ABSTRACT
When we pass from Butler’s arguments for a future life to the development of his case for natural religion, we find two important presuppositions constantly present. The first is that a future life is likely, so that the significance of our experience in this life must be judged in a wider context that includes it. The second is that nature does not merely have an intelligent author, but its author has made of it a teleological system: that we live in a world in which the regularities we find have been placed there for special purposes. Butler assumes that even if God does not interfere with the natural order he has established (and the possibility of miracle is not discussed until Part II of the Analogy), the results to which natural regularities lead are, in general, results to which God intends that they should lead. While we may not be able to discern all the purposes thus fulfilled, or understand those we can discern very fully, Butler thinks it follows from this that the investigation of nature is a necessary, if uncertain, way of finding out God’s purposes.
