The Reid Lectures on Natural Theology

The Reid Lectures on Natural Theology

Thomas Reid (1710–1796) was one of the main philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment. A colleague and friend of David Hume and Adam Smith, in 1764 Reid succeeded Smith to the University of Glasgow’s Chair of Moral Philosophy. He is most famous for his work in epistemology, defending common sense (the exercise of our ordinary, inborn cognitive faculties) as the ultimate foundation of human knowledge.

Reid was also an important contributor to the eighteenth-century debate on natural theology, that is, the inference from the evidence of purpose in nature to the existence and attributes of God. Although he never published a separate book on this subject, Reid did give regular lectures on natural theology at the University of Glasgow, of which several sets of student notes have survived. The notes edited, annotated, and published in this volume were from a student of Reid’s who attended his natural theology lectures in the late winter of 1780. These lectures have important implications for historical discussions on the relation between natural science and theology, culminating in the modern Intelligent Design debate of today.

The Reid Lectures on Natural Theology, as published here, were not included in the ten-volume Edinburgh Edition of Reid’s collected works. Moreover, while two earlier editions of these lectures exist, both contain serious mistakes of transcription and annotation. In consequence, this carefully revised edition of this important text fills an important gap in the literature.

Editors

James A. Barham is a historian and philosopher of science whose research focuses on teleology in biology. Along with a BA in Classics from the University of Texas at Austin and an MA in the History of Science from Harvard, he received his PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Notre Dame.

Jake Akins, trained in political science and theology, has a particular interest in the philosophy of science and the medieval worldview. He did archival research for John West’s The Magician’s Twin: C. S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society, to which he also contributed a chapter. His current passion is in reissuing long out-of-print books on the history of America’s Southwest.

William A. Dembski is a mathematician and philosopher who has done fundamental work on intelligent design. His book The Design Inference is a classic in the field, published in 1998 with Cambridge University Press, and issued in a second, thoroughly updated, twenty-fifth anniversary edition in 2023 through Discovery Institute Press, with Winston Ewert as co-author.