The following excerpt consists of the study's final two paragraphs. Consider the latter alternative.
Gale speaks occasionally of the theories of the great medieval theists.
This should remind us that they were great largely because they constructed imaginative theories, of wide scope and substantive adequacy, to connect religious experience and tradition with the best science and philosophy of their day. When successful, such theory construction, in and out of the sciences, provides a crucial form of rational justification reducible neither to argumentation of the kinds involved in the familiar arguments for and against the existence of God, nor to varieties of rational justification licensed by foundationalists within the pale. What theists need, then, as much as a return visit from Hume's Philo, is a bold turn to imaginative theory-construction, subject to constraints. In our day, many philosophers and others are not only naturalistically inclined but, even when not, broadly anti-foundationalist, nominalist, and sceptical about metaphysically necessary truth and conceptual analysis as a way unto it. The theist who cares about a rational apologetic that will appeal beyond the pale needs therefore to develop a progressing research program aimed at incorporating these elements, naturalism included, into a theory that connects them fruitfully with religious experience and tradition.