Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig, today, and excurses on natural theology.

For more resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

Today we are turning to a new section in our survey of Christian doctrine.

We are in the midst of the study of the doctrine of God,

and we have completed our subsection on the attributes of God.

And now I want to turn to an excursus on natural theology. We're going to leave our doctrinal

outline and take an excursus into the subject of natural theology. What is natural theology?

Natural theology can be defined as that branch of Christian theology which seeks to explore

the justification of Christianity's truth claims apart from the resources of authoritative

divine revelation. It explores what warrant there is for Christian truth claims without

appealing to authoritative-inspired scripture. Now scripture might still be

appealed to as simply human historical documents for historical information, but

they will not be taken as authoritative or revelation from God.

So natural theology, as a name suggests, is what we can learn about the existence of God

apart from the resources of authoritative divine revelation.

Now one might ask, how are the arguments of natural theology to be related to general

revelation?

You remember in our study of the doctrine of Revelation, we saw that God has revealed

himself both generally in nature and conscious,

as well as specially in His Word and in Jesus Christ. So that through God's general revelation

in nature and conscience, we can have a general knowledge of God as a creator and sustainer of the universe.

Are the arguments of natural theology the same as general revelation?

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