Of the four years spent at UK universities as a post-graduate student, I spent two at Durham University, earning a Post Graduate Diploma and Master of Arts in Theology and Religion (2013-2015). Durham was chosen for several reasons, one of which was its good Theology department ranking in the UK and world ranking tables. I also had family friends who lived there.

I was interested in and familiar with the philosophy of religion as a discipline in the analytic school of philosophy. Having come to Durham to study theology, I was introduced to a very different approach to interpreting religion (continental) which seemed irreconcilable with the analytic school. A survey of the academic literature yielded virtually nothing on possible analytic-continental interactions. So, I decided to give it a go.

The dissertation received a high distinction and assisted me in obtaining a distinction overall for my graduate diploma. My supervisor, the brilliant Dr Marcus Pound, was a joy to work with. I don’t mean any disrespect to say that he is delightfully eccentric and his classes on postmodernism were unhinged in the best possible way. Anyway, here it is:

Postmodernism and Natural Theology: Exploring the Possibility of Appropriating the Kalām Cosmological Argument into Radical Orthodoxy’s Post-secular Epistemology

Introduction

As postmodernism developed into the nuanced and variegated philosophical system that it is today, it instantiated itself most recognizably within humanities departments in the universities, and more influentially in some disciplines, like literary studies, than in others, like Anglo-American analytic philosophy. The overall shape of contemporary theology has likewise been moulded in a variety of ways by postmodern currents. Mark C. Taylor’s relativistic approach to religion and Don Cupitt’s postmodern scepticism can be said to represent one broad developing current [1] The weak theology of John D. Caputo, an American advocator of Jacques Derrida’s “deconstruction”, represents another. Radical Orthodoxy (RO), which seeks to reject the modern epistemological framework and recover and re-appropriate the insights of certain patristic and medieval theologians to articulate an orthodoxy based on an ontological, participatory, and analogical theological framework, co-founded by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, represents yet another albeit radically divergent current. [2]    

At the same time, theist philosophers working in Anglo-American philosophy departments that have been largely impervious to the encroachments of postmodernism have continued their work on the philosophy of religion with a distinctly analytic framework. Richard Swinburne and Alvin Plantinga immediately come to the fore as prominent examples. Within this framework, Natural Theology (NT) is among the various fields of philosophical inquiry that have enjoyed an analytic revival, with contemporary versions of the ontological argument, the teleological argument, the moral argument, the argument from consciousness and reason among others being developed and defended. [3] One such argument is the Kalām Cosmological Argument (KCA), an argument that has its roots in Plato and Aristotle, its first proper articulation from among the Arabic theologians in the middle east and Muslim Spain from around the ninth to twelfth century CE, [4] its contemporary revival in Stuart Hackett’s The Resurrection of Theism and its current revised state in the hands of Hackett’s student William Lane Craig.   

At first blush, postmodern theology and analytic philosophy of religion seem too wildly divergent in their methodologies to communicate, let alone converge in any constructive way. [5] Be that as it may, sweeping generalisations should not discourage one from looking for patterns of similarities in seemingly disparate disciplines if these could potentially lead to the progress of knowledge on the relation between them. [6] RO’s affirmation of a historically orthodox theistic world view predicated on creatio ex nihilo are also the predications on which the KCA is grounded. Consequently, this essay seeks to explore the interface between relevant aspects of RO and the KCA, examining their points of convergence and mapping their incompatibilities, and arguing that while RO would concede that the Kalām would work if its premises are true, it would nevertheless reject it because it does not fit into its overarching theological principles. Nonetheless, this essay will also attempt to articulate a case for its acceptance. In so doing, this essay hopes to have contributed, in some small part, to the larger, but unfortunately commonly avoided, conversation between postmodern theology and analytic philosophy of religion.

In order to explicate this thesis, an examination of the main principles of RO and its relation to postmodernism is first required to distinguish it from the liberal postmodern theologies that are admittedly completely incompatible with NT. Then a survey of the KCA’s central principles, contemporary form and dissimilarity with cosmological arguments predicated on the causal principle, and ‘Ground of Being’ (Thomas Aquinas’s versions) and the principle of sufficient reason (Gottfried Leibniz’s version) [7] will enable the following analysis of its compatibility with RO’s epistemological suppositions. This essay will then conclude with the implications of finding convergences between inconsonant methodologies in disciplines that are nevertheless predicated on a mutual commitment to a theistic worldview in the hopes that more substantive engagements of the same nature will continue to be made.

Postmodernism, Postmodern Theology, and Radical Orthodoxy

There are probably hundreds of mutually exclusive threads and millions of words that could be written about the genesis, development, and central features of postmodernity/postmodernism as both a cultural phenomenon and philosophical attitude. [8] Because this essay is interested in postmodernism as a philosophical reaction to modernism and the contrasts between postmodern liberal theology’s and RO’s responses to that reaction, it will only very briefly trace these relevant aspects of postmodernism. Though RO would attribute the secularising force of enlightenment rationalism earlier, to the currents of thought that eventually led to John Duns Scotus’s univocal concept of being, [9] early modernism can be said to be more directly borne from this European intellectual movement which championed ‘objective science, universal morality and law’ in ‘the pursuit of human emancipation’ from ‘scarcity, [and] want’, which was generally believed to be caused by ‘ the irrationalities of myth, religion, [and] superstition’. Modernism’s ‘universalising and totalizing drive’ has also been traced more specifically to the seventeenth century, as an extension of ‘Descartes’ foundational ambitions and his faith in reason’. [10] Then Friedrich Nietzsche’s discourse on the resultant ‘disorder, anarchy, destruction, individual alienation, and despair’ with only ‘the will to live and to power’ left to fill the teleological void of life and late modernism’s search for an alternative overarching myth to ground meaning spoke to the intellectual zeitgeist that eventually led to ‘the counter-cultural and antimodernist movements in the 1960s’ in post-war America, which were ‘antagonistic to the oppressive qualities of scientifically grounded technical-bureaucratic rationality as purveyed through monolithic corporate, state and other forms of institutionalised power’. [11]

This attitude which surged in 1968 led to the postmodern cultural movement popularly believed to have had a genesis on 15 July 1972 with the demolishing of the ‘Pruitt-Igoe housing development in St Louis’, a prize-winning modernist work. This admitted parallel but diverse trends in philosophy, traceable back to ‘Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche […] Freud and Heidegger’, an expression in the cultural consciousness and academia in the “West”. [12] Harvey notes that

in philosophy, the intermingling of a revived American pragmatism with the post-Marxist and poststructuralist wave that struck Paris after 1968 produced […] ‘a rage against humanism and the Enlightenment legacy.’ This spilled over into a vigorous denunciation of abstract reason and a deep aversion to any project that sought universal human emancipation through mobilization of the powers of technology, science, and reason. […] If lust and power are ‘the only values that don’t need the light of reason to be discovered,’ then reason had to become a mere instrument to subjugate others.                

As a result, the increasing visibility of the philosophies and cultural criticisms of Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida, [13] among others, that were largely in concert with the cultural consciousness, led to the formulaic crystallisations of philosophical postmodernism in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Seyla Benhabib declares that there are no certainties of truth, ‘but only the endless struggle of local narratives vying with one another for legitimation’. [14] Harvey argues that unlike late modernism which still held on to the belief in ‘the true nature of a unified, though complex, underlying reality’, postmodernism fully embraces the ‘ephemerality, fragmentation, [and] discontinuity’ of surface reality; it ‘swims, even wallows, in the fragmentary and chaotic currents of change as if that is all there is’. [15] For Hans Bertens’ examination of Ihab Hassan’s construal of postmodernism, he argues that a common denominator of the various strands of postmodern thinking that emerges is ‘radical epistemological and ontological doubt’. [16] And John McGowan, reflecting on the route of a postmodern philosophy that rejected Kant for a permanent immersion in Hegel’s ‘historical narrative’ but rejection of his hope of ‘an eventual reconciliation of Spirit with the objective order and with man in his rational essence’, argues that ‘contradiction is adopted as the inevitable, necessary status of thought and of being-in-the-(social)-world’. [17]

Theology has responded to this intellectual trend in several divergent ways. Sticking to the typology laid out in the introduction, one broad trend would be a kind of non-realist postmodern liberal theology, maintained by Cupitt and Taylor. In The Long-Legged Fly, Cupitt appeals to Heidegger’s re-consideration of the western metaphysical philosophical tradition, the linguistic turn in epistemology and the implications of the historical-critical method to reject a theological realism for an understanding of the scriptures (and by logical extension the faiths on which the scriptures are predicated) as a social construct that expresses ineffable human yearning. The breadth of his book logically outworks these basic premises. He argues that humanity has to reject any hope in the afterlife, which reinforces repression and oppression in its appeal to an ascetic morality, and seek fulfilment instead by a vicarious living on in family and society. Like a true postmodern, Cupitt embraces the contradiction of accepting systems of belief that permit no truths, systems that, he argues, have, ‘since the time of Nietzsche […] multiplied beyond all control’. [18]

            In After God, Taylor defines religion sociologically as

an emergent, complex, adaptive network of symbols, myths, and rituals that, on the one hand, figure schemata of feeling, thinking, and acting in ways that lend life meaning and purpose and, on the other, disrupt, dislocate, and disfigure every stabilizing structure.

His account of its contribution to secularism has broad parallels with RO’s thesis that the change of the patterns of theology from an analogical and participatory relation between God and Man to a univocal concept of being, [19] which effectively categorised God as being in a quantitative (horizontal) rather than qualitative (vertical) relation to Man, led to the free reign of autonomous reason without reference to God, the consequent splitting of philosophy from theology, and the rise of the modern secular state. However, while RO would be loath to implicate Aquinas in this downward trend, Taylor does include him in his exegesis of these historical intellectual currents that eventually led to the Protestant Revolution and then to modernism, postmodernism, and the modern secularism on which these typically presuppose in their expression. Taylor argues that the bifurcation of the secular and the supernatural, of faith and reason, from Aquinas to Ockham is what eventually led to Luther’s new secure foundation in his theology of grace by faith and utter dependence on God and Calvin’s symbolic interpretation of the Eucharist which broke ‘the bond between signifier and signified’, which in turn anticipated the epistemological scepticism of enlightenment modernism and its hyperextension, postmodernism. He argues that the reason Protestantism is so ‘resilient’ is because it is schizophrenic: it would flip from ‘rationalism’ (e.g., in contemporary fundamentalism and its commitment to biblical literalism) to ‘spiritualism’ (e.g., in Pentecostalism and its focus on the work of the Spirit) whenever one threatened to take over the other and God becomes either too transcendent or immanent to sustain belief. He also argues that these sometimes violent and divisive shifts are based on a mistaken notion that the knowledge of truth is either a foundational certainty or a fundamental uncertainty, rather than the notion that knowledge is inherently circular. [20] He argues that for the sake of Man’s future, ‘religious foundationalism and exclusive moralism’ should be replaced ‘with a religion of life and an ethics without absolutes’. This new ethic must transcend the tacit commitments to either/or binary oppositions – a commitment that has caused Protestantism’s divisive schizophrenia – that is, embrace contradiction, to reflect the ‘global complexity’ and meet the challenges of life. [21]

Another kind of postmodern theology can be found in Caputo’s indeterminate messianic drawn from his rejection of western metaphysics and Derrida’s “deconstruction” of hierarchical binary opposites – which legitimates injustice – and applied to Man’s relation to a God who is now understood to be wholly “other”. [22] This construal of an un-representable theology has the advantage of being pluralistic in its embracement of the various faith traditions, [23] supportive of a universalism based on love and right action, [24] and a good deterrent against violence in its de-legitimation of an eschatological certainty that has historically engendered oppression and violence. [25] While each of these theologies is, strictly speaking, different appropriations of postmodernism, they nevertheless share in common with each other what RO would call an underlying modern agenda. Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt argues that these kinds of theologies, like Taylor’s, which ‘reject the universal and totalizing pretensions of much traditional Christian theology in favour of some modest version’ to accommodate ‘religious pluralism’ and avoid ‘wag[ing] war against the Other’, are continuations of ‘the modern project of emancipation’ with faith re-shaped to serve this humanistic goal. [26] Similarly, Graham Ward rejects Cupitt’s and Taylor’s ‘anti-metaphysical philosophy’, which he argues is ‘akin to the liberal moves made by Tillich and Bultmann concerning Heideggerian existentialism’, because they have not moved beyond the latent concerns of secularism, [27] to a post-liberal space wherein orthodox confessions and the true telos of the faith may be properly recovered. And Simon Oliver’s observation that ‘the Church becomes a department of state and subject to the regulative and jurisdictional power of the sovereign’ can also be evidenced in these postmodern theologies that mutually pre-suppose Hobbes’ view of human nature – as basically self-interested – and that support the consequent need for the social contract by de-legitimating religious certainty and the violence that it typically engenders through its exploitation. [28]

Already RO comes across as thoroughly dissimilar to the liberal postmodern strands of theology that have been laid out here. The following explanation of RO seeks to further differentiate it from these kinds of postmodern theologies that are completely incompatible with NT, obviating any need for or possibility of constructive comparison. Because RO is a large and not always consistent body of literature, [29] this essay will only draw out its central principles and more specific concerns that are relevant to the present discussion. Going back to the split in theological thinking from intellectual currents in the Middle Ages that RO and Taylor both identify as having paved the road to modern secularism, unlike Taylor, who embraces the split and the consequent paradoxically cyclical nature of knowledge, RO wishes to recover the insights of certain pre-modern philosophers and theologians and appropriate a ‘critical reflexivity honed by continental thinking’, [30] ‘in order to inform a rigorous, critical and authentically theological reading of our own times’. [31] Far from throwing reason and truth away, RO seeks to harmonise it with faith ‘within a Christian vision’. [32]

The two most significant of those insights are Aquinas’s theology of analogy and participation. Oliver elucidates the kind of analogy RO endorses:

Imagine that you eat wholegrain bread for breakfast. We might call such bread ‘healthy’. It is not, however, healthy in itself; it is called healthy by virtue of its relation to you because it makes you healthy. [… Likewise] God is existence itself. We only have existence attributed to us by virtue of our relation to God as creator.

Oliver also provides a clear explanation for RO’s participation:

God bestows upon creation a finite participation in his own substantiality. In other words, creation does not have an existence by virtue of itself, but only and always because of the gratuity of God. [… Therefore] at every moment, creation is ex nihilo, ‘from nothing’. Its existence is a continuous and gratuitous divine donation in the form of an ‘improper’ participation in God’s own substantiality. [33]

RO also offers re-readings of Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine [34] among others to appropriate an ‘Augustinian vision of all knowledge as divine illumination – a notion which transcends the modern bastard dualisms of faith and reason, grace and nature’. [35] Milbank traces this dualism to the shifts in thought in ‘Avicenna, Gilbert Porreta, Roger Bacon, Henry of Ghent, Bonaventure [… and] its most consummate focus in Duns Scotus’. [36] Since, for RO, a properly “post” modern theology would have to jettison those same assumptions that have informed the sceptical and humanistic postmodern theologies listed here, RO might be more properly called “post-secular” or “post-liberal”. [37]

In Pickstock’s essay on Scotus, she discusses at length his contributions to the detrimental shifts toward the notion of a ‘univocal ontology’, as well as ‘knowledge as representation, and causality as primarily efficient’. On Scotus’s “univocity of being”, being is now a category that univocally encompasses Man and God:

Scotus here echoes the supposed Avicennian view that the subject of metaphysics is being and not the first principle (as Averroësheld), for being can now be regarded as […] transcendentally prior to, and also common to both God and creatures. [38]

One can therefore think of the distance between God and Man as encompassing a univocally infinite gulf. This is a far cry from RO’s desire to recover an intimate analogical connection between God and his creation. Therefore, instead of Aquinas’ view that the certainty of human knowledge of the truth is predicated on its participation in the mind of God, [39] in the absence of participation, knowledge takes an epistemological turn and becomes representational rather than de facto ontological, and this opens the way to postmodern scepticism. This also leads to a view of causality as an impersonal horizontal ‘occurrence’ rather than a vertical ‘influence’, [40] a view that Milbank argues informs the natural theologies, and more specifically, the cosmological arguments that are predicated on the causal principle or the principle of sufficient reason and the a posteriori [41] conclusion that God must be the first cause or sufficient reason of the cosmos.

Therefore, while RO would reject the ‘false humility’ [42] of the liberal postmodern theologies listed in this essay, it is also not particularly friendly to NT or any form of theology that refuses to pre-suppose God because they have consequently ‘forfeited the right to adjudicate’ knowledge of him. [43] Furthermore, since RO would consider the existence of modern academic disciplines to be the result of that dualistic split in theological thinking in the Middle Ages, predicated on acts on ontological violence [44] and, with the rise of the modern secular state, moulded to serve its interests, [45] any syncretistic model of Christian inquiry that relies solely on the secular disciplines for insight must, on principle, be rejected. Milbank, following this principle, states that ‘debates about the historicity of the resurrection, etc. will have no place in a postmodern theology’. [46] More broadly, it spells the end of classical apologetics for RO since these are normally predicated on autonomous philosophical or historical methodologies. Given these considerations, it seems that any kind of NT would be hard-pressed to fit into RO’s theological principles. Nevertheless, it is to an examination of a possible argument from contemporary NT that this essay now turns.  

Natural Theology, Analytic Philosophy, the Cosmological Argument, and the Kalām Cosmological Argument

NT may be defined as ‘the practice of philosophically reflecting on the existence and nature of God independent of real or apparent divine revelation or scripture’. It has its roots in Plato and Aristotle, its first proper articulations from Arabic theologians and philosophers, and its ‘most celebrated contributors’ in Christian thinking from Anselm, Aquinas, and Duns Scotus. It also has ‘played a major role in early modern philosophy’ evident in the writings of Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant, who critically assessed the arguments. [47] However, NT fell out of favour in the twentieth century as a result of ‘neo-Kantian criticisms of metaphysics, an extreme confidence in contemporary science, a revival, and elaboration of Humean empiricism in the form of logical positivism, as well as existentialism among Continental thinkers’. Then, from the second half of the twentieth century and with the fall of logical positivism, the resurgence of the possibility of metaphysics led to ‘a revival of natural theology’, with ‘analytic philosophers [… taking] the lead in discussing and debating these topics. [48] Analytic philosophy itself may be broadly defined as ‘the kind of philosophy that takes Gottlob Frege, G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell as its founding fathers, […] is usually practiced today in English-speaking philosophy departments’ [49] and is characterised by ‘logical analysis, which depended on the development of modern logic’, wherein propositions would sometimes be formalized into ‘mathematical statements’ in order to circumvent what these philosophers believed to be the misleading potential of language. [50] The KCA is among the arguments of NT that has also found a revival in Craig, [51] who gained an interest in it from reading his undergraduate philosophy lecturer Stuart Hackett’s The Resurrection of Theism and who subsequently wrote his doctoral dissertation under John Hick on it. [52] Before summarising Craig’s KCA, it is necessary first to briefly trace the history of the cosmological argument and distinguish the KCA from its siblings.

The cosmological argument, which may be defined as ‘an a posteriori argument for a cause or reason for the cosmos’ [53] had its origin in Plato and Aristotle. Plato argued that the best soul is the archē kinēseōs, or origin of change, of the cosmos. Aristotle made a distinction between potency and actuality and contributed to the argument by attributing to this best soul the concept of ‘an utterly unmoved mover which [he] called God’ who is ‘eternal’. However, this ‘God is in no sense the creator of the universe: it is co-eternal and, moreover, not dependent on him for its continued existence’. Nevertheless, this argument did contain ‘the germ of the argument from contingency’ which the Arabic falasifa, or philosophers, subsequently picked up and developed. While Islamic schools of thought from the ninth to twelfth centuries in the Middle East and Spain can be categorised in several ways, one division that will be helpful to this essay is between the Kalām and falsafa proofs for the existence of God. The history of the development of these proofs is far more complex than this short essay could do justice to, nevertheless, they may be broadly classified as arguments ‘which developed various forms of the argument from temporal regress’ and arguments ‘from contingency, from possible and necessary being’ respectively. While the mutakallim, or ‘practitioner of the Kalām’ would take ‘the truth of Islam as his starting point’, the failasuf, or ‘man of philosophy’, would follow ‘a method of research independent of dogma’. Consequently, the falsafa tradition was much more inclined to appropriate the platonic and Aristotelian philosophies that they had inherited from classical works originally owned by ‘Syrian converts to Christianity at Antioch, Edessa, and other seats of learning’ after ‘Islam superseded Christianity’. The falasifa can therefore be credited for providing the first sophisticated articulations of the cosmological arguments based on contingency, the essence/existence distinction [54], and the language of possible/necessary being. The mutakallimūn, on the other hand, argued against the ‘Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of the universe’ in favour of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo and ‘a tradition of argumentation in support of the doctrine of creation based on the impossibility of an infinite temporal regress of events.’ [55] These arguments were then transmitted to the Christians of the Latin West through Jewish philosophers. Consequently,

The Kalām argument for the beginning of the universe became a subject of heated debate, being opposed by Aquinas, but adopted and supported by Bonaventure [while] the falsafa argument from necessary and possible being was widely used in various forms and eventually became the key Thomist argument for God’s existence. [56]

The Kalām argument that this essay is interested in was developed by Al-Ghazālī, who was considered to be ‘the greatest figure in the history of the Islamic reaction to Neo-Platonism’. He rejected the argument from contingency because he believed that if the universe were eternal, then the universe itself could be that necessarily existing thing, and nothing would be able to ‘establish the need for the existence of God’.[57] Ghazālī instead argues, from the Kalāmtradition, for the “principle of determination” which posits from the impossibility of an infinite regress of events that a personal determining agent of the finite universe, who is not just an arbitrary first cause, needs to exist:

This principle meant that since prior to the existence of the universe it was equally possible for it to be or not-to-be, a determinant (murajjih) whereby the possibility of being could prevail over the possibility of not-being was required: and this ‘determinant’ […] was God.  

His argument may be summarised as such: 

Concerning (i), which is the crux of the argument, Ghazālī, assuming a pre-scientific view of the cosmos, argues that if two planets revolved around the sun at different rates for all eternity, ‘then these bodies will have each completed an infinite number of revolutions, yet one will have completed twice as many or thousands of times as many revolutions as another, which is absurd’. He applies this also to the question of whether the infinite number of revolutions is odd or even, which leads to more absurdities. Since this thought experiment shows that ‘the series of temporal phenomena must have a beginning’ then ‘according to the principle of determination […] an agent must exist who creates the world’. It is important to note that (b) is not dependent on the ‘causal principle’, that is, on secondary or efficient causation that informs other arguments like Aquinas’s and that have been attacked by Hume and more recently J. L. Mackie [58] and Milbank. [59] The statements that make up (2) simply argue against an infinite number of temporal phenomena, whether or not they are causally related is irrelevant. [60]

            Craig then provides a modern defence of the KCA. He presents the argument in an uncontroversial syllogism that is valid, that is, the conclusion logically and inescapably follows from its premises:

• Premise 1: Everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence
• Premise 2: The universe began to exist
• Conclusion: Therefore the universe has a cause of its existence     

The question that remains is whether the syllogism is sound, that is, whether the premises have more truth value than their negation and whether the conclusion bears the theistic significance that Craig wants it to. Concerning premise one, he argues that this is not a physical (scientific) principle, but a metaphysical (philosophical) one: ‘being cannot come from nonbeing; something cannot come into existence uncaused from nothing’. [61] This is synonymous with the Latin translation of the ancient Greek philosophical principle ‘ex nihilo nihil fit’. He argues that this principle is ‘constantly verified and never falsified’ in everyday experience and intuition. Mackie, taking his cue from Hume, has argued that ‘there is a priori no good reason why a sheer origination of things, not determined by anything, should be unacceptable’, [62] because ‘we can imagine something’s coming into existence without a cause’. [63] He has also argued that ‘if God existed for infinite time, then the same arguments would apply to his existence as would apply to the infinite duration of the universe’ resulting in absurdities. Concerning the first, Craig counter-argues that while the objection is a logical possibility, that is, not logically absurd, it does not necessarily mean that it is actually possible. He provides an analogy: ‘Just because I can imagine an object, say a horse, coming into existence from nothing, that in no way proves that a horse really could come into existence that way.’ [64] Concerning the second, Craig argues, with scientific support from the Big Bang or Standard Friedman-Lemaître model in cosmology wherein the singularity constitutes a ‘boundary to time’, that God has not existed from infinite time, but ‘is timeless without creation and [only] temporal subsequent to creation’. [65]

Furthermore, some have contended that ‘quantum physics furnishes an exception to the claim that something cannot come into being uncaused out of nothing’. Craig notes that the interpretation of quantum physics from which this misunderstanding derives is the Copenhagen interpretation with which ‘a great many physicists today are quite unsatisfied’. In his recent public debate with Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll on ‘God and Cosmology’, Carroll agreed with Craig, saying that ‘the Copenhagen interpretation is basically nonsense, no thoughtful person still holds to it, and yet we teach it to all of our undergraduates, that’s kind of a scandal’. [66] Furthermore Craig notes that ‘Quantum cosmologists are especially averse to Copenhagen, since that interpretation in a cosmological context will require an ultramundane observer to collapse the wave function of the universe’. [67] Nevertheless, even if one does hold to the Copenhagen interpretation and bring it to bear on the early state of the universe, ‘particles do not come into being out of nothing. They arise as spontaneous fluctuations of the energy contained in the subatomic vacuum’. Craig points out that this vacuum is not nothing, it ‘is a sea of fluctuating energy endowed with a rich structure and subject to physical laws’. [68]

Concerning premise two, Craig rallies philosophical and scientific support. Prior to Georg Cantor who invented set theory and the mathematical concept of an actual infinite, whose cardinal number is assigned the aleph zero, ‘the only infinite considered possible by philosopher and mathematician alike was the potential infinite’ usually assigned the lemniscate. The thrust of Craig’s argument here, in consistency with the mutakallimūn, is that while ‘the actual infinite is a fruitful and consistent concept within the postulated universe of discourse, it cannot be transposed into the real world’. [69] He argues for this principle in the two philosophical lines of argument that he defends for premise two, namely, ‘the argument from the impossibility of the existence of an actual infinite’ and ‘the argument from the impossibility of the formation of an actual infinite by successive addition’. [70] Space does not permit a substantive reproduction of his defence here; in summary he uses thought experiments like Hilbert’s Hotel, Bertrand Russell’s Tristram Shandy, ‘Zeno’s paradoxes of motion and the thesis of Kant’s first antinomy of pure reason’ to show how actual infinities instantiated in the real world leads to absurdities. One strong objection to the second argument for premise two is if the static, or B-theory of time, precipitated by Hermann Minkowski’s approach to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity in 1908, wherein time is unified with space ‘into a four-dimensional, geometrical entity called spacetime, all of whose points are equally real and none of which is objectively present’, is taken to be true. In this case, the actual infinite does not need to be formed by successive addition, it just exists in its entirety like in a mathematical set of natural numbers: {1, 2, 3, …}. Craig responds by rejecting both ‘the Einsteinian, relativity interpretation’ and ‘the Minkowskian, space-time interpretation’ of STR for ‘Lorentzian relativity’ [71] which would restore the dynamic, or A-theory of time, in which ‘temporal becoming is an objective feature of reality’ [72] and therefore also the soundness of his argument for ‘the impossibility of the formation of an actual infinite by successive addition’. [73]

Craig’s two-pronged scientific support for this premise in the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology is very dense and long and features highly technical cosmological jargon. Consequently, this essay will only tease out its simplest and most vital principles. From Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (GTR), Alexander Friedman and Georges Lemaître were able to formulate ‘solutions to his equations which predicted an expanding universe’ in the 1920s, a universe that had previously been ‘regarded as fixed and immutable’. If one extrapolated backward from their model, which is also called the Standard Model, one would arrive at ‘a singularity at which spacetime curvature, along with temperature, pressure, and density, becomes infinite. John Barrow and Frank Tippler emphasize that ‘at this singularity, space and time came into existence; literally nothing existed before the singularity, so, if the Universe originated at such a singularity, we would truly have a creation ex nihilo’. [74] Craig argues that all of the subsequent attempts to avoid creatio ex nihilo with other models have failed broadly for two reasons. The first is because of the formulation of Arvind Borde, Alan Guth and Alexander Vilenkin’s theorem in 2003 (aptly called the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem) ‘establishing that any universe which has on average over its past history been in a state of cosmic expansion cannot be eternal in the past but must have a spacetime boundary.’ The second is an application of the second law of thermodynamics to the closed system of the universe, which would render the proposition of its eternality untenable, for ‘if, given sufficient time, the universe will suffer heat death, then why, if it has existed forever, is it not now in a state of heat death?’. As a result, a whole slew of alternate models, like the Steady State Model, Oscillating Models, Vacuum Fluctuation Models, the Chaotic Inflationary Model, Quantum Gravity Models, String Scenarios like the Pre-Big Bang Scenario and the Cyclic Ekpyrotic Scenario, Baby Universes, Inflationary Multiverses etc. have been accepted (in the general scientific consensus) as either flawed or not able to escape from the true cosmic beginning predicted by the Standard Model. At most, it only pushes it further back, for example, to the beginning of the multiverse. [75]

Finally, concerning the conclusion, Craig argues that the cause must be uncaused, single rather than plural (applying Ockham’s razor), beginningless, changeless but not immutable ‘since immutability is a modal property, and from the Cause’s changelessness we cannot infer that it is incapable of change’, immaterial, timeless ‘sans the universe’, spaceless, vastly powerful and personal. He provides three reasons for the cause being personal. The first is an appropriation of Swinburne’s notion that ‘there are two types of causal explanation: scientific explanations in terms of laws and initial conditions and personal explanations in terms of agents and their volitions’, and since there cannot be a scientific explanation of the universe given the spacetime boundary of the Standard Model, ‘it can only be accounted for in terms of an agent and his volitions, a personal explanation’. The second is that there are only two alternatives for what could fit the description of being ‘immaterial, beginningless, uncaused, timeless, and spaceless, […] either abstract objects or an unembodied mind’, and since ‘abstract objects are not involved in causal relations’ with the material, whatever one’s philosophical commitments to them are (i.e., Platonism, Conceptualism, Physicalism, Fictionalism, etc.), they cannot be the cause of the universe; therefore, the cause must be an unembodied mind. The third is the ‘fact that only personal, free agency can account for the origin of a first temporal effect from a changeless cause’. Craig notes that if the cause is impersonal, and

if the necessary and sufficient conditions for the production of the effect are eternal, then why is not the effect eternal? How can all the causal conditions sufficient for the production of the effect be changelessly existent [as an immutable abstract impersonal cause must be] and yet the effect not also be existent along with the cause?

Craig therefore contends that the solution must be that the cause is an agent with freedom of the will, who wills ‘from eternity’ to create the universe not temporally, but logically prior to when it is in fact created. Consequently, for Craig, this personal creator is, ‘as Thomas Aquinas was wont to remark, […] what everyone means by “God”’. [76]

As it has already been noted, this argument has attracted lively discussion in philosophy journals. Craig has also defended the KCA quite prolifically in public debates with philosophers of science and physicists specialising in cosmology. Therefore, whether or not one personally finds the argument persuasive, the fact remains that the KCA is recognized as a prominent and formidable contemporary product of analytic philosophy of religion. In the section following, this essay will attempt to provide an in-depth comparison between it and the other contemporary trend in theology, RO.  

Exploring the Interface

This essay will first explore three points of convergence between RO and the KCA. First, both affirm creatio ex nihilo. Conversely, Leibniz’s cosmological argument based on the principle of sufficient reason makes no reference to the impossibility of an infinite temporal regress, [77] because for him an eternal universe would still need a reason for its existence. Apart from rejecting the notion of an eternal universe, Milbank also rejects the principle of sufficient reason because it is nihilistic and circular. [78] Also, Aquinas, taking his cue from the falasifa, articulated cosmological arguments predicated on efficient causation and the essence/existence distinction. While RO would conjoin Aquinas’s participatory theology with his empirically justified proofs, reading him through the lens of Augustine, showing how his a posteriori proofs are radically pre-suppositional and focusing more on his Proclean Neoplatonism [79] and his argument based on the essence/existence distinction, that argument (his Third Way) does not need creatio ex nihilo to work. Like the falasifa Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Rushd’s arguments that rely on the essence/existence distinction and the possible/necessary distinction respectively, Aquinas’s Third Way implies that the universe could be eternal and never have a beginning in time, but would only need a being whose essence is his existence who would, by the nature of his existence, be able to furnish (finite or infinite) essences their existence. [80] On the contrary, the KCA’s driving principle is creatio ex nihilo: its conclusion hinges on the premise that there was a beginning of all time, space, matter and energy a finite number of moments ago. Furthermore, the conclusions from Aquinas’s Third Way and Leibniz’s argument from sufficiency can only logically lead to a necessary being of or sufficient reason for the possibly eternal universe, and these are relatively anaemic theistic definitions. But for the KCA, given creatio ex nihilo and the eternal cause’s temporal effect issuing in the finite universe, this cosmological argument’s first cause is also a transcendent personal creator, and these are theologically richer attributes of God that RO would readily affirm.        

The second point of convergence is the fact that RO and the KCA do not give credence to the principle of efficient or secondary causation. Oliver is clear that because creation is a gift from God, it is at every moment ex nihilo. [81] He goes on to say that motion for Aquinas can be better understood as a Neo-Platonic hierarchy ‘in which God “touches” every motion’. [82] While Craig himself would reject the similar Mu’tazilite notion that God re-creates all reality at every instant so that there is no cause other than God, which to him leads to a fatalism that is philosophically untenable, [83] the KCA, originally a product of that mutakallim tradition, does not need secondary causation to work since it only argues against the existence of an actually infinite number of temporal phenomena. The only “causal principle” that the KCA invokes is the metaphysical one in the first premise. However, since RO – unlike the other non-realist postmodern theologies listed in this essay – affirms a Neo-Platonic recovery of metaphysical reflection that nevertheless tries to skirt the pitfalls of Scotus’s univocal metaphysics, [84] as is evident in Oliver’s analysis, it is possible that its proponents would accept a causal relation between the metaphysical and physical that informs the KCA’s first premise and conclusion even though they would still charge it with false humility.

This leads to the third and last significant convergence between RO and the KCA: their affirmation of a kind of metaphysics that has hitherto been stripped from modern and postmodern discourse as well as overlapping academic disciplines that are also predicated on enlightenment principles, like the natural sciences. The first line in Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory, and underpinning all of RO’s critique, is the notion that ‘once, there was no secular’. [85] As it has been surveyed more substantively in the relevant foregoing chapter, RO wishes to recover the effects of that split in philosophy from theology precipitated by currents in medieval theological thought that had its consummate expression in Scotus. One of the many places in which those effects can be felt today is in contemporary cosmology. Carroll, in his debate with Craig, notes that God is irrelevant to cosmology; naturalism is pre-supposed because science can only work with data it can quantify and make predictions with. [86] Consequently, the only kind of God that can be univocally invoked in naturalism is a “God of the gaps”, who would, as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson astutely points out, recede as science progress. [87] This type of “zero-sum game” that results from a univocal ontology is specifically repudiated by Milbank who argues that prior to Scotus, ‘the two causalities [i.e., the physical and metaphysical] were basically shared and energized each other’. [88] Similarly, Craig does not attempt to prove God with science, since this would presuppose a univocal ontology and its attendant “zero-sum game”, “God of the gaps” mindset. Rather, his KCA attempts to show how a close examination of contemporary scientific discoveries actually supports premises in a philosophical argument that concludes to a transcendent personal creator. [89] Although the argument is structurally a posteriori and would on that count be rejected by RO, which pre-supposes an analogical and participatory theological framework to recover the split, it is attempting to put philosophy and science back into theology by showing how a metaphysical theistic hypothesis is the best explanation for the state of the physical universe currently understood. Therefore, the more cosmology and physics uncover the fundamental nature of reality and the origin of the universe, the more, not less, one may see the handiwork of its Creator. [90] Furthermore, concerning the specific interface between theology and modern science, Oliver mentions that he does hope to ‘see RO engage more particularly with scientific culture because this tends to set the agenda of so many debates within politics, economics and ethics’. [91] It remains to be seen how RO would take up this challenge with pre-suppositional and non-syncretistic principles, but it can be argued that Craig’s KCA furnishes a broad example of how this might be done a posteriori.

The foregoing analysis has shown that the KCA does affirm, or at least not contravene some specific aspects of RO’s theological principles. However, this essay is under no misimpression that there are no serious incompatibilities between them. While RO would not say that the conclusion of the KCA is false if its premises are true, since it is not irrational, it would still charge it, and the whole project of Natural Theology [92] with the fact that it bases its methodology on that dualistic split by relying on the deliverances of the secular disciplines and refusing to presuppose God. This essay will explore three consequent incompatibilities: the univocal versus analogical concept of being, the fact that the KCA cannot furnish a comprehensive account of divine action in the same way that an analogical theological framework can, and a whole slew of theological “proofs” from RO that are impossible to affirm through the methodologies that undergird the KCA.    

While the KCA tries to recover a metaphysics that would serve to provide a holistic picture of the universe, the very nature of the proof, being a posteriori and based on the “neutral grounds” of contemporary cosmology and an autonomous philosophy, ensures that its conclusion cannot escape very far from the charge that it invokes a univocal concept of being to define what the nature of that being is, that is, timeless, spaceless, immaterial, powerful and personal. [93] Although Craig would not say that the KCA makes God out to be just another being in the universe, since he is its progenitor in every sense of the word, his nature nevertheless has to be, given the logical structure of the KCA, described in anaemic univocal terms. This is a far cry from RO’s analogical framework wherein a priori and a posteriori philosophies are both rejected because they presuppose the epistemological turn wherein ‘the thinking subject [has] been cut off from the transcendent and start[s] worrying about whether it really knows anything’. [94] Instead, RO sees knowledge as genuine because the human intellect ‘is formed and measured by participation in the divine understanding’. Pickstock explains:

That which clinches his [Aquinas’s] exposition of the divine attributes is neither the ascent from effect to first cause nor the a priori grasp of the latter, but rather the (Dionysian) reading of the divine signs and symbols as disclosed in the hierarchies of participating creatures. [95]

Furthermore, since for RO, theology can only be done as an outworking of Christian revelation alone, and the patristic tradition that builds on this supposition, a fuller and richer concept of God over and against the deistic God of NT may be affirmed. That is to say because theology no longer has to be circumscribed by the encroachments of the autonomous disciplines and have to jump over swaths of obstacles just to be able to articulate an anaemic definition (relative to full-blown Christian theism) of some deistic God like in the KCA, it can radically re-affirm the God of Christian theism, revealed in the scriptures and confirmed in the ecumenical creeds, through RO’s analogical and participatory theological framework. This is evident in RO’s understanding of the role of the Trinity in creation. For example, Aquinas, who appropriated the concept of emanation from Plotinus through the medium of the cosmological arguments of the falasifa, [96] who were themselves influenced by Plotinus, understood creation to be an emanation from ‘the eternal uttering of the Logos’. RO accepts this and then builds on it by articulating a kind of Trinitarian “Natural Theology”:

The ‘reversed supplementation’ of the Trinity validates history as the horizontal route of our vertical ontological supplementation. […] With the Trinity, Christianity has succeeded in thinking thought as absolute and simple, precisely because it no longer thinks of it as reflexion, but as relation, poesis, and vision, [97]

and supplementing it with creatio ex nihilo.

This leads to the final significant incompatibility between RO and the KCA, and that is the question of what constitutes “proof”. For the analytic framework in which the KCA operates, one of the few things that can determine the truth value of a certain proposition is if it is formed by valid and sound philosophical arguments that do not commit any informal fallacies and can be supported by the deliverances of the other autonomous disciplines, for example, statistical data from the field of psychology. In other words, a convincing proof has to be built slowly and carefully from the ground up in strict accordance with the rules of philosophical logic and preferably with support from empirical data. Conversely, for RO, “proofs” are much more theological and readily available everywhere. Pickstock offers a critique of scientific (or empirical) knowledge as imposing ‘a gulf between the everyday world and the ironic gaze of the scientific sage from the height of his privileged insight’. In this framework, truth ‘has here become the property of an élite’. But Pickstock argues that when knowledge and truth are understood within ‘Aquinas’s theology of metaphysics and participation’, truth is both ‘immediately accessible to the simplest apprehension, and yet amenable to profound learned elaboration’. Therefore, for RO, this happens through a kind of phenomenology of aesthetics. Pickstock argues that the ‘metaphysics of participation in Aquinas is immediately and implicitly a phenomenology of seeing more than one sees, of recognising the invisible in the visible’. And the act of determining truth in his phenomenological framework to employ ‘an aesthetic judgment’ because truth ‘shines outwards in beauty’. [98] In Bauerschmidt’s article on aesthetics, he also appropriates Hans Urs von Balthasar’s ‘theological aesthetics’, wherein the ‘premodern sacred cosmos […] transparently radiates divine wisdom’, as the solution to the postmodern epistemological problematic. [99]

For RO, the project of Christian knowing is comprehensively integrated with liturgy and the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, through an aforementioned aesthetic apprehension. Milbank argues that the recovery of the depthless-ness in postmodernism comes from Christ’s hypostatic union. [100] That is why for him, ‘Catherine Pickstock’s “liturgical turn” is so crucially foundational for Radical Orthodoxy’. [101] Pickstock herself explains:

God descends in the Incarnation and its perpetuation in the Eucharist to our immediate sensory awareness, wherein alone we enjoy intuitive understanding. In this fashion, it is the lower reason which is required to educate our higher reason.

So knowledge of divine truth is experienced through the touching of ‘divine physical manifestation’ and the ‘Grafting of liturgical enactments’. [102] Therefore, if RO would ever concede to a “Natural Theology”, it would be deeply integrated with revealed theology and the established practice of the church; it would be in the Logos’s emanation of the cosmos, with which he is analogically related, his incarnation, which ensures the alethiological connection between signifier and signified, and his continuing presence in the Eucharist with which his creation participates. In contrast to the KCA, which tries very hard to play by the “rules” of the secular disciplines, RO’s formulation of what constitutes “proof” legitimates the breadth of theological resources that it brings to bear holistically to this issue.    

In summary, this section has shown that, while RO and the KCA converge on some points, like their affirmation of creatio ex nihilo, their rejection of secondary causation, and their mutual desire to recover metaphysical reflection and bring those insights to bear on the secular autonomous disciplines that pre-suppose a naturalistic world view and method to heal the split and bring these disciplines back into the service of theology rather than the secular and its lust for power and control, larger overarching incompatibilities remain. This essay would like to propose the possibility of appropriating the KCA into RO’s post-secular epistemology by appealing to Oliver’s argument about Aquinas in his Philosophy, God, and Motion. While Oliver, like Pickstock, tries to show how Aquinas’s natural theology draws from Aristotle’s cosmos through an Augustinian lens, whose motions ‘always refer beyond themselves’ and a kind of Neo-Platonism in which ‘metaphysics and physics are understood to be in intimate proximity’ so that the Godhead has to be analogically presupposed, he does concede that at some points, Aquinas plainly and undeniably follows a bare a posteriori empirical method and uses the principle of efficient causality to prove the existence of God. Oliver argues that what Aquinas is doing is

looking on matter as the ‘fool’ might do, with an apparently bare metaphysics which is characteristic of the pagan mind – in order to show that ‘God is’ can be made evident, even in this way. […] He is trying to demonstrate the value of other sciences in making clear to us the content and implications of sacra doctrina. [103]

If by this concession, Aquinas’s more empirical methods may be baptised into RO along with the rest of his theology, it seems that the same could be done for the KCA. Like Aquinas’s more empirical proofs, the KCA appropriates the deliverances of contemporary science and analytic philosophy (which are respected sources of knowledge in the modern world, as Aquinas’s methods were in his time) to show how even through those methods, belief in the theistic proposition can be rendered at least reasonable, and at most incontrovertible. While of course, whether or not the KCA and the methods of analytic NT could ever be appropriated by RO would depend solely on whether its proponents would be willing to bend over backward a little to accept it, this section has hoped to show that, unlike the other kinds of irrational postmodernisms that whole-heartedly embrace contradiction, including the contradiction of having a non-contradictory conviction about the truth of contradiction, in tacit support of a kind of secular emancipation from universal truth, RO’s radical affirmation of a theistic world view wherein all knowledge is ultimately God’s knowledge and whose truth is made available to us through our participation in his divine mind opens the possibility of permitting an argument that wishes to affirm the same thing but with the tools of the secular sciences.     

Conclusion

Consider for a moment that creative analogies of RO’s thesis on the dualistic split between philosophy (reason) and theology (faith) can be made to theological currents that have historically run through the origin and evolution of the record of the Yahwistic religion itself. In the Pentateuch, or the Torah, Yahwistic, and Priestly sources present two pictures of God, broadly speaking: immanent, interactive, and personal on the one hand and transcendent, legalistic, and distant on the other. [104] In the historical and prophetic books, or the Nevi’im and Ketuvim, this split appears again in the legalistic theology associated with the Deuteronomist and the Deuteronomistic History (DtrH) [105] that broadly understood strict ritual obedience to the laws of Yahweh, to be the guarantor of peace, prosperity, and restoration, in contrast with the moral theologies of the ‘free prophets’, [106] who were not implicated in political agendas as the official or court prophets were, [107] and who prophesied the virtues of love, grace, mercy, charity, and forgiveness as the true underlying principles of the call to ritual obedience. This is apparent again in the New Testament, with the legalism of the Pharisees on one side starkly contrasted with the grace-filled moral teachings of Jesus Christ – who explained the moral purpose of the law – and his followers on the other. Fast forward two millennia and this split is still arguably apparent in the “law” abiding analytic philosophers of religion in one camp and the “prophetic” continental theologians in the other. [108] If in the history of Yahwism, Judaism and Christianity, these two general models of theological reflection have always been operative, and in perpetual tension, it would seem pertinent to wonder if specific articulations on either side that arise from mutually sincere theological reflection could not find deeper consonances and syntheses. This essay has endeavored to show that in one of their contemporary incarnations, significant consonances and teloi can indeed be found. It has also implicitly ventured the proposition that both could potentially aid in covering each other’s blind spots when viewed synthetically rather than in opposition: A continental theology like RO could, in the words of Milbank, show how an autonomous philosophy – as analytic philosophy certainly is in itself – ‘offer[s] no secure self-contained foundation, because it always necessarily gestures beyond itself’, given RO’s affirmation of the pre-suppositional nature of all knowledge. An analytic NT can re-articulate esoteric theological convictions clearly and cogently with the accepted methods of inquiry and sources of knowledge of the day, [109] allowing theology to genuinely dialogue with the autonomous disciplines and consequently possibly strengthen itself as a visible player in political decision-making, as Oliver has contended.

Furthermore, in seeking to explore consonances between disciplines that are mutually committed to a theistic world view, and consequently dialogue through those consonances, this essay has not attempted the much larger goal of arguing which is ultimately a “better” exemplification of the purpose of theology, or the more precise goal of arguing whether Craig gets his philosophy of science right, or whether RO accurately portrays Aquinas, Kant and Scotus (for these would require a lot more ink to be spilled), but hopes that with its engagement, and others like it, the two distinct theological pictures engendered by these methodologies that can be broadly summarised in the table below – which is taken from Nick Trakakis’s article on the analytic continental divide in the philosophy of religion – of a God who ‘is the supreme exemplification of the old adage: The more you know, the more you don’t know’, [110] can, instead of being mutually exclusive and opposed, be dialectically appropriated and synthetically explored by theologian, philosopher and ordinary believer alike. 

Appendix

Endnotes

1. For example, Mark C. Taylor, After God (London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), and Don Cupitt, The Long Legged Fly (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1987).
2. This categorization of postmodern theology, though not exhaustive, is also hinted at in James K. A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy (Michigan: Baker Academic, 2004), pp. 56, 58. 
3. See for example, The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, ed. by William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland (United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing, 2009), which appropriates insights from the natural sciences and analytic philosophy, bringing them to bear on classical and contemporary theistic arguments. 
4. William Lane Craig, The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz (Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2001).
5. See for example, Nick Trakakis, ‘Meta-Philosophy of Religion: The Analytic-Continental Divide in Philosophy of Religion’, Ars Disputandi, 7 (2007), pp. 1, 42.
6. In this case, that would be analytic philosophy, the natural sciences and postmodern or continental theology as RO might be more properly called.
7. This typology of cosmological argument type has become standard. See Natural Theology, p. 101, footnote. 
8. ‘Postmodernism has provoked precious little agreement on anything from the reasons for its existence to its definition, let alone on the evaluation of its effects’, A Postmodern Reader, ed. by Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), p. xi.   
9. The centrepiece of RO’s critique of the rise of contemporary secularism as ‘a Christian heresy’. See The Radical Orthodoxy Reader, ed. by John Milbank and Simon Oliver (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 21.  
10. A Postmodern Reader, p. ix.
11. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1990), pp. 12, 15, 30, 38.
12. “West” is used here to refer broadly to Europe and America. 
13. Most influentially, the discourse on power as proportionately related to knowledge, an ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’, and “deconstruction”. This typology can also be found in James K. A. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism (Michigan: Baker Academic, 2006).
14. Christopher Butler, Postmodernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 29. 
15. Harvey, Postmodernity, pp. 39, 41, 30, 44. 
16. Hans Bertens, ‘The Postmodern Weltanschauung and its Relation to Modernism’, in A Postmodern Reader, p. 45.
17. John McGowan, ‘Excerpts from Postmodernism and its Critics’, in A Postmodern Reader, p. 205, 204, 205. This is also what causes the ‘oft-commented-upon failure for a dialogue to develop between continental and Anglo-American philosophy’, p. 205. 
18. Don Cupitt, The Long-Legged Fly (London: SCM Press, 1987), pp. 4, 1, 63, 124, 125, 33. 
19. See Steven Shakespeare, Radical Orthodoxy: A Critical Introduction (Great Britain: SPCK, 2007), p. 10.
20. This bifurcation can also be seen in the historical progression of the divergent pathway between rational and spiritual expressions of faith with Isaac Newton, John Locke, William Paley on one side and Barth and Kierkegaard on the other. Taylor, After God, pp. 91, 94, 106, 193, chapter 8.
21. Taylor, After God, pp. 12, 51, 55, 57, 60, 61, 71, 70, 254, 349. Some of those challenges are abortion, sex education, contraception and stem cell research. Taylor argues that a reactive and cyclic return to a simplistic moralism must be abandoned for the sake of humanity, p. 352.
22. See John D. Caputo, ‘Introduction’, in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997).
23. Caputo, On Religion (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 110. 
24. ‘The Kingdom of God […] includes anyone who does justice in spirit and in truth’. Caputo, On Religion, p. 138.
25. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, pp. 153, 154.
26. Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, ‘Aesthetics: The Theological Sublime’, in Radical Orthodoxy ed. by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward (London Routledge, 1999), p. 204.   
27. The Postmodern God ed. by Graham Ward (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1997), p. xIii.
28. Simon Oliver, ‘Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: from participation to late modernity’, in The Radical Orthodoxy Reader, ed. by John Milbank and Simon Oliver (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 10, 10. 
29. Milbank has acknowledged that critics think that there are ‘serious ruptures’ within the movement. See Milbank, ‘Forward’, in Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, p. 11. 
30. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, p. 67. Quoted from Graham Ward.
31. ‘About this Reader’, in The Radical Orthodoxy Reader, p. xi 
32. Shakespeare, Radical Orthodoxy: A Critical Introduction, p. 24.
33. Oliver, ‘Introducing Radical Orthodoxy’, in The Radical Orthodoxy Reader, pp. 15-16, 17-18. 
34. Shakespeare, Radical Orthodoxy: A Critical Introduction, p. 6.
35. Milbank, Ward and Pickstock, ‘Suspending the material: the turn of radical orthodoxy’, in Radical orthodoxy, p. 2. 
36. ‘Radical Orthodoxy: a conversation’, ed. by Rupert Shortt, in The Radical Orthodoxy Reader, p. 33.
37. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, p. 73; and Milbank, ‘Knowledge: The theological critique of philosophy in Hamann and Jacobi’, in Radical Orthodoxy, p. 22. 
38. Pickstock, ‘Duns Scotus: his historical and contemporary significance’, in The Radical Orthodoxy Reader, pp. 117, 120.
39. Milbank and Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 9.
40. Milbank, Beyond Secular Order (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013), p. 3. 
41. Prior to Kant, who used the terms a posteriori and a priori to mean what would come to be known as empiricism and rationalism respectively, these terms meant an argument that proceeds from effect back to cause, and an argument that proceeds from cause forward to effect. It is the latter definition that this essay is implicitly using unless otherwise stated. See Craig, The Cosmological Argument from Plato, pp. 222-223.   
42. Oliver, ‘Introducing Radical Orthodoxy’, in The Radical Orthodoxy Reader, p. 21.
43. Milbank, ‘Knowledge: The theological critique of philosophy in Hamann and Jacobi’, in Radical Orthodoxy, p. 21.
44. See Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), chapter 10.
45. Shakespeare, Radical Orthodoxy: A Critical Introduction, p. 7.
46. Milbank, ‘Postmodern Critical Augustinianism’, in The Postmodern God, p. 277.
47. Charles Taliaferro, ‘The Project of Natural Theology’, in Natural Theology, pp. 1, 1, 1-2.  
48. James Brent, ‘Natural Theology’, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy <http://www.iep.utm.edu/theo-nat/> [accessed 8 April 2014]. For a more comprehensive account of analytic philosophy and the fall of logical positivism, see Aaron Preston, ‘Analytic Philosophy’, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy < http://www.iep.utm.edu/analytic/> [accessed 16 April 2014]   
49. Trakakis, ‘Meta-Philosophy of Religion’, p. 4. 
50. Michael Beaney, ‘Analysis’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analysis/> [accessed 16 April 2014]
51. The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed. by Michael Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 183 states that ‘a count of the articles in the philosophy journals shows that more articles have been published about Craig’s defense of the Kalam argument than have been published about any other philosopher’s contemporary formulation of an argument for God’s existence’. 
52. Craig talks about writing on the cosmological argument under John Hick for his PhD on his website: <http://www.reasonablefaith.org/stuart-hackett> [accessed 8 April 2014] 
53. Craig, The Cosmological Argument from Plato, p. x. His use of a posteriori here bears the post-Kantian meaning.
54. This same distinction from Aquinas informs Oliver’s concept of “participation” mentioned earlier.
55. Craig and Sinclair, ‘The Kalam Cosmological Argument’, in Natural Theology, pp. 101, 101. The prominent mutakallimūn include Al-Ghazālī (Algazel), while the prominent falasifa include Al-Kindī (Alkindus), Al-Fārābī (Alpharabius), Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averroës), see Craig, The Cosmological Argument from Plato, chapter 3 for a full articulation of their arguments.
56. Craig, The Cosmological Argument from Plato, pp. 21, 20, 24, 35-36, 42, 49, 49, 60, 60, 59, 61, 110-111.
57. Craig, The Cosmological Argument from Plato, pp. 98, 99, 54.
58. Craig, Reasonable Faith (Illinois: Crossway, 2008), p. 113.
59. See Milbank, Beyond Secular Order, p. 112.
60. Craig, The Kalām Cosmological Argument (Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2000), pp. 48-49, 46, 46, 47, 49.  The original mutakallimūn were the Mu’tazilites. They were metaphysical atomists who believed that ‘atoms were radically contingent and had to be continuously re-created by God in every successive instant’. Therefore they rejected secondary causation as did Ghazālī, which led to the fatalism that characterises the Islamic religion. See Craig, The Cosmological Argument from Plato, pp. 49-51.   
61. Craig and Sinclair, ‘The Kalam’, in Natural Theology, p. 186.
62. A priori used here denotes rationalism.
63. Craig, The Kalām, pp. 63, 143, 145, 144.
64. Craig, Reasonable Faith, pp. 112, 112, 112.
65. Craig, Time and Eternity (Illinois: Crossway, 2001), p. 236.
66. ‘God and Cosmology’, 21-22 February 2014, The Greer-Heard Forum, Fortress Press (forthcoming), alternatively available on YouTube <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0qKZqPy9T8> [accessed 15 April 2014]. It was also mentioned that Craig is himself leaning toward the deterministic theory of David Bohm, while Carroll holds to Hugh Everett’s Many-worlds interpretation. 
67. Simon Oliver offers a theological interpretation of quantum physics with Aquinas’s concept of “participation” in his Philosophy God and Motion (Oxon: Routledge, 2005), pp. 185-186, whereby ‘form becomes the mediating principle […] between the quantum and macroscopic worlds’ and things become actual by participating in substantial form. In his conversation with Rupert Shortt, he also seems to endorse the Copenhagen interpretation when he notes its consistency with the thought of many medieval theologians who ‘envisage[d] a genuine mutual interaction between the observer (the soul) and that which is observed’. ‘Radical Orthodoxy: a conversation’, in The Radical Orthodoxy Reader, p. 46. 
68. Craig and Sinclair, ‘The Kalam’, in Natural Theology, pp. 182, 183, 183, 183, 183. 
69. Craig and Sinclair, ‘The Kalam’, in Natural Theology, p. 108. Craig explains that this argument is not concerned with logical modality but rather metaphysical modality. And even though this might be a ‘woollier’ notion, ‘the poorly defined nature of metaphysical modality cuts both ways dialectically’, so that ‘such arguments cannot be refuted by facile observations to the effect that such states of affairs have not been demonstrated to be strictly logically inconsistent’, p. 106.
70. Because that would be how temporal phenomena in the universe has to be accrued, assuming the dynamic or A-theory of time.
71. Craig, Time and Eternity, pp. 168, 173.
72. Craig, Reasonable Faith, pp. 118, 121, 121.
73. Craig, The Kalām, pp. 65, 140, 140, 98, 105, 140. i.e., unlike the potential infinite, ℵ₀ can never be reached ‘by successive addition’ because ‘one can always add one more’, p. 104. 
74. The term “Big Bang” originated from Fred Hoyle. See Simon Mitton, Fred Hoyle: A Life in Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
75. Craig, Reasonable Faith, pp. 125, 126, 126, 127, 140, 141, 127-150.
76. Craig and Sinclair, ‘The Kalam’, in Natural Theology, pp. 192, 192, 192, 193, 193, 107, 193, 193, 194. Also, a cause so defined narrows the theistic scope to the western monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. See Halvorson, Hans and Helge Kragh ‘Cosmology and Theology’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/cosmology-theology/> [accessed 11 April 2014]
77. Craig, The Kalām, pp. 276-277.
78. Milbank, Beyond Secular Order, p. 89.
79. Milbank and Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, pp. 29, 30.
80. Craig, The Cosmological Argument from Plato, pp. 193-195.
81. Oliver, ‘Introducing Radical Orthodoxy’, in The Radical Orthodoxy Reader, p. 18.
82. Oliver, Philosophy, God and Motion, p. 4.
83. Craig argues that any form of causal determinism, i.e., soft or hard determinism, of which fatalism is a subset, cannot be rationally held to be true since, if actually true, one would necessarily be causally determined to hold that or any other belief, and all rational consideration is illusory. See Four Views on Divine Providence, ed. by Dennis W. Jowers (Michigan: Zondervan, 2011), p. 60.  
84. Pickstock argues that Aquinas supported the ‘Greek legacy of metaphysical reflection’ that she elsewhere identifies as a kind of Neo-Platonism. See Milbank and Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, p. xiii. 
85. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, p. 9. 
86. ‘God and Cosmology’.
87. ‘Neil deGrasse Tyson on Science, Religion and the Universe’, Moyers & Company, <http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-neil-degrasse-tyson-on-science-religion-and-the-universe/> [accessed 15 April 2014]
88. Milbank, Beyond Secular Order, p. 46.
89. ‘God and Cosmology’.
90. ‘The Standard Model’s prediction of an absolute beginning has persisted through a century of astonishing progress in theoretical and observational cosmology and survived an onslaught of alternative theories. […] It can be confidently said that no cosmogonic model had been as repeatedly verified in its predictions and as corroborated by attempts at its falsification, […] as the Standard Big Bang Model’. Craig, Reasonable Faith, p. 140. 
91. ‘Radical Orthodoxy: a conversation’, in The Radical Orthodoxy Reader, p. 46.
92. Milbank sees NT as a ‘bad theology’. See ‘Radical Orthodoxy: a conversation’, in the Radical Orthodoxy Reader, p. 41.
93. Craig and Sinclair, ‘The Kalam’, in Natural Theology, p 192.
94. Shakespeare, Radical Orthodoxy: A Critical Introduction, p. 163.
95. Milbank and Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, pp. 21, 26.
96. See Craig, The Cosmological Argument from Plato, p. 59. Also, ‘Aquinas’ own metaphysics (and theology) will be unintelligible without an understanding of the debt he owes to Ibn Sīnā’, p. 98.
97. Milbank and Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, pp. 28, 50, 51.
98. Milbank and Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, pp. xii, xiii, xii, 41, 7, 8.
99. Bauerschmidt, ‘Aesthetics: The theological sublime’, in Radical Orthodoxy, pp. 207, 206. Interestingly, outside of theology and philosophy, aesthetics has also been the subject of scientific scrutiny, and recent research on mathematicians and their positive emotional experiences when looking at mathematical equations, determined via fMRI scans, wherein activity was recorded in ‘field A1 of the medial orbito-frontal cortex’ of their brains, could point to the notion that what one apprehends as aesthetically pleasing lies in a sensorial awareness of a kind of harmony or truth that the object or proposition exhibits. See Semir Zeki, Romanya, Benincasa, and Atiyah, ‘The experience of mathematical beauty and its neural correlates’, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8 68 (2014).       
100. Milbank, ‘Knowledge: The theological critique of philosophy in Hamann and Jacobi’, in Radical Orthodoxy, p. 32. 
101. Milbank, ‘The grandeur of reason and the perversity of rationalism’, in The Radical Orthodoxy Reader, p. 369. 
102. Milbank and Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, pp. xiii, 75.
103. Oliver, Philosophy, God and Motion, pp. 99, 97, 105, 106.
104. See Marc Z. Brettler, ‘Introduction to the Pentateuch’, in The New Oxford Annotated Bible, ed. by Michael D. Coogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 
105. See Antony F. Campbell and Mark A. O’Brien, Unfolding the Deuteronomistic History (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000).
106. See David Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World (Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1983).
107. See for example I Kings 22.
108. Trakakis recognises the prophetic nature of continental theology. See Trakakis, ‘Meta-Philosophy of Religion’, p. 42. Smith also notes that the deconstructive church is deeply prophetic. See Smith, Who’s Afraid, p. 58, as does Pickstock for RO. See Milbank and Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, p. 95. 
109. One example of this can be found in Five Views on Apologetics, ed. by Steven B. Cowan (Michigan: Zondervan, 2000), pp. 232-234. Craig shows how John M. Frame, a theologian with a pre-suppositional apologetic method, commits the fallacy of petittio principii by arguing, in effect, that ‘God exists. Therefore, God exists’ because ‘he confuses transcendental reasoning with what medievals called demonstratio quia, proof that proceeds from consequence to ground’. Craig argues that a true transcendental argument that rises above ‘the cloud of confusion’, that is ‘philosophically sophisticated’ and ‘carefully articulated’, can be found in Analytic philosopher Plantinga’s Reformed epistemology developed in his Warrant: The Current Debate and Warrant and Proper Function, wherein he develops the argument that ‘warrant accrues to a belief when it is formed by cognitive faculties functioning properly […] according to a design plan aimed at producing true beliefs. Thus, the existence of God is a precondition of knowledge itself’, so ‘the nontheist who thinks that he is warranted in his non-belief thus unwittingly presupposes the existence of God in his very denial of God’.  
110. Terence E. Fretheim, Exodus: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1991), p. 62 footnote.   
111. Quoted entirely from Trakakis, ‘Meta-Philosophy of Religion: The Analytic-Continental Divide in Philosophy of Religion’.

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