Objections That Did Not End the Project

Natural theology faced its most serious philosophical challenges in the eighteenth century from David Hume, whose Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion subjected the design argument to sustained critical scrutiny, and Immanuel Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason argued that all three classical families of argument ultimately depend on the cosmological argument, which in turn depends on an ontological argument Kant held to be invalid, an objection many philosophers since have taken as at least seriously complicating, if not decisively refuting, the classical arguments in their traditional form.

Natural theology nonetheless remains an active field within contemporary philosophy of religion rather than a historical curiosity, with philosophers including Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne developing considerably more sophisticated versions of cosmological, design and other arguments that engage directly with Hume's and Kant's objections, using tools including probability theory and modal logic unavailable to the classical formulations. This atlas records natural theology as a long running and still active philosophical project rather than a settled or abandoned one, with genuine and ongoing disagreement among professional philosophers of religion over how far any of its arguments succeed.