The Consequences of Ideas (Redesign)

Perhaps the best summary and emphasis of the book is within the closing paragraphs:

Etienne Gilson has defined the gods of modern philosophy as “mere byproducts born of the philosophical decomposition of the Christian living God.”

According to Gilson, our choice today is not between Immanuel Kant and René Descartes or between G. W. F. Hegel and Søren Kierkegaard. We must choose instead between Kant and Thomas Aquinas. Gilson insists that all other positions are mere halfway houses on the road to either absolute religious agnosticism or the natural theology of Christian metaphysics. As I enter the twilight years of my life, I am convinced that Gilson is fundamentally right. We need to reconstruct the classical synthesis by which natural theology bridges the special revelation of Scripture and the general revelation of nature.