A problem with rejecting natural theology.

Some time ago, I decided that natural theology was a dead end. I take natural theology to be something like the practice of looking at creation to deduce information about God. I'm not sure when I did this consciously, but I think I had two reasons. First, I became interested in theology that suggested to me a God who is way transcendent, except for the Incarnation, when He became way immanent. Second, I learned enough math and science to see that nothing in nature really jumps out as special creation — everything seems to run on laws, and we've described enough of those laws that we've got a general picture of how things work, though I have to acknowledge that picture gets really weird when you look at very big or very small things. (Weird in a good way, I think.)

At first, this made things simpler, as it avoided all the conundrums of creationism or ID theory. No conflict with science!

But recently I've been wondering if I made a mistake somewhere. I wrote a rather mopey post at the League on this theme. As I see it, dropping natural theology entirely leaves you with philosophical arguments, personal experience, and revelation handed down. Philosophical arguments can be nice, but there's also a counterclaim for almost every claim that's been made: I don't take leaning on philosophy to be easy. Personal experience… it's difficult for me to rely on my interpretations of my own interior life. And revelation — ah, revelation. More on that another time?

At any rate, as I think threw my view of nature, I'll take these ideas into consideration. Lee at A Thinking Reed:

“What we can and should do as Christians is offer a way of integrating the findings of the sciences with a richer picture of reality that takes account of all our experience (moral, aesthetic, religious, etc.). Reality is a many-layered thing.

“It also strikes me that Kenneth Miller’s statement that human beings are “an afterthought, a minor detail, a happenstance in a history that might just as well have left us out” is a salutary and properly humbling one. Christian theology has been entirely too anthropocentric, and a more theocentric and creation-centric perspective is urgently needed.”

And Matthew Milliner, a.k.a. Millinerd, quoting Jonathan Edwards:

“There is some impropriety in saying that a disposition in God to communicate himself to the creature, moved him to create the world. For though the diffusive disposition in the nature of God, that moved him to create the world, doubtless inclines him to communicate himself to the creature when the creature exists; yet this can't be all: because an inclination in God to communicate himself to an object, seems to presuppose the existence of the object, at least in idea. But the diffusive disposition that excited God to give creatures existence was rather a communicative disposition in general, or a disposition in the fullness of the divinity to flow out and diffuse itself.”

Final thought: it'd be so much easier to give up on this stuff if it weren't for beauty.