ABSTRACT
In other words, the Jewish and Christian doctrine of creation has a history: it developed from an ancient Near-Eastern cosmogony resistant to the prevailing dualisms of struggling light and dark, of good and evil locked in endless conflict, into the recognition that absolutely everything is radically contingent. The notion of ‘natural theology’ makes its appearance in 1670, and this characteristically early modern project conflates two quite different enterprises. On the one hand, there is the ‘grammatical’, or philosophical, activity of reflecting on, and puzzling over, our uses of the word ‘god’. Nineteenth-century German scholars gave astonishingly confident accounts of what they called ‘the history of religions’, according to some of which, throughout the human race, monotheism evolved out of polytheism and, according to others, ‘one finds everywhere a decline from monotheism to polytheism’. When church leaders are exhorted to concentrate on ‘spiritual’ affairs, the implication sometimes seems to be that the things are different from, and loftier than.
