Philosophical theism

Not to be confused with Classical theism, sometimes also called "philosophical theism".

Plato was by some reckonings an early proponent of philosophical theism.

O you who look on this our machine, do not be sad that with others you are fated to die, but rejoice that our Creator has endowed us with such an excellent instrument as the intellect.

Kurt Gödel, the eminent mathematical logician, composed a formal argument for God's existence.

One factor that moved Whitehead toward theism was the inability to understand how mathematical objects—being ideal, nonactual entities—could be efficacious in the world in general and in human experience in particular—in fact, how they could even exist—unless they existed in a primordial actuality.

Philosophical theism is the belief that deities exist (or must exist) independent of the teaching or revelation of any particular religion.^[1] It represents belief in a personal God entirely without doctrine. Some philosophical theists are persuaded of a god's existence by philosophical arguments, while others consider themselves to have a religious faith that need not be, or could not be, supported by rational argument.

Philosophical theism has parallels with the 18th century philosophical view called Deism.

Relationship to organized religion

Philosophical theism conceives of nature as the result of purposive activity and so as an intelligible system open to human understanding, although possibly never completely understandable. It implies the belief that nature is ordered according to some sort of consistent plan and manifests a single purpose or intention, however incomprehensible or inexplicable. However, philosophical theists do not endorse or adhere to the theology or doctrines of any organized religion or church. They may accept arguments or observations about the existence of a god advanced by theologians working in some religious tradition, but reject the tradition itself. (For example, a philosophical theist might believe certain Christian arguments about God while nevertheless rejecting Christianity.)

Notable philosophical theists

• Thales of Miletus (624-546 B.C.) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher and mathematician from Miletus in Asia Minor. Many, most notably Aristotle, regard him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition. According to Henry Fielding, Diogenes Laërtius affirmed that Thales posed "the independent pre-existence of God from all eternity, stating "that God was the oldest of all beings, for he existed without a previous cause even in the way of generation; that the world was the most beautiful of all things; for it was created by God."^[2]
• Socrates (469-399 B.C.) was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher; he is the earliest known proponent of the teleological argument,^[3] though it is questionable if he abandoned polytheism.
• Plato (428-347 BC), a student of the Athenian sage Socrates, provided early medieval Christianity with a philosophical paradigm and is widely acknowledged as the father of Western philosophy.
• Aristotle (384-322 BC) founded what are currently known as the "cosmological arguments" for a God (or "first cause").^[4]
• Chrysippus of Soli (279–206 B.C.) was a Greek Stoic philosopher. Chrysippus sought to prove the existence of God, making use of a teleological argument: "If there is anything that humanity cannot produce, the being who produces it is better than humanity. But humanity cannot produce the things that are in the universe – the heavenly bodies, etc. The being, therefore, who produces them is superior to humanity. But who is there that is superior to humanity, except God? Therefore, God exists."^[5]
• Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist.
• Plotinus (204—270 A.D.) was a major philosopher of the ancient world. In his philosophy there are three principles: the One, the Intellect, and the Soul.
• Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519) was an Italian polymath and is widely considered one of the greatest painters of all time. According to biographer Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, "He found proof for the existence and omnipotence of God in nature—light, color, botany, the human body—and in creativity"^[6] Marco Rosci, author of "Hidden Leonardo Da Vinci"(1977) notes that for Leonardo "[m]an is the handiwork of a God who retains few links with traditional orthodoxy. But man is emphatically no mere 'instrument' of his Creator. He is himself a 'machine' of extraordinary quality and proficiency and thus proof of nature's rationality".
• Christiaan Huygens (1629 – 1695) was a prominent Dutch mathematician and scientist. Huygens was first to formulate what is now known as the second of Newton's laws of motion in a quadratic form. He regarded science as a form of “Worship”, that is, one can serve God by studying and admiring his works: "And we shall worship and reverence that God the Maker of all these things; we shall admire and adore his Providence and wonderful Wisdom which is displayed and manifested all over the Universe, to the confusion of those who would have the Earth and all things formed by the shuffling Concourse of Atoms, or to be without beginning."^[7]
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was an important German polymath, regarded as the father of digital computing. Although Leibniz embraced Christianity, as a philosopher he argued for the existence of God on purely philosophical grounds. Leibniz wrote: "Even by supposing the world to be eternal, the recourse to an ultimate cause of the universe beyond this world, that is, to God, cannot be avoided."^[8]
• Sir Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727) was an English physicist and mathematician (described in his own day as a "natural philosopher") who is widely recognised as one of the most influential scientists of all time and as a key figure in the scientific revolution. Newton saw God as the masterful creator whose existence could not be denied in the face of the grandeur of all creation.^[9] Although born into an Anglican family, by his thirties Newton held a Christian faith that, had it been made public, would not have been considered orthodox by mainstream Christianity; in recent times he has been described as a heretic. For this reason Newton's view has been considered to be close to deism and several biographers and scholars labeled him as a deist who is strongly influenced by Christianity.^[10][11] However, he differed from strict adherents of deism in that he invoked God as a special physical cause to keep the planets in orbits. He said: "This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent Being. [...] This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called "Lord God" παντοκρατωρ [pantokratōr], or "Universal Ruler". [...] The Supreme God is a Being eternal, infinite, [and] absolutely perfect."^[12]
• Émilie du Châtelet (1706 – 1749) was a French mathematician, physicist, her most celebrated achievement is considered to be her translation and commentary on Isaac Newton's work Principia Mathematica. In Du Châtelet's words, “[t]he study of nature elevates us to the knowledge of the supreme being; this great truth is even more necessary, if possible, to good physics than to morality, and it ought to be the foundation and conclusion of all the research we make in this science”^[13]
• Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) was an American Founding Father who was the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence. He argued for God's existence on teleological grounds without appeal to revelation.^[14]
• Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1796-1832) was a French military engineer and physicist, often described as the "father of thermodynamics". As a deist, he believed in divine causality, stating that "what to an ignorant man is chance, cannot be chance to one better instructed," but he did not believe in divine punishment. He criticized established religion, though at the same time spoke in favor of "the belief in an all-powerful Being, who loves us and watches over us."^[15]
• Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777 – 1855) Sometimes referred to as the "Princeps mathematicorum" (Latin, "the foremost of mathematicians") and "greatest mathematician since antiquity". "According to biographer Dunnington, Gauss's religion was based upon the search for truth. He believed in "the immortality of the spiritual individuality, in a personal permanence after death, in a last order of things, in an eternal, righteous, omniscient and omnipotent God"^[16]
• Karl Ernst Ritter von Baer, Edler von Huthorn (1792 – 1876) was a founding father of Embryology, a leading critic of Haeckel's theory of recapitulation. Late in life, he argued equally strongly against Darwin’s theory of natural selection, even while accepting the evidence Darwin discussed. His last book, Studien auf dem Gebiete der Naturwissenschaften "Studies from the field of natural sciences (1886)", contained a critique of evolutionary theory that said that “for a true understanding of nature, we cannot dispense with a governing intelligence”
• Sir Richard Owen (1804 -1892) was a comparative anatomist and paleontologist. He produced a vast array of scientific work, but is probably best remembered today for coining the word Dinosauria (meaning "Terrible Reptile" or "Fearfully Great Reptile"). Owen is also remembered for his outspoken opposition to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. He wrote “The satisfaction felt by the rightly constituted mind must ever be great in recognizing the fitness of parts for their appropriate function..the prescient operations of the One Cause of all organization becomes strikingly manifested to our limited intelligence.”^[17]
• Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. According to James W. Keyes, "A reason he gave for his belief [in a "Creator of all things"] was, that in view of the Order and harmony of all nature which all beheld, it would have been More miraculouis to have Come about by chance, than to have been created and arranged by some great thinking power."^[18]
• Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) was a British naturalist, biologist and co-discoverer of natural selection. Wallace later began to doubt his own theory of natural selection and advocated a teleological form of evolution, in a letter to James Marchant he wrote "The completely materialistic mind of my youth and early manhood has been slowly molded into the socialistic, spiritualistic, and theistic mind I now exhibit"^[19]
• Charles Voysey (1828–1912) was a priest of the Church of England who was condemned by the Privy Council for heterodoxy and went on to found a Theistic Church in London. He was the father of English architect Charles Voysey.
• Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist who sketches, for God's reality, an argument to a hypothesis of God as the Necessary Being^[20]
• Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was a philosopher and non-theologian who found that following through on the development of an innovative philosophy led to the inclusion of God in the system.
• Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) was a Spanish philosopher
• Ralph Barton Perry (1876–1957) was an American philosopher
• Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) was the preeminent mathematical logician of the twentieth century who described his theistic belief as independent of theology,^[21] he also composed a formal argument for God's existence known as Gödel's ontological proof.
• Martin Gardner^[22](1914–2010) was a mathematics and science writer who defended philosophical theism while denying revelation and the miraculous. Gardner believed that many liberal Protestant preachers, such as Harry Emerson Fosdick and Norman Vincent Peale, were really philosophical theists without admitting (or realizing) the fact.
• Antony Flew (1923–2010) was an atheist philosopher who converted to philosophical theism on the basis of scientific discoveries and related reasoning, which had convinced him that there is an intelligent designer of the natural universe^[23]
• Allan Rex Sandage (1926 – 2010) determined the first reasonably accurate values for the Hubble constant and the age of the universe. He also discovered the first quasar. Sandage became a Christian towards the end of his life, but affirmed theism prior to that on independent grounds “I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing.”^[24]
• Michael Denton (born 25 August 1943) is a British-Australian author and biochemist, he has long adhered to a structuralist view of organic form, seeing much of the underlying order of life to be immanent in nature, the result of higher organizational principles or ‘laws of form’ which constrain the behaviour of complex higher order assemblages of biomatter.

References

1. ↑ Swinburne, Richard (2001), Entry, "Philosophical Theism" in Phillips, D.Z. and T.Tessin (eds.), Philosophy of Religion in The 21st Century, Palgrave.
2. ↑ Fielding, Henry. 1775. An essay on conversation. John Bell. p. 346
3. ↑ Xenophon, Memorabilia I.4.6; Franklin, James (2001). The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability Before Pascal. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 229. ISBN 978-0-8018-6569-5. 
4. ↑ Aristotle's Physics (VIII, 4–6) and Metaphysics (XII, 1–6)
5. ↑ Cicero, De Natura Deorum, iii. 10. Cf. ii. 6 for the fuller version of this argument.
6. ↑ Apostolos-Cappadona, Diane. "Leonardo: His Faith, His Art." Before 2 Nov. 2009. 26 Jan. 2010.
7. ↑ Huygens, Christiaan, Cosmotheoros (1698)
8. ↑ Leibniz, G. W. (1697) On the ultimate origination of the universe.
9. ↑ Webb, R.K. ed. Knud Haakonssen. "The emergence of Rational Dissent." Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in eighteenth-century Britain. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 1996. p19.
10. ↑ Gieser, Suzanne. The Innermost Kernel: Depth Psychology and Quantum Physics. Wolfgang Pauli's Dialogue with C.G. Jung. Springer. pp. 181–182. ISBN 9783540208563. Newton seems to have been closer to the deists in his conception of God and had no time for the doctrine of the Trinity. The deists did not recognize the divine nature of Christ. According to Fierz, Newton's conception of God permeated his entire scientific work: God's universality and eternity express themselves in the dominion of the laws of nature. Time and space are regarded as the 'organs' of God. All is contained and moves in God but without having any effect on God himself. Thus space and time become metaphysical entities, superordinate existences that are not associated with any interaction, activity or observation on man's part.
11. ↑ Force, James E.; Popkin, Richard Henry (1990). Force, James E.; Popkin, Richard Henry, eds. Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton's Theology. Springer. p. 53. ISBN 9780792305835. Newton has often been identified as a deist. ...In the 19th century, William Blake seems to have put Newton into the deistic camp. Scholars in the 20th-century have often continued to view Newton as a deist. Gerald R. Cragg views Newton as a kind of proto-deist and, as evidence, points to Newton's belief in a true, original, monotheistic religion first discovered in ancient times by natural reason. This position, in Cragg's view, leads to the elimination of the Christian revelation as neither necessary nor sufficient for human knowledge of God. This agenda is indeed the key point, as Leland describes above, of the deistic program which seeks to "set aside" revelatory religious texts. Cragg writes that, "In effect, Newton ignored the claims of revelation and pointed in a direction which many eighteenth-century thinkers would willingly follow." John Redwood has also recently linked anti-Trinitarian theology with both "Newtonianism" and "deism."
12. ↑ Principia, Book III; cited in; Newton's Philosophy of Nature: Selections from his writings, p. 42, ed. H.S. Thayer, Hafner Library of Classics, NY, 1953.
13. ↑ Lascano, Marcy P., 2011, “Émilie du Châtelet on the Existence and Nature of God: An Examination of Her Arguments in Light of Their Sources”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 19(4): 741–58.
14. ↑ To JOHN ADAMS vii 281 1823 Jefferson Cyclopedia, Foley 1900
15. ↑ R. H. Thurston, 1890., Appendix A. pp. 215-217
16. ↑ Guy Waldo Dunnington (2004). Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science. MAA. p. 305.
17. ↑ Owen, On the Nature of Limbs, 38.
18. ↑ 352. James W. Keyes (statement for Willam H. Herndon).[1865 — 66]
19. ↑ When I was alive by Alfred Russel Wallace, THE LINNEAN 1995 VOLUME 11(2), pp. 9
20. ↑ Peirce (1908), "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God", published in large part, Hibbert Journal v. 7, 90–112. Reprinted with an unpublished part, CP 6.452–85, Selected Writings pp. 358–79, EP 2:434–50, Peirce on Signs 260–78.
21. ↑ Wang 1996, pp. 104–105.
22. ↑ According to Gardner: "I am a philosophical theist. I believe in a personal god, and I believe in an afterlife, and I believe in prayer, but I don’t believe in any established religion. This is called philosophical theism.... Philosophical theism is entirely emotional. As Kant said, he destroyed pure reason to make room for faith." Carpenter, Alexander (2008), "Martin Gardner on Philosophical Theism, Adventists and Price" Interview, 17 October 2008, Spectrum.
23. ↑ My Pilgrimage from Atheism to Theism: an exclusive interview with former British atheist Professor Antony Flew by Gary Habermas, Philosophia Christi, Winter 2005.
24. ↑ Willford, J.N. March 12, 1991. Sizing up the Cosmos: An Astronomers Quest. New York Times, p. B9.

See also

• Freethought