuss in any depth human eschatological prospects.