Natural Theology VS Gospel

There was once Newton spent a month at his basement to make a model of solar system. It was a tedious process, from builing the skeleton, molding the planets to scaling the sizes and distance between the planets,  piece by piece and inch by inch, finally he put together the whole model!

One day, his atheist friend visited him. The friend was amazed as he saw the model, and cried out," Wow, what a beautiful piece of handicraft!! Newton, you made this?" Shrugging his shoulder, Newton answer, "Its not me."  "Then, who made this?" the friend continue asking.

"I don't know, i just heard a bing BANG came from my basement one day, and the whole model emerged just like that!" Newton answer with a clueless expression. The friend was annoyed and replied," Pls stop fooling me, how can things collide together and make up such perfectly organised model?! Its unreasonable!!!"

Newton smiled while calming his friend down and replied wisely," Dear friend, if it is unreasonable for this little model to emerge by itself, how can you believe the vast orderly universe was exist by chance? Don't you think there must be a highly intelligent creator behind all these?"

I often use this story to begin my gospel sharing, because i found its difficult to share the gospel of Christ before you can prove to the atheist friend that there is God. Like what Thomas Aquinas said, all the non-Christians would find difficulty to connect when Christian Theologian cited the Bible or the teaching of the church. "If any real impact was to be made on these persons, it would be necessary to enter some neutral arena where no special authority need be appealed to, and to settle the matter on terms accepted by all rational persons." He stressed in his book - Summa Theologica.

According to Thomas, all truth belongs to one of two realms. The lower realm is the realm of nature which may be known by reason, while the higher the realm of grace must be accepted on authority (special revelation from the bible & church).

However, there are still critiques of Natural Theology like if the proofs are inadequate, then in rejecting the proofs, the unbeliever may also reject the Christian message.

Aware of the critique of natural theology, I still stand with Thomas point of view when confronting the atheist, If we could not settle the core problem in their heart, sharing gospel to them alone will be impossible to convince them. Since they do not believe in God, undertaking reasoning approach of Natural theology to prove the existence of God would be a better way to pace and lead them to the gospel of Christ.

Having say so, I think God's supernatural intervention in the process of evangelism is crucial, let us not depend solely on men wisdom, but the spirit of God who can accomplish all thing.