OLD PRINCETON APOLOGETICS: COMMON SENSE OR REFORMED?, THE

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Dec 2003 by McConnel, Tim

Reid was a contemporary of Bishop Butler, and knew and approved of the latter's Analogy. There are similarities in their treatment of evidence for contingent truths, especially in the joining together of several lines of evidence in order to gain a high degree of probability. Reid himself lectured on natural theology as well, although his work was not published until 1981.23 This series of lectures begins with an argument for the necessity of reason alongside revelation in matters of religion. Reid wrote,

It is no doubt true that Revelation exhibits all the truths of Natural Religion, but it is no less true that reason must be employed to judge of that revelation; whether it comes from God. Both are great lights and we ought not to put out the one in order to use the other. . . . Tis by reason that we must judge whether that Revelation be really so; Tis by reason that we must judge of the meaning of what is revealed; and it is by Reason that we must guard against any impious, inconsistent or absurd interpretation of that revelation.24

Reid proceeded to lecture extensively on the proofs for God's existence from causality, and especially design. In the later lectures he turned to an exposition of the "natural attributes" of God-those that can be discerned from nature by the use of reason. On the basis of these attributes he discussed the natural and moral government of God, as evidenced in nature. In the final lecture he returned to the theme of revelation, and stated the following about its necessity:

Hence we find that the doctrines of Natural Religion have been improved by the Speculations of Theologians and assisted by the representations of Deity given in the Sacred Scriptures. For no where do we find such a completed system of Natural Religion as in the Christian Writers. The being of God, is indeed so evident, from his works, & the conduct of his providence that no nation has been found so barbarous as to have no notions of Deity, at all, yet it is to be expected that rude men if left to trace out his attributes by the mere force of their reason would form very gross conceptions, widely different from the presentation of Scripture & the dictates of a Sound reason.25

This is the closest that Reid came to the Calvinist notion of the failure of natural theology. he further wrote, "The first sentiments of the Deity were thus lost, by the corruptions of human reason, the craft of the priest or the cunning of the politician. We have seen that reason properly employed, will point out the duties of Natural Religion, yet it is necessary to compleat our notions of them, that we be enlightened by a divine revelation."26

The Old Princeton theologians, such as Greene, clearly did not go so far as Reid did in his arguments for a natural theology. However, they obviously, and admittedly so, accepted the epistemological arguments of the common sense philosophy, including especially the notion of self-evident first principles. There are a number of reasons why it was easy for them to do so. First, many of the tenets of Common Sense Realism do, in fact, describe how people live in the "real" world. We all do act as if there is a real, external world, populated by other intelligent, feeling human beings, which we know through trusting our senses. Thus, "common sense" seemed to provide a basis for daily life as well as for science. One assumption, however, that lay under much of the philosophy, particularly in its application to natural theology, is that we live in a well-ordered universe, and that such order points to an intelligent cause. Thus, belief in God was also basic to Reid, who often refers to the Author of nature, the Creator, and so forth. However, he did not make such belief one of his first principles, but rather derived it.