Preface
Preface In Characters in Search of Their Author,1 I considered the difficulties posed for natural theology by various developments in recent philosophy. By and large, philosophers have become professionally hostile to the possibility of proving the existence of God and consequently of saying other true things about him. This hostility seems a predictable consequence of the subjective turn taken with Descartes and the various other turns taken since.2 In the present volume, by contrast with its predecessor, I propose to treat the negative attitude toward natural theology that is found among those one would have expected to be defenders of it. This book is a defense of a robust understanding of the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas and of the Magisterium on praeambula fidei. It is a critique of several influential thinkers whose writings have, however unwittingly , eroded the notion of praeambula fidei. Finally, it is an oblique defense of Thomism as philosophy. The locus of the praeambula fidei is in metaphysics as Thomas learned that culminating science from Aristotle. It is only when that metaphysics is correctly understood that the praeambula fidei can be correctly understood. Thomas added much to our understanding of these matters , but what he added to is what is found in Book Lambda of the Metaphysics and the presuppositions on which it depends. Thomists who imagine an enmity between Thomas and Aristotle fail to see this, and accordingly would lead us along paths that end in something akin to fideism. ix 1. Characters in Search of Their Author, the Gifford Lectures Glasgow 1999-2000 (South Bend, Ind., 2001). 2. Cornelio Fabro’s magisterial Introduzione al ateismo moderno (Rome, 1964) finds in the Cartesian turn the seeds of modern atheism. ...
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