ABSTRACT
When Butler moves on, in Part II of the Analogy, to make his case for revealed religion, we might expect him to concentrate on the special evidences in history and Scripture that have been the standard bases of argument for Christian apologists both before and since. Had he done this, Part II would have suffered gravely from the fact that it pre-dates the whole of modern critical biblical scholarship. In keeping with his modest defensive stance, he does not do this. Only Chapter vii of Part II is addressed directly to these evidences, and even there the treatment is one that involves him in general considerations that we would class as philosophical ones. Most of Part II is designed to answer popular attacks on the credibility of Christian revelation, and most of these are arguments which would cause their hearers to disregard the evidences rather than scrutinise them carefully. In Butler’s language, they are arguments that state ‘presumptions’ against the reality of any revelation, and arguments that point to alleged failings in the ‘scheme’ or content of the Christian revelation in particular. Butler uses all the dialectical powers at his command to change the attitude of his opponents. He considers this attitude to be frivolous, since if there is any chance at all that the Christian revelation is true, nothing could be more important than attending to it. He also considers it to be presumptuous, in that they are prepared to lay down a priori standards that revelation has to meet, without regard to the inevitable mysteriousness of divine things and the manifest limits of human understanding. He therefore emphasises the pragmatic importance of Christian claims, and tries to show that if the mysteriousness of God and the limits of the human mind are taken into account, the supposed defects in the Christian revelation are to be expected, and are not the barriers they are said to be. His procedure parallels that of Pascal, whose eloquent accounts of human weakness and of the limits of the human intellect are designed to get his reader to ‘listen to God’ and not be deterred by the obscurities which this weakness and those limits help make intelligible.1
