Professor N. H. G. Robinson and Natural Theology

Abstract

In a recent article ‘The Problem of Natural Theology’, Professor N. H. G. Robinson has considered the requirements of a ‘genuinely empirical natural theology’. For the first section of it, a very clear sorting-out of recent debates on the ontological argument, I have nothing but admiration. It ends with the question: ‘Granted that if we think of God we must think of him as necessarily existing, why must we think of God at all?’, followed by the comment: ‘We seem thrown, without any prospect of rest, between apriorism and [Barthian] empiricism’. Robinson is rightly dissatisfied with that situation, and in his second section he raises the question whether there cannot be an approach to God which the debates on the ontological arguments (as so far described) have overlooked and which may be properly called an ‘empirical’ one, free from Barthian presuppositions. He finds what seems to be such an approach in Professor E. L. Mascall's Existence and Analogy but concludes that it is in fact after all a form of ‘rationalism’. In the third section he criticises Professor T. F. Torrance's defence of Barth's position in a way which seems to me most satisfactory, and in the fourth he makes his own positive proposals. With these I am in substantial agreement. It is only his account of Mascall's position, in particular at the end of his second section, which seems to call for critical comment.