Main authors discussed: Søren Kierkegaard, Johannes Climacus, William L. Rowe, Cardinal Newman, Karl Rahner

According to the standard reading, Søren Kierkegaard is a staunch critic of natural theology.  Johannes Climacus, the pseudonymous author of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments, lampoons all attempts to “prove” God’s existence, and the views Climacus expresses in this text are, for good reason, commonly attributed to Kierkegaard himself.  Furthermore, as C. Stephen Evans has argued at length (see especially chapters 10 and 11 of Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays), Kierkegaard’s thought bears a marked resemblance to Reformed epistemology as defended by John Calvin and, more recently, by Alvin Plantinga, who hold that belief in God is warranted on the basis of an immediate—that is, non-inferential—awareness of divinity (sensus divinitatis).  In this paper, however, Mulder revisits the issue of Kierkegaard’s relation to natural theology and, more generally, to the Catholic tradition, in the hopes that “this encounter between two unlikely allies can serve as a helpful propaedeutic for similar rapprochement between natural theologians and the kinds of Reformed epistemologists that have been skeptical of natural theology” (43-4).

Mulder begins with a discussion of Climacus’s attack on natural theology in Philosophical Fragments.  On Mulder’s analysis, Climacus’s objection can be separated into two facets: the “Foolishness Objection,” and the “Infelicity Objection” (46).  The former objection contends that attempts to prove God’s existence are foolish on the grounds that “if we undertook to demonstrate the existence of God we would not be taking God’s existence to be a doubtful postulate—since then we would never ‘begin’” (46).  The latter objection contends that any attempt to demonstrate that some mysterious entity is in fact God is a pointless exercise that will convince no one of God’s existence, because the mysterious entity in question is one whose existence is not doubted.  Mulder concludes that the latter is not very serious; the former is “the real issue in considering Climacus’s criticism” (47).

How are we to understand the Foolishness Objection?  What does it mean to say that we would never “begin” the argument if we took God’s existence to be doubtful?  Mulder explains: “The reason that Climacus thinks we would never begin is that we would be using God’s works (i.e., creation) to prove the existence of a Creator, but the argument would never get off the ground were it not to premise that the works in question are precisely God’s works, which would not themselves exist without God” (47).  The objection appears to be a very dubious one—why think that we must simply assume that events within creation are God’s works?—but Mulder contends that it is “more interesting than it looks at first” (47).  What the objection points to, Mulder suggests, is that the problem of evil plagues attempts to establish God’s existence via arguments from design.  Unless we have some independent reason for thinking that God exists, we must admit that nature, with all of its apparently gratuitous and pointless evil and suffering, appears not to be the work of an all powerful, perfectly good Creator.  But if we do have some independent reason to think that God exists, then appeals to design arguments are superfluous.

Mulder points out, however, that while Climacus apparently intends this to be a critique of all proofs of God’s existence (or, more charitably, of all a posteriori proofs), it is not clear that it has the same force against the cosmological argument; thus Climacus’s attack on natural theology in Philosophical Fragments is at best incomplete (49).  More importantly, though, Climacus’s attacks on natural theology—whether successful or not—should not lead us to immediately conclude that Climacus (or Kierkegaard) is hostile to all attempts to ground belief in God apart from special revelation.  In fact, there is a kind of “natural” knowledge of God to which Climacus seems sympathetic.  One comes to knowledge of God not through proofs, but rather “by actively relating to one’s own life with passion” (50).  This is the kernel of truth in Climacus’s critique of natural theology, Mulder thinks: it is “a narrow (if erroneous) instance of a wider (and ultimately correct, in my view) suspicion of reason’s capabilities in relation to faith” (51).

So far, so good.  But in subsequent sections, “Natural Theology and Epistemology in the Catholic Tradition” (section 3) and “Natural Reason in Kierkegaard and Catholic Theology” (section 4), Mulder turns to a host of different topics, ranging from the official Catholic position on natural theology (52-3), to a discussion of William Rowe’s version of the cosmological argument and the Church’s view on knowledge of metaphysical principles, such as the Principle of Sufficient Reason (53-4), to Aquinas on natural reason (55), John I. Jenkins on basic beliefs (55-7), Stephen R. Grimm’s views about the relation of Cadinal Newman to Reformed epistemology (57-8), and Karl Rahner’s views about transcendental knowledge of God (59).  The reader is often left wondering where Mulder is going with all this—at times, the discussion seems to lose sight of Kierkegaard altogether—and, in the end, left uncertain whether the myriad issues and figures that Mulder has addressed bear more than a loose connection to one another.  Though depth is sometimes a necessary sacrifice to achieve breadth, in this case the movement from one topic to the next is so fast that the discussion often feels scattered, and the reader is left to do too much of the work of trying to keep sight of the big picture.  Those readers who persevere to the final pages (60 ff.), however, will be rewarded with some passages that summarize and help to pull things together.

The relation of Kierkegaard to natural theology and Catholicism is an important and fascinating one, and there are interesting nuggets throughout this essay, as well as some genuinely deep insights.  Nevertheless, this essay at times demands of its readers a bit more patience than it should.

Reviewed by R. Zachary Manis
Southwest Baptist University