Richard Swinburne

Four principles about Time have the consequence that God must be everlasting, and not timeless. These are 1) events occur over periods of time, never at instants, 2) Time has a metric if and only if there is a unified system of laws of nature, 3) The past is the realm of the causally unaffectible, the future of the causally affectible, 4) Some truths can only be known at certain periods. Yet God is not Time’s prisoner’, for the unwelcome features of Time--the increase of unaffectible events, the cosmic clock’ ticking away--only occur if God so chooses.

The orderliness of the universe and the existence of human beings already provides some reason for believing that there is a God - as argued in Richard Swinburne's earlier book Is There a God? Swinburne now claims that it is probable that the main Christian doctrines about the nature of God and his actions in the world are true. In virtue of his omnipotence and perfect goodness, God must be a Trinity, live a human life in order to share our suffering, and found a church which would enable him to tell all humans about this. It is also quite probable that he would provide his human life as an atonement for our wrongdoing, teach us how we should live and tell us his plans for our future after death. Among founders of religions, Jesus satisfies uniquely well the requirement of living the sort of human life which God would need to have lived. But to give us adequate reason to believe that Jesus was God, God would need to put his 'signature' on the life of Jesus by an act which he alone could do, for example raise him from the dead. There is adequate historical evidence that Jesus rose from the dead. The church which he founded gave plausible interpretations of his basic message. Therefore Christian doctrines are probably true.

Richard Swinburne is one of the most distinguished philosophers of religion of our day. In this volume, many notable British and American philosophers unite to honor him and to discuss various topics to which he has contributed significantly. These include general topics in the philosophy of religion such as revelation, and faith and reason, and the specifically Christian doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and atonement. In the spirit of the movement which Swinburne spearheaded, the essays use analytic philosophical methods to examine doctrines in particular religious traditions, expanding upon traditional discussions of theism. As such, this volume represents a field-report on the interaction of philosophy and Christian thought in the English-speaking world. Swinburne has himself contributed an individual and personal Intellectual Autobiography.

It is most improbable a priori that laws of nature should have a form, and their constants have values, and the variables of the boundary conditions of our universe should have values, of such a kind as to lead to the evolution of human bodies. If there is a God it is quite probable that there would be human bodies. Our only grounds for believing that there are other universes, are grounds for believing that those universes are governed by the same laws and have the same boundary conditions as our own. Hence, the existence of our universe is evidence for the existence of God

Theodicy needs to show, for all actual evils e, that 1) in allowing e, a God would bring about a necessary condition of a good g not achievable in any other morally permissible way, 2) if e occurs, g occurs, 3) it is morally permissible for God to allow e, and 4) g is at least as good as e is bad. This article contributes to a full-scale theodicy by showing that A being of use (e.g., by suffering) to B is a great good for A, and that in consequence, if 1) and 2) are satisfied, 3) and 4) are also likely to be satisfied

This is a rich volume full of valuable detailed exposition, criticism and development of Reichenbach's views. It brings vividly before us the range of his interests. Reichenbach worked out in careful detail his empiricist view of the world. He made it a plausible and attractive view. For myself, I think that this overall view was largely mistaken. I think that science is concerned to describe the unobservable reality which explains what we observe; that there is a physical necessity in nature; and that we approach nature with certain a priori principles of probability for which we can provide no further justification beyond the fact that they seem intuitively obvious. But this difference of overall view does not lead me to find the details of Reichenbach's work lacking in value. For it is easy to translate a lot of Reichenbach's detailed work into a different idiom— e.g. to regard his work on physical necessity as showing not the nature of physical necessity but the a priori criteria by which we judge that something is physically necessary; his work on simultaneity not as showing that some distant events are not "absolutely" "simultaneous" or "non-simultaneous" with each other, but as showing only the impossibility of determining whether or not some distant events are simultaneous.

This paper defends (especially in response to Brian Leftow’s recent attack) logical nominalism, the thesis that logically necessary truth belongs primarily to sentences and depends solely on the conventions of human language. A sentence is logically necessary (that is, a priori metaphysically necessary) iff its negation entails a contradiction. A sentence is a posteriori metaphysically necessary iff it reduces to a logical necessity when we substitute for rigid designators of objects or properties canonical descriptions of the essential properties of those objects or properties. The truth-conditions of necessary sentences are not to be found in any transcendent reality, such as God’s thoughts. "There is a God" is neither a priori nor a posteriori metaphysically necessary; God is necessary in the sense that His existence is not causally contingent on anything else

Theism is a far simpler hypothesis, and so a priori more probably true, than naturalism, understood as the hypothesis that the existence of this law-governeduniverse has no explanation. Theism postulates only one entity (God) with very simple properties, whereas naturalism has to postulate either innumerableentities all having the same properties, or one very complicated entity with the power to produce the former. If theism is true, it is moderately probable that God would create humanoid beings and so humanoid bodies; but laws of nature would have to have very special properties if they are to bring about the existencne of humaoid bodies. Given laws of the present form (quantum theory with the Pauli principle and the four forces), the constants of the laws and variables of the boundary conditions of the universe would need to be extremely fine-tuned; and no simpler set of laws would allow the existence of humanoid bodies at all. So the evidence of the existence of humanoid bodies adds further to the probability of theismas against naturalism.

Jeremy Gwiazda made two criticisms of my formulation in terms of Bayes’s theorem of my probabilistic argument for the existence of God. The first criticism depends on his assumption that I claim that the intrinsic probabilities of all propositions depend almost entirely on their simplicity; however, my claim is that that holds only insofar as those propositions are explanatory hypotheses. The second criticism depends on a claim that the intrinsic probabilities of exclusive and exhaustive explanatory hypotheses of a phenomenon must sum to 1; however it is only those probabilities plus the intrinsic probability of the non-occurrence of the phenomenon which must sum to 1

O artigo sustenta que, a fim de dar uma descrição completa do mundo, precisamos listar não apenas os eventos cerebrais que ocorrem, mas também os eventos mentais e analisálos como estados de uma substância imaterial, a alma. Com base nesse dualismo de substância, defende-se que a ciência física não tem como explicar a existência de vida consciente. O artigo conclui que, levando-se em conta a estrutura de argumentação formalizada no Teorema de Bayes, podemos dizer que o fenômeno da vida consciente constitui um incremento na probabilidade da existência de Deus.The article argues that in order to give a full description of the world, we need to list not merely the brain events which occur, but also the mental events, and to analyse them as states of an immaterial substance, the soul. On the basis of this substance dualism it is argued that science could not ever explain the existence of consciousness. The article concludes that, bearing in mind the reasoning framework provided by Bayes’s Theorem, we can say that the phenomenon of conscious life increases the probability of the existence of God.