John Henry Newman and the Illative Sense: A Re-consideration

The aim of this article is to provide an historical description of an important piece of Victorian theology, and subsequently to suggest a new context, or rather a new content for a familiar theme. Firstly, it will consider in what sense Newman may be called a ‘natural theologian’; secondly, it will give an account of the notion of the illative sense within the developing pattern of Newman's thought; finally, it will suggest that, by a unilateral concentration on moral experience — the ‘voice of conscience’ — Newman failed to do justice to the full significance of his own argumentation. The point of the illative sense is not that it helps us to identify any one experiential content, or area of reflection, which might lead us to theistic belief, but that it provides an overall context in which a variety of experiential strata and argumentative strategies may be displayed. Newman was, perhaps, too dominated by an autobiographical sense in the realm of fundamental belief in God to identify and correct the individualism which in dogmatic theology proper he would have avoided. Our theistic materials do not lie simply within our own breasts, but in an inter-rogation, Gadamer-like, of the entire theistic tradition as that is mediated to us by the classic texts of our predecessors.

God and Rationality

Is belief in God rational? Over a century ago, Hegel (following Kant) and Søren Kierkegaard established one set of parameters for discussing that question, but in a language that appears opaque to many philosophers today. Very recently, Alvin Plantinga, James Ross, and George Mavrodes have been debating similar issues in a modern analytic idiom. In this essay, I want to use this modern philosophical language in an attempt to clarify certain issues surrounding the relevant notion of “rationality” and related notions essential to the natural theologian, and in so doing attempt to make presentable the dispute between Hegel and Kierkegaard.For our purposes here, I take “rationality” to be predicated of an epistemological concept of belief, even if, as I believe, any such notion would have to be a special case and a logical derivative of a more general notion of “rationality” as primarily practical.

Berger's Plausibility Structures: A Response to Professor Cairns

Few sociologists can afford to ignore Peter Berger, and theologians only do so at their cost. Berger's contributions to both the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of religion are important and widely influential. However, I think he would be the first to admit that his specifically theological contributions are more tentative and exploratory. Professor Cairns ably shows that in fact Berger's theological ideas have shifted considerably over the last decade. From a highly Barthian position, distinguishing rigidly between ‘religion’ and Christianity, he has now almost become a natural theologian, appealing to ‘signals of transcendence’ within the experience of everyone, whether Christian or not.

The Argument From Design

“NATURAL theology” is generally used as the name of a study which seeks to “get at religious truth” by the use of man's reasoning powers, and not to expound revelation. But I want to limit its application to part of this field. By natural theology I mean here a study which seeks to “get at religious truth” by an empirical examination of things, and not by “pure reason.” It is a (would–be) “scientific” theology. An example of a natural theologian in this sense would be, I suppose, the author of any one of the Bridgewater Treatises, or Paley, or F. R. Tennant. Perhaps I might have called this kind of theology “empirical theology” (or “empiricist theology”); but I do not want to invent new terms more than I have to.