entire modern history of philosophical theology. Thinkers no longer took the cosmos as their starting point in order to demonstrate in a quasi-experimental way that God is the first cause of the natural order. Instead, they argued from the existence and experience of human beings in order to show that God is inevitably presupposed in every act of human existence. In patristic and medieval philosophy and theology this approach had provided only a secondary line of argument. It did not have to bear
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