Is it time that we lost our faith in philosophy of religion? That discipline, which is sometimes referred to as ‘natural theology’, is still often associated, if not identified, with the traditional philosophical arguments concerning the existence and nature of God. As the existentialist theologian John Macquarrie succinctly expresses this narrow interpretation of its purpose, it is ‘to supply rational proof of the reality of those matters with which theology deals’. Many philosophers have attempted to answer the old question ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ (theologians having mostly tended to treat it as a less urgent matter), and their answers have often taken the form of elaborate systems of philosophy of religion, thus narrowly interpreted. As a work of philosophy of religion, this book implicitly engages with Tertullian's question in a rather different way, in a way that demands a broader interpretation of the terms ‘philosophy of religion’ and ‘natural theology’. The implied answer to my opening question, therefore, is a qualified negative.

I shall spare the reader from yet another detailed criticism of the traditional arguments; as Macquarrie remarks on such overfamiliar analysis, ‘it has been done again and again’. Here, I simply record my agreement with his two main reasons for being dissatisfied by that general programme. The first reason is that the traditional attempts to prove or justify God's existence by appeal to evidence and rational argument are doomed to philosophical failure.