It's no secret that I'm not a fan of "natural theology". My mentor, Stan Hauerwas, said it best in his 2000 Gifford Lectures, With the Grain of the Universe: Natural theology, far from giving us causal explanations ("god") for the universe, merely results in a theologia gloriae, leaving no room for the cross.
But here's my new idea: What if, instead of the usual "first cause" arguments that we get with natural theology, it instead offers us a unification of lots of different explanations? In other words, what if all the various (strange) phenomena in science could be brought together in a wholistic way theologically, under the rubric of natural theology?
What if nature bears transcendence, but not in a "natural" way? Not out of its own essence, since there's no mere uninterpreted nature, but only different constructed "readings" of nature (think Young's Double-Slit Experiment from your general physics days). But when seen through the richness of a trinitarian ontological lens, I think there's much to be said.
Think Colin Gunton's Bampton Lectures, The One, The Three, and the Many, or his Triune Creator, or Moltmann's God in Creation here.
Of course, the real problem with most "natural theology" is the fact that these theologians reflect on an imaginary world of idealized peace and harmony and perfection, instead of taking seriously the apparent blindness and ugliness and brutality that is so easily perceived in the created order. Even a thinker as probing and sensitive as T. F. Torrance -- with his immense ruminations on the order and structure and rationality of the natural world -- seems far too little impressed by what his teacher, Karl Barth, called the "shadow side of creation", the fact that creation's "goodness" is a difficult and demanding article of faith rather than an observable phenomenon.
That's the real problem with those strange things called "creation science" and "intelligent design".
The ennoble atheism precisely at that point.
Nature is, as Luther put it, simul bona et mala: It's marked by beauty and ugliness, joy and pain, good and evil.
That's why I think the move to explain nature outside the economy of salvation is always a bad move for Christians. Just think the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. As soon as you go looking for a theological account of such ugliness, pain, suffering without beginning with Jesus, you find so little a "god" to believe in. (Michael Buckley's At the Origins of Modern Atheism is one of those books everyone should read.) When we begin with the cross, the created world is decayed and ambivalent, a morally and aesthetically variegated entity whose goodness and beauty are often opaque and hidden, yet nevertheless shining with the hope of transformation. That's Paul's point in 1 Corinthians 13.
The universe does seem to have an "anthropic principle"; there is this peculiar and puzzling friendliness towards life. So maybe it's better to see that as less of an argument for God's existence and more so a window onto the universe that's consistent with the Christian vision of God. From the constants of the universe; the origins of life; the chemistry of water; the constraints of evolution; the teleology of evolution; and emergence -- all of it makes sense from the perspective of a Christian.
But it means "natural theology" gives up its silly and philosophically-bankrupt pursuit of proof of God's existence. Sure, there's a coherent fit between the observable world and the deep resources of Christian imagination. What we find in the created order resonates with the core themes of a trinitarian witness. (It's why I think Darwin makes so much sense; I've read Augustine. Creation theology isn't just primordial actuality, it's also emergent possibility.)
If what I'm wondering today seems strange, I think it is best summed up in CS Lewis' observation that, "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else".
In any case, I'll grant this is a strange idea, even for me. But maybe Barth's Nein was too premature. Maybe there's room for "natural theology", just not of the sort that gets practiced in Intelligent Design.