Christian Apologetics has always recognized that God has spoken not only in his verbal revelation now contained in the Scriptures, but  also  through the  natural phenomena and structure of the Creation.  This is made clear in such passages as Psalms 8 and 19, and in Romans 1and Acts 14 and 17, and is implied on many  other occasions.

The  controversy continues however, as to whether the apologist should argue for the existence and attributes of God by starting from the empirical properties of  the  Creation  without   referring   first  to  the inscripturated   portion of revelation. For Reformed thinkers,  this is the essence  of the question.    Can God’s  existence and  attributes be probatively demonstrated by rational proofs derived from nature alone? Or should  we first  presuppose the existence of the God of the biblical revelation, and only then interpret his Creation in terms  of his own  prior interpretation found  in special  revelation?  Is it possible  to prove  the  existence of God  without reference to the Bible, or is this project impossible and therefore a strategic  mistake  for the Christian apologist?

The purpose of this article is to show  that not only does the Bible contain  no encouragement to the Christian apologist to develop a “natural theology” independently from Scripture,  but  that in fact such a project is a reversion from the biblical world-view, in the direction  of pagan  philosophy. The entire  project is a pre-Christian phenomenon in Greek philosophy,  and only entered  the early church’s theology  after  other  compromises with non-Christian thought had  prepared the way  for such efforts.   In fact, it is not only invalid as a method,  but is also incompatible with  the Bible’s view of the knowledge of God.

The  issue  here  is not  whether God  reveals himself through  the creation (usually  referred to as “general revelation”) or  not, but  whether “evidences” as traditionally developed from facts or reason, should be made the basis of theistic proofs constructed apart from the consideration of special revelation. Nor  does  a skeptical attitude to the traditional theistic proofs have any bearing on the validity of the  so-called “transcendental  proof” developed recently by reformed presupposi­ tionalists (Bahnsen, Frame, etc.)

The Tradition Of Natural Theology

Natural theology was established as a legitimate phase  of Catholic thought by  the  early  church Fathers, but  was  not  given its  most  definitive formulation until Thomas Aquinas.  It was Aquinas who  effectively settled  the  question for western Catholicism and  for  much of traditional Protestantism thereafter,  including such  modern evangelical apologists as  Norman Geisler. Systematic  discussions of this question therefore habitually begin with a consideration of St. Thomas’ famous formulation of the  “five ways” of proving God’s  existence by looking  at nature. To this was traditionally added  the “ontological argument” as presented by Anselm of Canterbury. Later analysts further reduced the five ways to three, because some of Aquinas’ formulations turned out  to be  just different  versions of what  came  to be called  the “cosmological” argument from causation or contingency.

Traditional natural  theology has  therefore usually fielded four types of argument intended to prove God’s existence by starting with the Creation. They have been called  the  ontological, the  cosmo­ logical, the  moral and  the  teleological arguments. They correspond roughly  to the classical division of Greek philosophy  into  the  four  central issues of Being, Knowing, Ethics, and Purpose, and they have  been  related to  Aristotle’s four  “causes,” distinguished as  the  material, the  formal, the efficient, and the final cause. Also, modern systems theory tells us that any working  system minimally requires four  “components,” the  material, the informational, and  the  intentional components, plus a more elusive something called “expertise.”

In order to function,  the system called a computer on the  desk before me  requires a material structure made  of metal  and  glass  and  plastic, while  the informational component is built into it by the original designers and  the programmers of the software. Then, it would not be a “computer” rather than a “TV” unless it had been manufactured according to  a  purpose or  end intended by the designers.  The expertise (such as it is) is supplied by my poking at the keyboard to express a certain set of choices which in turn prompt a particular  result  in the printing of these words on the screen.  Through the keyboard I can manipulate the  program to  select pertinent information. Without  all   four  of   these components there would be  no  computer, no working “system,” and so this essay would have to be composed some  other  way.    Similarly, the world  as a whole may be thought of as a system with the same set of components.

By observing  these components, we can make inferences about the   makers of  the  computer. Likewise, natural  theology invites us to look at the four similar components of the world  considered as a whole, and to draw conclusions about its Maker. Hence,  the  traditional Theistic  Proofs  take  their departure from  the  Being,  the  Information, the Morality, and  the Design  of the world.    It is also argued that the  analogous nature of  human knowledge about God does not alter the relevance of the four major theistic proofs.

The reader must go elsewhere for a demonstration that  either  the  theistic  proofs  are all  logically invalid  (the “inferences” and “conclusions” just mentioned do not validly follow from the premises), or that even if formally valid, the conclusions they yield are not the God of the  Bible (cf. Aristotle’s prime mover). Our purpose here  is limited to showing where  they came from, and  that  this  point  of origin  was not the  Bible  itself, but  the  surrounding  Greek intellectual culture.

The  tradition of beginning an apologetic program  with  natural theology  and  then  adding special (or supernatural) theology as a kind of supplement, was described by Catholic theologians in the famous saying that “Grace does not destroy Nature, but only completes it.”  By this they meant that the lower realm of Nature is autonomously intelligible to  us  in  terms of itself, while  our understanding of the higher  realm of Grace must come  from  God’s revelation.  Nature can  be understood to yield its own  science without  prior dependence on  the   faith described in  verbal revelation (such as we find in the Bible), so that we must first derive our natural knowledge of God from the Creation (such  as that  God is there, wise, omnipotent, and  good), before adding  saving knowledge to it (he is also  an eternal  Trinity  of Persons), by the Church’s authority.  In other words, Grace comes to Nature  rather like a religious icing on a secular cake.

Framing the topic this way originated in the first place from  acceptance of  Aristotle’s famous disjunction between  “believing” and  “knowing.” For  Aristotle, real   knowledge was   initially empirical, and this kind of knowing was treated as not  only  available to  the  autonomous human· consciousness  naturally, but was strictly objective. “Knowing”  was   based  empirically  on   our experience of Facts, while “believing” was what you did when you didn’t really “know,”  that is, when you had no empirical basis for what you believed. Accordingly, the  “realm of  faith,” which the Thomists labeled  Grace, was clearly distinct  from the “realm  of science,” which  the Thomists called Nature.  With this statement, we are home already with  the  scientistic prejudice of the  twentieth century, in which  people of science are those who know,while people of faith merely believe.

From  then  on,  the  big question for Catholic thought becomes how to relate the realm of Nature to the realm of Grace. It could even be argued  that this is still the central project of Catholic apologetics. The usual way of doing this is to show that we can start  with  what  we can know  naturally,  and  then supplement this natural theology  with  the added bonus of supernatural revelation from the realm of Grace.   Since grace and  revelation  (and salvation mediated  through the sacraments) come from God, the realm of Grace is above ( Lat. superior),the realm of Nature on the hierarchically-ordered great chain of Being.   That  is, Grace  is  supernatural (above Nature). Accordingly, the realm of Nature is subject to the higher realm, being lower or beneath it ( Lat. inferior),which meant that Theology was Queen of the sciences.   At least, that was how they saw the world  in the Middle Ages.   The Nature-Grace dichotomy provided a motif, which structured such problems as the relation of faith to science, of the sacraments to the lay life, and  even  of church  to state.

Fundamental Assumptions Of Natural Theology

Aristotle taught an autonomist free will, and bequeathed this view of human nature to the Stoic school  that  he inspired.  Of course, he  had  no conception of a Fall affecting the  whole  of our nature, but  simply assumed that  the  will  could autonomously choose  either  way  for  or against anything  presented  to it by the intellect.   In other words, Aristotle taught that God as the prime mover of natural  motion  ( Gk., the  proton kinoun or Lat., primum mobile),could be known by an autonomous intellectual  process essentially the same  as other types of empirical knowing. He had no concept of the “realm of Grace” later  developed by Catholic theologians in the Middle Ages.

Natural  theology accepts this autonomy of the natural intellect as axiomatic, and further  assumes with Strato of Lampsacus  that the universe can be made intelligible in terms of itself. Then, from what we already know of the world, God can be deduced as a first cause, as a necessary being, as an origin of moral meaning, or as a great designer. Considering what the Bible says about knowledge and wisdom and instruction all beginning with the acknowledgment of God  (e.g.in  Prov  1:7, 9:10, 15:33, etc.),  and considering  what St. Paul does in 1 Corinthians 1 and 2, with the idea that the Greeks discovered God apart from revelation, it is disturbing that so many believers have been willing historically  to accept Strato’s naturalistic axiom, that  the principles  for interpreting the world should be found in the world itself, rather  than in an eternal  principle  or “god” outside the  world.  Following David Hume’s acceptance of this thesis, Antony Flew has insisted on  his  “presumption of  atheism.”   Yet many Christians have  remained oblivious to the anti­ Christian character of such a naturalistic assumption, allowing Strato free rein in the lower realm of Nature.

One would  think  that  for the Bible-believing Christian, it would be obvious enough that simply because he is the Creator of the world, God’s  own prior interpretation of the cosmos would  have to be the necessary condition and ground for all true interpretation of reality. Surely, the place to start to understand the world would most naturally be with what God actually says about it? For example, this would  define out of court  any  theory  that asserts an eternal world or  “matter” over  against the creation of everything finite in time.  But if Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1-3 are allowed to define Aristotle’s eternal matter out of court, why should  we not also believe  that  Proverbs 1:7, 9:10, and  15:33 define Aristotle’s empiricism out of court as an adequate basis for a believer’s theory of knowledge?

Aquinas no doubt believed that  he  had  a properly unified world view, rather than the dichotomy suggested to us by the division between Nature and Grace.  How then, was the gap to be bridged?   For Aquinas,  although it was true  that human  nature  in its mind, emotion  and will, was depraved hy the Fall, this depravity was reversed in every  Catholic at  Baptism, which  sacrament regenerated the  soul, freeing it  to  function in essentially the same freedom that Adam had before the Fall.  Free will therefore operated equally well in both the lower realm of Nature and in the higher realm of Grace.  It was  man’s metaphysical autonomy that bridged the gap in practice, between Nature  and Grace, as he reasoned  his way up the chain of Being by analogy  and  allegory  from the lower to the higher realm.
The  other unifying feature of  the  Thomas synthesis between  Nature and Grace was provided by this “analogy of Being.”  This guaranteed that because “even  the different  beings of the spiritual and the material have Being in common,”(   Summa theologiae I: q.65, a.1 ), there  is an  “analogy” or likeness between the finite and the infinite which makes it possible to use human reason to cross the epistemic gulf between  them.

Thomas is seen jumping  this gap in his famous conclusion(s)  to each of the five ways,  “and  this [conclusion  to the argument] is called God.”  This facile equation  of such an entity as a prime mover with  the God  of Christianity is one  of the most serious problems besetting the  proofs.    As one reformed  apologist pointed out,  believers  might reasonably hope  that  the  theistic proofs are all invalid, for should one of them be succesful, we would be faced with proof for a God other than the God of the Bible! Inother words, Christians should see Aristotle’s god as an idol.

Syncretism InThe Early Fathers

Whether the earliest Christians to venture into philosophical apologetics took seriously the fact that the Bible  presupposes, rather  than  proves the existence  of God,  is not  always as clear  in most Fathers  as it was  to Tertullian.  What  is clear, is that they quickly  began  to borrow the arguments of the Greeks wherever they sensed  a philosophic lack in the Bible. This “lack” was really created by the  way  the  Greeks asked the  questions, and formulated their objections to Christianity.  Instead of questioning the presuppositions on which  the questions were based, the early Fathers sought to respond  to objections against religion in much the same way that their Greek mentors  in philosophy had  been  doing for many years.  Terms and arguments, involving important controlling presuppositions, were all  happily borrowed wherever they seemed for the moment useful, without regard  for  the  implications these  ideas might  later  have  for  the  future of the Christian worldview.  But a short-term solution might eventually come  to  have  long-term problems hiding  in its fabric, which would  demand further attention  in a later  context,  and  even  undermine some further argument or doctrine down  the pike.

Perhaps the  most  startling example of this “long-term” effect in our own  day, starts with the time-honored attempt to  solve long-standing problems  in evangelical theology  by appeal  to a libertarian concept of free  will.   The “free  will defense” has long  been  popular as a short-term solution  to the problem  of evil, but what  happens when  the further quite  reasonable conclusion is drawn, that  to be “truly free”  (i.e., in the  sense required for the accepted answer  to the problem of evil), it must also be impossible  for God to know future contingencies  that depend on such freewill choices?    In  this  way,  the  “openness of God” movement is now undermining the entire structure of the traditionally-conceived attributes of God. Yet nobody in that movement seems willing to question the initial  presupposition of libertarian free will. This dogma is simply taken for granted and is given a priviledged status.

A most blatant  early exponent  of the program of syncretism  was the very influential  Clement  of Alexandria  (ca. 150-215 AD), who clearly studied previous syncretists  like Justin, but also noted  the connections between  Greek  thought and  biblical revelation  in the writings  of Philo Judaeus  ( d. ca.
50 AD). Philo was a contemporary of the Apostles who sought to combine Greek thought with the Old Testament  by simply allegorizing the  parts  that didn’t fit.   Clement also  learned syncretistic philosophy from Pantaenus, first head of the famed catechetical school of  Alexandria. It is  now generally agreed that  he probably also  knew Ammonius Saccus, (d. about 240 AD), whose work inspired the Neo-platonist movement, and who was the teacher of both Origen and Plotinus.  It would appear that Clement  was in fact saturated in the philosophical atmosphere of Alexandria’s Middle Platonism, and tried to do for Christianity what he had seen Philo do for Judaism.

Despite  his  desire  to formulate a “Christian Gnosticism,” Clement shows  no understanding of the effects the Fall had  on the intellectual  cast of the natural mind. He simply equates human reason with the “breath of life” breathed into Adam in Gen 2:7 ( Stromateis,i. 94. 2, and v, 87. 2). In that context
he connects  the  ennoia phusike (natural insight, common intellect) of all wise men with the human ability to reason, breathed into Adam at his creation (v. 88. 1-2). He considered that the ”breath  of life” imparted something of the Logos to man, identified with the “image” of God (v. 95. 4-5). The concept of
a natural revelation is developed by Clement  in Stromateis, i. 94. 3-4, and v. 87. 3-88.1. He thought the  Greeks not  only had  the  potential for understanding God’s revelation in  nature, but actually were correct in their grasp of nature’s true principles. In i. 26. 2ff, he  refers  to both  innate wisdom  and divine inspiration from the Logos as sources of Greek wisdom  (cf. v. 88. 2-3). In v. 29. 4 he even represents Pythagoras and Plato as inspired prophets!   Elsewhere  he compares  Greek thought to showers rained  on them by God, or to seeds broadcast  by the divine Sower.  He seems to have got these images from Philo, Justin Martyr, and the Wisdom of Solomon.   Likewise  in Ecclesiasticus, an wisdom is compared with  a rainfall of divine  Wisdom.   For Clement, as for  Philo,  the human nous (mind) is the divine element in all men. Human  wisdom is viewed in  Philo, Justin, and Clement as a seed or particle of the original Logos. The parallel with Stoicism and with  Plato himself before them, is very apparent here.

Both Justin and  Clement  therewith trace both human philosophic speculation and  the  special revelation of the Prophets back to a common source, effectively blending natural theology with revelation.   Both Greek philosophers and  biblical Prophets are alike divinely inspired.

But Clement is not satisfied  with this.  He also argues with  Justin and  Philo, that  the  Greeks plagiarized the Old Testament  writings,  and  also that much Greek thought has a demonic origin (in such events as the irruption of angels found  in the interpretation of Genesis 6:1-4 in Enoch 16:3}, that angels descended from heaven to mate with human women  and  generate  the false religions  taught  in the heathen  mythologies. In this way, he can have his philosophic cake and  eat  it too, for Clement treats this theft of divine wisdom as an act of divine providence.

By the time we observe Clement’s acquiescence in the further  notions  that the observable  world is but an image or representation of a spiritual  world of ideas above, that God made the world  of a pre­existent matter rather than   ex  nihilo, and  that although the  world was  “created,” it  was  not generated  in time, but in eternity  past, we realize that  he is no longer developing a Christian philosophy, but  a christianized gnosticism.   In fact, Clement’s general view of the Greeks is that their gnosis was intended by God to prepare  the world for the “truegnosis” of the Christian revelation. This is the  theme  developed so fully  by Eusebius of Caesarea’s  Preparation For The  Gospel, which summarizes the syncretistic approach to the Greeks in some detail, providing what became the classical statement from the third  century onwards.  Its eventual fruits in the theology of Eastern Orthodoxy can be observed in such competent accounts as Vladimir Lossky’s The Mystical Theology Of the Eastern Church, in which  the Neo-platonist vision of the sixth-century Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite is treated as if it were an essential part of the apostolic deposit!

It must  be said  in  his  favor   however, that Clement was at least trying  to respond  to the two most serious problems faced by apologists in the second and third centuries.  First, not only did many uneducated Christians have  a highly negative attitude  to philosophy and  to Greek education in general, a “fundamentalist” attitude evidencing a full retreat from any responsibility for developing a full-scaleChristian philosophy out of the materials of revelation, but secondly, philosophers themselves were  writing detailed refutations of Christian claims, of which  the Alethes  Logos (True Doctrine) of Celsus is the best known. Much of this pagan attack on  Christianity has  been  reconstructed from  the extensive quotations given by Origen in his  famous answer, the  Contra  Celsum  and  is available in a recent edition.

But the question remains to fester, that the attempt  to christianize  Greek philosophy is neces­ sarily bedeviled  by the basis of all non-Christian thought systems in the fallen assumption of human autonomy,  with its concomitant problems of natu­ ralism, Being-in-general, and the perennial conflict of an ultimate  unity with an ultimate  diversity.  It could  usefully be argued that  the  early  church developed  the doctrines  of Canon, creatio ex nihilo, and Trinity in response to these three problems.

The Pre-Socratics

Little attention  will be given here to the details of the Greek  ideas  of God  before  Socrates.    The important point is  that  the  entire pre-socratic program was based on the Stratonician assumption of a self-interpreting Being-in-general  which  was really an eternally  evolving  organism.  That is, the eternal substance of Being was a living thing.  The word hylozoism was coined to describe this notion, . and means “living matter.”  The evolving world we experience was  “more like  a cabbage  than  a machine,” as one writer put it.

By “God” the pre-socratics either meant

1)  the eternal  substance out  of which  the world evolved, or
2)   the universal  principles  of unity, diversity, law and change which were somehow innate within that  evolving substance from  the  beginning. This is living and evolving life-process threw up plants, animals, and men, as well as
3)  the finite polytheistic divinities of the mytholo­ gies, as it flowed on in time. As a representative of meaning #2), we  shall  consider here  only Xenophanes of Colophon.

Xenophanes  is credited  with  a strong  view of “the One God.”  The fragments and references that remain  of him indicate  that  he was asserting  the absolute unity  of the One  God  over  against  the polytheism of his day, and collectively, his account leads to the view that his One God was in fact identical to the unity of Being as a universal cause of the  phainomena (appearances) of the Many.  He does not definitely deny the existence of the Many as Parmenides was to do, but like Pythagoras and Theagenes of Rhegium, he does use allegorism  to show the “real meaning” of the polytheistic myths. Even the gods of the pantheon are reduced to phenomena, although Xenophanes  seems to have thought  that the natural forces of the world  really did have “gods” animating them. Of “the One God” he  said   that   he  “is  all  sight, all  thought, all hearing….[he] without effort brandishes all things by the thought of his mind (noon phreni) [he] abides ever in the same, never moving.” He “is coherent with all things ( sumphune  tois pasin ).” Over against the  many  gods, he  is  “eternal” (  aidios ), not “immortal” ( athanatos ), being both “.unbegotten” ( agennetos  ) and  “free from becoming”  ( agenetos ). And over against  these attributes, all phenomena, including  the soul, is made of material substances of varying grades, so that limit and flow, or rest and motion, can apply to phenomena only.

But nowhere  in the pre-socratics  do we find a theistic  “proof” that  starts with  the  world and concludes with a distinct Creator-God. The reason is obvious.  Since the ultimate  divinity is Being-in­ general, this is to be presupposed, not proved.  So Xenophanes  illustrates both  the strength and  the irrelevance of presocratic speculation about  the reality of a god. It was not until Plato and Aristotle, that the task of refuting  the denial of the existence of gods seems to take the form of an attempt to prove their existence. And even then, though  the form of the argument is increasingly  clear, the result is still highly  ambiguous, for nothing  in Greek  thought from Thales to Plotinus gives any solution to the problem  of pantheism versus  polytheism, to the perennial One-and-Many problem.

Plato

The main  source  in  Plato’s work  on natural theology is  his  loosely-argued defense of the existence of God (or gods) in the  Laws, chapter  X. This is a dialogue in which an unnamed “Athenian” explains to his largely  acquiescent hearers why it is inappropriate for philosophers to be allowed  to teach either, 1) that  there  are no gods, or 2), that the gods do not concern themselves with human affairs  (a complaint commonly made  about  the group who  coalesced around Epicurus in  the following century), or 3), that the gods can be bribed and distracted from concerns of justice by sacrifices and prayers.  Sometimes Plato refers to “God” as if he means  a single  personal deity, and more often to “the gods” as a general reference, indicating  that his own view of God was caught in the classic Greek dilemma of the unity and diversity of the Ultimate. Much of value  has been  written  for centuries  on “Plato’s view  of God,” but  the  upshot of this discussion is that  he equated Being-in-general with  The Good,  and  with  God  as containing his “world of ideas.”   So when he refers to “God,” Christians should not  treat  this as if it describes anything like  orthodox Christian theism.    This sliding scale of ideas about “the Divine” (to Theion or ho Theos ) amounts only to an observation  that Being, the All, the Cosmos,  manifests  a group  of divine attributes.

So when Plato  argues ( in  Laws X ) to the existence  of the gods  from the  consensus gentium
(agreement  of the nations),  he is simply  claiming the common sense view that people recognize that human nature as a whole senses the presence of God in the order of the world.   When he argues in the same context  that  the orderly  motions  of the sun and stars speak of the gods, he is merely pointing to a “design  factor” in the universe  itself.  He also observes  that the love the gods  have for justice is an appropriate basis  for  human laws,  but  this speaks only  of our  need  for standards, not  of a “proof.”  Plato’s  argument that  the motions  and changes  of the world  require  a self-moved origin which  he calls  the  soul,  and  then  equates with God, comes closest  in this dialogue to a theistic proof as we recognize it today.  Unfortunately, he never  transcends the  problem of how  to decide between one God and many. That task he left to his star  pupil,  Aristotle, who  “solves” the  problem simply  by offering a quote  from  Homer  averring that “the rule of many is not good: let the ruler be One” ( Illiad,ii,204). But Christians do not consider that  the answer  to polytheism is pantheism, any more  than  the  answer to Plato’s rationalism is Aristotle’s  empiricism.

Aristotle

In book twelve ( Lamda ), parts 7, 8, and 9 of the Metaphysics, Aristotle  discusses  the necessity  of a prime mover, himself unmovable, whom he equates with the Intellect of the cosmos.  This first cause of all motion  in the world has been described as “Thought thinking  itself,” because,  he says, “the Intellect and its intelligible object are the same.” He speaks of an “actuality [which] is in virtue of itself, a life which is the best, and is eternal.  We say that God is a living Being which is eternal and the best, so that life and  continuous duration and  eternity belong  to God, for this is God.”    In section 8, he makes the point that “it is of himself then, that the Intellect [God] is thinking, if he is the most excellent of things, so  that  Thinking is  the  thinking of Thinking.”  This  eternal Thought is  a  “first principle,” because the cause of eternal motion must itself be eternal  and  immovable. “It causes  the primary  motion, which is eternal  and one.”

The  point will not  be  labored here that Aristotle’s prime mover is nothing much like the Jehovah of the Bible.   He has no interest or involvement with  the  things that  move further down the causal chain, like us.  It is not even clear that we are among his thoughts at all.

In  these parts of  the Metaphysics, we  are presented  with a series of propositions which may seem at first to be a bit disconnected in the text, but together they add up to a very clear example of what has come  to be known as the cosmological Argument. It is from  this  source that  Thomas Aquinas  developed his own  version of this proof in the several “ways.”

It must not be forgotten that when St. Thomas refers to “the Philosopher,” he means Aristotle.  It should  also be remembered that  Thomas  already had two unambiguous examples before him, of how Greek philosophy (particularly Aristotle) could be used in the service of a religious apologetic.  First, the Muslims had  already discovered the  Greek originals of the Stagirite, and had  translated  them into  Arabic while using  Aristotle’s  theistic arguments to defend Islam against Christian objections. In fact, Aristotle first appeared in Europe in Arabic, from  which  the  mediaeval Latin texts were  translated.  Then second, the great  Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides had already copied his aristotelian  teachers Averroes (Ibn Rush’d) and Avicenna (Ibn Sina) to produce  his apologetic  for Judaism, the Guide of the Perplexed, a strongly aristotelian work.  In his Summa contra GentilesAquinas would beat Jew and Muslim hollow at the great game of syncretistic apologetics. We have here a case of the common maxim that great artists have great teachers. There is also something to be said for the advantage of not being  a pioneer  in such matters. By the time Thomas came to the task, many of the pitfalls involved in the defenders of a religion based  on revelation  trying  to make  use of Greek ontology and  epistemology based on  the “Stratonician presumption” had been noted already by the Muslims.  The bottom line however, is that Thomas’ biblical motivations  undermined  his aristotelianism, while  his uncritical  acceptance  of Greek presuppositions undermined the coherence of his theology.  These incoherencies were soon to be taken  advantage of by William of Occam. But that’s another story.

Later Greek Philosophers

An important Stoic influencing the early church was Epictetus.  He flourished in the second half of the first century, and became widely popular.  Paul (and so Luke) seems  to have quoted  him in Acts
17). He explicitly argued  for God’s  existence from the design and beauty of the colors and the eye designed to see them.  “In this great city (the world) there is a Householder who orders everything.”  The abilities of the  human body  correspond to the properties of the external world  like a sword  to its scabbard.  “From the  very construction of a completed work, we are used to declaring positively that it must be the operation of some Artificer, and not the effect of mere chance.”  This is probably as near to a formal proof of God we will find in Epictetus, but since our rational soul is itself a little bit of the universal Logos, it naturally gravitates to God as its Origin.  Epictetus recognizes also the omnipresence and  Fatherhood of God,  and  his loving providence and  goodness. The rationality of man  requires not  only  that  we  acknowledge God’s sovereign  right  to do with  us what  he will, but demands sincere worship also.  The appeal  to God is natural for the wise man, and a formal proof would be unnecessary, since nobody  was denying the existence of ultimate  Being.

In short, for the Greeks, a natural  Theology is the same as the theology of Nature.   Ultimately, Being is God; to Theion is just the divine element of Reality.

Two Key Scriptures Often Misused

Romans 1:16-32. These verses are the locus classicus for the topic of natural theology, and  are regularly quoted in its support, although they offer no formal proof for God’s  existence in themselves, and expressly state that the knowledge of God seen in the creation is revealed by God, not that one could start  from  a lower  realm  of science  to reach  the higher realm of revelation.

To begin  with, verse 18 states  that  the thing being revealed from heaven  is the “wrath of God” on the unrighteous, not the existence of God in itself. Reformed theologians call  this  God’s General Revelation, to distinguish it from Special (or verbal) Revelation. What can be known  of God from the creation is said  to be perfectly clear and obvious, because God  has already “made it  obvious” ( phaneron.… ephanerosen ).  Indeed, that  God  is eternal, that he is unimaginably powerful, and that he has personal divinity (theiotes) are three things about God that are said to be obvious to the sinner from the creation of the cosmos.  So clear and obvious is this essentially universal revelation, that Paul  notes that “they are  without excuse,” (anapolegetos) or “without an apologetic” for their sin.  He adds  (verses 21-23) that sinners start out with this virtually innate revelation, and instead of being thankful  (“when  they already  knew God,”) they fail to glorify God, and actually  suppress this natural  awareness  of God’s  presence.   Ultimately, their replacement  of this revelation  by worship  of idols  is caused  by “worshiping and  serving  the creation instead  of the Creator.”   This is a clear reflection on Adam  and  Eve’s turning  from what God  had  said  about the  forbidden fruit  to the properties  of the fruit itself, called “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” by John in 1 Jn 2:16.  They simply  “did  not wish  to retain God in their knowledge.” Paul did  not see the Stoic “citizenry  of the Cosmos” as a university of seekers.  Belief in the divinity of the Cosmos is a substitute for, not a searching  for, the real Creator “who is blessed forever” (1:25).

Paul’s perspective is a far cry from the tradition of trying  to start  with  selected  attributes of the Cosmos, and  trying  to formulate  arguments from them that some kind  of “god” exists.   Aristotle’s bizarre Prime Mover is proof enough  of this.

Acts 17:16-34. The Areopagus  Address  is not an  exercise in  apologetic dialogue or  bridge­ building.   It is a radical  repudiation of the entire structure of the Hellenistic worldview, and contains at least twenty  separate  expressions  that together contradict  everything of importance in the Greek religio-philosophical vision.   Paul starts by observing that they admit ignorance of the divinity, calls them highly superstitious, idolatrous, ignorant, self-contradictory, and  then  proves that  their worship  contradicts their theology.  He quotes the Stoics Aratus and Epictetus against the Stoics, and plays  off the  pantheists against the  polytheists. Finally, he tells them  that God  authoritatively as their Creator, commands them to repent and believe in a particular  man called Jesus, who is not even a Greek, but a Jew!! This kind of particularism went against  the very  grain  of philosophic Hellenism, with  its  vaunted attitude of superiority to the particular ethnic  faiths,  and  its claim  to offer a “citizenship of the world.” The coup de grace comes in verse 31 with the claim that Jesus had been raised from  the  dead.  Every  Greek  “knew” this  was impossible, and  in  any  case  was  unnecessary, because  of the inherent immortality of the soul. Who in heaven would  need a material body in the after-life?   The very  idea  was  absurd.  Virtually everything Paul said was a threat, or a challenge to the rationality and sophistication, of the  people before him.  His  analysis reduces the Greek worldview to a mass of self-contradiction, and  is predicated  throughout on the basic criticism of all Greek thought, that they denied the Creator-creature distinction, and  started with  Being-in-general instead.

Still, as Luke says of another occasion, “as many as were  ordained to eternal life believed” (Acts
13:48). It was a tiny group, but one of them was a member of the Areopagus council itself, and would have his  name plagiarized by an  important syncretist of the future, the pseudo-Dionysius, about
500AD.

Although  individuals might  indeed  seek after God and perhaps even find him {17:27), it is a very feeble  seeking, and  a highly tentative finding, considered apart  from Special Revelation.  The Areopagus  address  only confirms  Romans 1, and effectively illustrates what Paul would say about Greek philosophy  in the first two chapters  of First Corinthians.  The Greeks by their wisdom, knew not God. The essential thing they lacked was those “words which the Holy Ghost teaches,” the propo­ sitional truth of special revelation  (1 Cor 2:6-16), in terms of which alone experience can yield Truth.

The fact remains that any form of getting at the knowledge  of God by starting with the creation is without countenance in the  Bible.   From Moses’ opening statement that in the beginning God created the world,  through Solomon’s insistence  that  all forms  of human knowing must  begin  with  the recognition of who Jehovah-God  is, to John’s poem to the Creator (in Revelation 4:8-11 and 5:8-14), as the one who is alone glorified by his own creation, the Bible makes God the ultimate  reference-point for all intelligibility whatsoever.   For the Prophets Apostles, it’s no God, no meaning at all.

Syncretism

From  the  earliest Apologists of the  second century, through the fuller  attempts at Christian philosophy, to the full-scale systematic  theology of Thomas Aquinas and so on to the present, those engaged in apologetics have  been  continuously tempted  to make Athens at least a sister city to Jerusalem.  This is very evident  in the long history of attempts to join one system  or another  to the biblical revelation, whether as a “Preparation Of The Gospel,” a Christian Gnosticism or Platonism or  Aristotelianism.  But all  the  great  battles of philosophy are  won  or  lost  in  the  area  of pre­ suppositions, and unless our presuppositions come from  God’s Word as the determining revelation, false assumptions will be allowed  to replace them. This has been true with a vengeance in the long attempt  to develop a “natural theology” out of our experience of the world without first allowing God to be what he must be in the nature of the case, the ultimate  reference-point and  presupposition of all Christian  rationality.

One  of  the  most powerful  tools for the facilitation of  syncretistic systems has  been allegorism, the  ancient system of transformist hermeneutics that allows  the interpreter to make an earlier  text say virtually anything he wants. It was invented  by the Greeks in order  to make the mythologies speak a philosophy they knew not of, and from such syncretists as Philo and Clement, and Origen, it spread  to the entire Catholic Church.  By the Middle Ages every word and phrase in the Bible was assumed to have a “four-fold sense.” Any “holy tradition” could by this method be found somewhere in the Bible, depending only  on the ingenuity of the  interpreter.  As  Hack   points out, “from Theagenes of Rhegium  (late sixth century)  on, the ingenious stupidity of this device commended it to Greeks  of a philosophic bent”  (p. 68).   It simply allowed  anything to be combined with  anything else: “the Stoics devoted  to it a large part of their energies, and smoothed the way for the expansive allegorical discourses of Philo and of the Christian Fathers.”

The ultimate  failure of a Christian  philosophy erected on pagan  presuppositions, is to be told by the unbeliever  when we confidently  invite them to “Come over to my position” is, “What do you mean, Come over?  You are already in my position, and you don’t even know it!”

 

Conclusion

If the warning  of Solomon that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning  of wisdom,  knowledge,  and instruction” (in Prov 1:7,9:10, 15:33, and elsewhere) is not allowed  to include  God’s  sovereignty  over the question  of presuppositions, it will quickly be reduced to a platitude with no point of contact with the world  of apologetic  thought.   Apologists will then continually be tempted to fabricate a common ground  with  their “cultured despisers” that does not really exist. And they will be tempted  to ignore the Creator-creature distinction of Genesis 1:1 in order to chat with the Greeks about Being and non­ Being, just before they are caught  in the bear-trap of the One-and-Many dilemma, from  which  no believer has ever escaped  intact.

Unless Solomon’s warning is taken at face value, it is only a matter  of time before a compromised apologetic disintegrates under the weight of its own self-contradictions, however  we  may cover  them with  the plasters of “antinomy,” “paradox” and “mystery:”

Sources And Further  Reading
On Clement of Alexandria, the doctoral  thesis of that  title  (Oxford, 1971)  by  Salvatore Lilla  is especially  helpful  on Clement’s embracing of the Greeks.  On  mediaeval thought, especially Thomism, the classic studies of Etienne Gilson, The Spirit Of Mediaeval Philosophy, and  The History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages are probably still the best places to start.   The unfolding of the Nature-Grace dichotomy is effectively described by Wilhelm Windelband  in his A History of Philosophy, pages 301-347. Gordon  Clark explains  the fallacies of the  traditional theistic  proofs  in his  Religion, Reason, and Revelation, (Trinity, 1986) pages 28-43, and so does  Antony  Flew in  God and Philosophy (Harcourt, 1966)  pages  58-123.   An  evangelical attempt  to rehabilitate the  theistic  proofs  can be found in chapter 13 of Norman  Geisler’s Christian Apologetics, with a much fuller discussion in chapters 5-9 of his Philosophy of Religion.

On  the idea  of God  among the  Greeks,  The Evolution Of Theology In The Greek Philosophers (the Gifford Lectures of 1901-2), by Edward Caird is still serviceable, while R. K. Hack’s God In Greek Philosophy To The Time Of Socrates (Princeton, 1931) covers the pre-socratic age, and has a good clear explanation of each  philosopher, illustrated with lots of useful  quotations.  Hack’s  account should be compared  with Kathleen  Freeman’s  Companion To The Pre-socratic Philosophers  (Oxford, 1949), to show how   the  fragments of  Xenophanes are variously interpreted.  The Theology Of The Early Greek Philosophers (Oxford, 1947) by Werner Jaeger also has a good chapter  on Xenophanes.

Cornelius Van Til shows how the presupposition of human autonomy causes the  progressive disintegration of Christian  attempts at philosophy in A Survey of Christian Epistemology  (Den Dulk,
1969). In chapters rv, V, and VI of A Christian Theory of Knowledge  (Baker, 1969), he traces the effects of compromise  with Greek thought  from the patristic age to mediaeval Catholicism.   All of Van Til’s works are  available on  a single CD  from  the Westminster Seminary  Bookstore.

E. P. Gillett’s God In Human Thought (New York, 1874), is an older but comprehensive two-volume history of natural  theology down  to Bishop Butler. Likewise, Studies In The History Of Natural Theology (Oxford, 1815), by C. J. J. Webb has a good essay on Plato’s  theology.

On Stoicism, see R. D. Hicks’ Stoic And Epicurean (New York,1962), A. A. Long’s Hellenistic Philosophy (Berkeley, 1986), and the first volume  of Frederick Copleston’s History  of Philosophy.

Edwin Hatch, The Influence Of Greek Ideas And Usages Upon The Christian Church (the  Gifford Lectures of 1888) is priceless, but later scholars think that parts of it are overstated. It remains however, the most helpful  outline  of the subject of its title available.

I used the translations by Ross arid Apostle of the Metaphysics, and by Jowett of Plato’s  Dialogues.

My own No Place For Sovereignty (IVP, 1996) shows  with  historical illustrations, the  philoso­phic  incompatibility of the  libertarian free will theory with both the Bible and reason, and offers a calvinistic response to Clark Pinnock’s “openness of God”  theology,  argued from  specific  texts of the Bible.

Note: Article was published in the Journal of Biblical Apologetics (go to the Apologetics Tab to see journals).