The shadow of David Hume, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, has loomed large against all efforts to prove the existence of God from evidence in the natural world. Indeed from Hume’s day to ours, the vast majority of philosophical attacks against the rationality of theism have borne an unmistakable Humean aroma. The last forty years, however, have been marked by a resurgence in Christian theism among philosophers, and the time has come for a thorough reassessment of the case for natural theology. James F. Sennett and Douglas Groothuis have assembled a distinguished team of philosophers to engage the task: Terence Penelhum, Todd M. Furman, Keith Yandell, Garrett J. DeWeese, Joshua Rasmussen, James D. Madden, Robin Collins, Paul Copan, Victor Reppert, J. P. Moreland and R. Douglas Geivett. Together this team makes vigorous individual and cumulative arguments that set Hume’s attacks in fresh perspective and that offer new insights into the value of teleological, cosmological and ontological arguments for God’s existence. ~ Product Description

Table of Contents

• • 1 Introduction : Hume’s legacy and natural theology  9
  • 2 Hume’s criticisms of natural theology  21
  • 3 In praise of Hume : what’s right about Hume’s attacks on natural theology  42
  • 4 David Hume on meaning, verification and natural theology  58
  • 5 Hume’s stopper and the natural theology project  82
  • 6 Metaphysical implications of cosmological arguments : exorcising the ghost of Hume  107
  • 7 Hume and the Kalam cosmological argument  123
  • 8 Giving the devil his due : teleological arguments after Hume  150
  • 9 Hume, fine-tuning and the "who designed God?" objection  175
  • 10 Hume and the moral argument  200
  • 11 David Hume, experiential evidence and belief in God  226
  • 12 The argument from reason and Hume’s legacy  253
  • 13 Hume and the argument from consciousness  271
  • 14 David Hume and a cumulative case argument  297