What This Book Actually Is
The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology is a two-volume reference work edited by William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland, published by Wiley-Blackwell around 2009. It collects essays from working philosophers and theologians on topics like the cosmological argument, the fine-tuning of the universe, the moral argument, and design-based reasoning. If you are trying to understand where contemporary natural theology stands after the revival that began in the 1980s and 1990s, this is one of the more comprehensive collections available. It is not a textbook. It is not written for beginners who have never encountered a philosophical argument before. The essays assume familiarity with analytic philosophy, formal logic notation, and at least a basic understanding of theology. You will run into Kalam formulations, modal logic applications, and Bayesian probability references without much hand-holding.
The Blackwell Companion To Natural Theology Structure and Use
The two volumes are organized thematically rather than historically. Volume One covers foundational issues: the nature of natural theology itself, classical arguments from Aquinas and Leibniz re-examined through a contemporary lens, the fine-tuning argument, and the relationship between science and theology. Volume Two moves into more applied territory: moral arguments, the argument from consciousness, responses to atheistic objections, and discussions of religious experience. Each chapter is authored by a different specialist. Craig contributes his own Kalam defense. Moreland tackles consciousness and moral ontology. Others include contributions from people like Robin Collins on fine-tuning and William Dembski on specified complexity. The quality varies by chapter, which is unavoidable in any multi-author volume. Some essays are rigorous and well-referenced. Others read more like position papers than scholarly contributions. If you want a single download link, you will not find one that is legal. The book is under copyright. Wiley-Blackwell sells it through their website, Amazon, and academic distributors. The hardcover edition is priced in the $200 range, which prices out most individual readers. That is why library access or interlibrary loan is the practical route for most people who actually want to use this material.
How I Actually Used It
I pulled this off the shelf at a university library about five years ago when I was preparing a seminar on the relationship between natural theology and scientific naturalism. I needed to give my students something that showed the current state of the field, not just the classic arguments from centuries ago. The problem was that I only had three weeks to prepare, and the book is over a thousand pages across two volumes. Reading it cover to cover was impossible. My workaround was to read the table of contents carefully, then focus on the chapters most relevant to my syllabus. I skipped the introductory meta-essays about what natural theology is, since those tend to be repetitive across companion volumes. I paid particular attention to Collins on fine-tuning, the moral argument chapters, and the sections responding to evolutionary debunking arguments. I read those thoroughly and skimmed the rest for references I could point students toward for further reading. One specific edge case I ran into: a student asked me about the distinction between the teleological argument and the fine-tuning argument as treated in this volume. The book does not always maintain a sharp line between them, and some authors use the terms interchangeably while others draw careful distinctions. I had to cross-reference Collins' chapter with Plantinga's earlier work and a paper by Richard Swinburne to give a useful answer. That is the thing about these companion volumes—they are starting points, not exhaustive treatments of any single topic.
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Common Pitfalls for Readers
People who pick this up expecting a neutral survey of natural theology will be disappointed. Craig and Moreland are proponents, not impartial editors. The selection of contributors skews heavily toward theistic philosophy. You will not find substantial defenses of atheism or naturalism presented in good faith within these pages. The "objections" chapters tend to summarize the strongest atheistic positions and then rebut them. If you want to engage fairly with anti-realist or naturalist critiques, you need to supplement this with works by people like Graham Oppy, Michael Martin, or Paul Draper. Another issue is that several essays rely on technical tools that require background knowledge. The modal ontological argument discussions assume you understand possible world semantics. The probabilistic fine-tuning arguments assume comfort with conditional probability. If you do not have that foundation, you will struggle to follow the reasoning even if the conclusions seem plausible at a surface level. The book also has a durability problem. It was published before several important developments in the philosophy of religion, including recent work on divine hiddenness, updated discussions of the problem of evil following work by David Conee and Theodore Drange, and new arguments from quantum gravity and multiverse hypotheses that complicate fine-tuning reasoning. The fine-tuning chapter by Collins is still among the best available, but the landscape has shifted in important ways since 2009.
What It Does Well
The strength of this collection is that it maps the terrain. If you are trying to understand what arguments are currently in play among theistic philosophers, this gives you a reliable overview. The cosmological argument chapters show how the debate has moved beyond the simple versions taught in introductory philosophy courses. The moral argument sections demonstrate how contemporary theists are responding to evolutionary and psychological challenges to objective morality. The consciousness chapters reflect genuine engagement with philosophy of mind literature. The essays are generally well-written and avoid the worst sins of academic obscurantism. You can follow the reasoning even when you disagree with the conclusions. That is more than I can say for a lot of contemporary philosophy publications.
Alternatives Worth Considering
If the price or access issue makes this impractical, there are other options. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has extensive entries on natural theology, the cosmological argument, and the fine-tuning argument that are free and regularly updated. These are written by specialists and go deeper on individual topics than a companion volume ever could. For a book-length treatment, Peter van Inwagen's "The Problem of Evil" and his various essays on natural theology, or Paul Draper's "Pain and God" offer serious engagement with the strongest objections. For a more historically grounded approach, Alvin Plantinga's "Warranted Christian Belief" and his collected essays provide dense but rewarding reading that addresses many of the same topics. The companion volume itself is worth consulting if you can get it through a library, but I would not recommend purchasing it at full price unless you are building a specialized reference collection. It serves best as a starting point for further research rather than as a definitive treatment of any single topic within natural theology.
