Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ Denken speist sich aus einer breiten Kenntnis früherer Philosophen – aber hat es die Philosophiegeschichte selbst zum Thema? Hannes Amberger bejaht diese Frage: Leibniz’ ...Verständnis der Philosophiegeschichte orientiert sich an einem Fortschrittsparadigma, dem zufolge entscheidende Wahrheiten der Metaphysik von jeher bekannt sind, aber durch eine Verbesserung der philosophischen Methode in einem niemals abgeschlossenen Prozess kontinuierlich weiterentwickelt werden. Dieses für Leibniz lebenslänglich entscheidende Motiv dient Ambergers Studie zugleich als hermeneutischer Schlüssel, der einen neuen Blick auf bekannte Themen der Leibniz-Forschung erlaubt: die Rezeption etwa Thomas Hobbes’, des Platonismus oder der Scholastik, den Dualismus von Materie und Form, die Prästabilierte Harmonie, den Erfahrungshintergrund im barocken Fürstenstaat und die zeitliche Gliederung von Leibniz’ Werkbiografie. Entscheidende Prämisse für Leibniz’ progressives Geschichtsbild, so die These, ist das neuplatonische Motiv der Teilhabe aller Dinge am Wesen Gottes.
A magnificent proliferation of new Christ-centered devotional practices-including affective meditation, imitative suffering, crusade, Eucharistic cults and miracles, passion drama, and liturgical ...performance-reveals profound changes in the Western Christian temperament of the twelfth century and beyond. This change has often been attributed by scholars to an increasing emphasis on God's embodiment in the incarnation and crucifixion of Christ. In Holy Matter, Sara Ritchey offers a fresh narrative explaining theological and devotional change by journeying beyond the human body to ask how religious men and women understood the effects of God's incarnation on the natural, material world. She finds a remarkable willingness on the part of medieval Christians to embrace the material world-its trees, flowers, vines, its worms and wolves-as a locus for divine encounter.
Early signs that perceptions of the material world were shifting can be seen in reformed communities of religious women in the twelfth-century Rhineland. Here Ritchey finds that, in response to the constraints of gendered regulations and spiritual ideals, women created new identities as virgins who, like the mother of Christ, impelled the world's re-creation-their notion of the world's re-creation held that God created the world a second time when Christ was born. In this second act of creation God was seen to be present in the physical world, thus making matter holy. Ritchey then traces the diffusion of this new religious doctrine beyond the Rhineland, showing the profound impact it had on both women and men in professed religious life, especially Franciscans in Italy and Carthusians in England. Drawing on a wide range of sources including art, liturgy, prayer, poetry, meditative guides, and treatises of spiritual instruction, Holy Matter reveals an important transformation in late medieval devotional practice, a shift from metaphor to material, from gazing on images of a God made visible in the splendor of natural beauty to looking at the natural world itself, and finding there God's presence and promise of salvation.
This study offers students of religion and philosophy introductory chapters concerning the concept of natural religion. It holds that we can't engage in useful discussion about the present concept of ...religion without a knowledge of the philosophical history that has shaped that concept. This is discussed with reference to the notion of natural religion to illustrate certain aspects of deism and its legacy. Originally published in 1989.
Abstract In this paper, I present a proposal for a Formal Natural Theology. The approach employed for this task is through a first-order theory, in which fundamental concepts such as divine, ...necessary, and supreme beings, are formally introduced, which allow obtaining the theorems of existence and uniqueness of a divine being, according to the perspective of classical theism.
Contrary to what has been stated in most accounts that Hume intends to make arguments against the existence of God, he aims to attack the claim that religious propositions can be argued; not ...completely reject these propositions. He considers these propositions epistemologically outside of human knowledge but ontologically accepts the existence of God. With such a view, we can dismiss atheistic-agnostic interpretations and relate him to a kind of mysticism. The key to deciding whether or not Hume is a mystic is to determine what criteria we have to consider someone a mystic. Two very influential components here are (1)the belief in the existence of God; (2) the belief that the existence of God is far from our usual reasoning (antirational or irrational).And the second component is enough to call someone like Wittgenstein a fideist. We claim that there is clear evidence of these components in Hume’s works; therefore, what reason do we have to remove Hume from the circle of fideism and mysticism? In this study, after an introduction to the concept and types of fideism, we show that Hume, based on his works, surpasses skepticism and manifests a special kind of fideism.While there is an emphasis on the mystery of the proposition that God exists, he combines Christian faith, in aform that is inseparable from illogical and mysterious propositions such as the incarnation of God. Thus, Hume can be called a Christian mystic.
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Basil and Gregory criticized dialectics on the grounds that it tries to usurp the truths that could only be known through Revelation. Nevertheless, the Church Fathers developed natural theology in ...which they deliberately used arguments based on sensual cognition, human logic or philosophical tradition, and especially on common notions. Although their terminology is often inconsistent and they use technical terms interchangeably, the context provides us with clear ideas of their theses. We should admit that as, far as dialectics and philosophy were concerned, the orthodox authors despite many reservations used all possible methods to reach the truth. They favoured the Scripture and the Tradition, but also respected such sources as sensual perception, human logic or common notions and preconceptions.
Natural Theology Alister McGrath
St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology,
08/2022
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This article explores the biblical foundations and historical development of natural theology, noting in particular its relationship with the emergence of the natural sciences. After considering some ...questions of definition, the biblical foundations of natural theology are considered, followed by a detailed historical engagement with its development within the theological tradition during the patristic period, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Reformation, and the early modern period. The concept of ‘physico-theology’, which emerged during the seventeenth century, is of particular significance in highlighting the close interaction between natural theology and the emerging natural sciences. Although early modern natural theology tended to focus on the physical sciences, interest in the potential of the biological world for natural theology became increasingly important, and is perhaps seen at its zenith in William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802). Yet Darwin’s theory of evolution through a process of natural selection called into question Paley’s idea of a divine watchmaker, suggesting that complex biological structures emerged through the unguided natural process of evolution. The challenges raised by Darwin and his successors for natural theology are carefully evaluated. Yet although Darwin raised some difficulties for traditional forms of natural theology, the growing twentieth-century realization that the universe came into existence with properties that seemed to be fine-tuned for life created new interest in this approach. These approaches are noted, before the article concludes with some wider reflections on the interaction between natural theology and the sciences, particularly the possibility that natural theology might serve as a bridge between science and religion.
N. T. Wright’s important recent discussion of Natural Theology seeks to redefine traditional Natural Theology on Biblical grounds. I show that Wright’s discussion neglects Biblical passages (e.g., ...Acts 14:14–17 and Romans 1–2) which imply that God has left ‘witnesses’ (Acts 14:17) in the natural order, and which contradict Wright’s claim that people cannot start with the natural world apart from Christ and infer that God exists. Contrary to Wright, some contemporary versions of the arguments of Natural Theology do not entail ‘classical theism’ as Wright understood it but increase the plausibility of miracles and the Jesus of the Gospels.
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