Richard Swinburne

This two-volume collection of cutting edge thinking about science and religion shows how scientific and religious practices of inquiry can be viewed as logically compatible, complementary, and mutually supportive. Features submissions by world-leading scientists and philosophers Discusses a wide range of hotly debated issues, including Big Bang cosmology, evolution, intelligent design, dinosaurs and creation, general and special theories of relativity, dark energy, the Multiverse Hypothesis, and Super String Theory Includes articles on stem cell research and Bioethics by William Hurlbut, who served on President Bush's Bioethics Committee.

This paper comments on the other papers in this special issue of ’Faith and Philosophy’ on natural theology. It claims that most people today need both bare natural theology (to show that there is a God) and ramified natural theology (to establish detailed doctrinal claims), and that Christian tradition has generally claimed that cogent arguments of natural theology (of both kinds) are available. Plantinga’s "dwindling probabilities" objection against ramified natural theology is shown to have no force when different pieces of evidence are fed into the arguments at different stages. But showing the cogency of arguments of natural theology involves the lengthy process of helping people to see the correctness of certain moral views

Do humans have a free choice of which actions to perform? Three recent developments of modern science can help us to answer this question. First, new investigative tools have enabled us to study the processes in our brains which accompanying our decisions. The pioneer work of Benjamin Libet has led many neuroscientists to hold the view that our conscious intentions do not cause our bodily movements but merely accompany them. Then, Quantum Theory suggests that not all physical events are fully determined by their causes, and so opens the possibility that not all brain events may be fully determined by their causes, and so maybe - if neuroscience does not rule this out - there is a role for intentions after all. Finally, a theorem of mathematics, Godel's theory, has been interpreted to suggest that the initial conditions and laws of development of a mathematician's brain could not fully determine which mathematical conjectures he sees to be true. Papers by Patrick Haggard, Tim Bayne, Harald Atmanspacher and Stefan Rotter, Solomon Feferman, and John Lucas investigate these issues. The extent to which human behaviour is determined by brain events may well depend on whether conscious events, such as intentions, are themselves merely brain events, or whether they are separate events which interact with brain events (perhaps in the radical form that intentions are events in our soul, and not in our body). The papers of Frank Jackson, Richard Swinburne, and Howard Robinson investigate these issues. The remaining papers, of Galen Strawson, Helen Steward, and R.A. Duff, consider what kind of free will we need in order to be morally responsible for our actions or to be held guilty in a court of law. Is it sufficient merely that our actions are uncaused by brain events, or what?

There is a good a priori argument for the doctrine of the Trinity, from the need for any divine being to have another divine being to love suffi ciently to provide for him a third divine being whom to love and by whom to be loved. But most people who have believed the doctrine of the Trinity have believed it on the basis of the teaching of Jesus as interpreted by the church. The only reason for believing this teaching would be if Jesus led the kind of life which a priori we would expect an incarnate God to live in order to identify with our suffering, make atonement for our sins, and to reveal truth to us; culminated by a miracle which God alone could do and which would also authenticate the teaching. Given good a posteriori evidence for the existence of God, there is enough historical evidence to make it probable that Jesus did live that sort of life, and so to believe the doctrine of the Trinity.

Richard Swinburne offers an original treatment of a question at the heart of epistemology: what makes a belief rational, or justified in holding? He maps the rival accounts of philosophers on epistemic justification ("internalist" and "externalist"), arguing that they are really accounts of different concepts. He distinguishes between synchronic justification (justification at a time) and diachronic justification (synchronic justification resulting from adequate investigation)--both internalist and externalist. He also argues that most kinds of justification are worth having because they are indicative of truth; however, it is only justification of internalist kinds that can guide a believer's actions. Swinburne goes on to show the usefulness of the probability calculus in elucidating how empirical evidence makes beliefs probably true.

This is an introduction to a collected volume. It distinguishes between evidential, statistical, and physical probability, and between objective and subjective understandings of evidential probability, in the use of Bayes’s theorem. If Bayes’s theorem is to be used to assess an objective evidential probability, a priori criteria--mainly the criterion of simplicity--are required to determine prior probability. The five main contributors to the volume discuss the use of Bayes’s theorem to assess the evidential probability of scientific theories, statistical hypotheses, criminal guilt, and miracles; and also its value for assessing physical probability.

Scientific explanation in terms of laws and initial conditions (or better, in terms of objects with powers and liabilities) is contrasted with personal explanation in terms of agents with powers and purposes. In each case the factors involved in explanation may themselves be explained, and infinite regress of explanation is logically possible. There can be no absolute explanation of phenomena, which is explanation in terms of the logically necessary; but there can be ultimate explanation which is explanation in terms of factors which themselves have no explanation. Our normal criteria of explanation suggest that the explanation of the universe lies in the action of God.

Theodicy would be an impossible task if the only good states were pleasures and the only bad states were pains. This paper lists many other and greater goods, and shows that many of these cannot be had without corresponding bad states. These goods include the satisfaction of persistent desires, desires for incompatible good states, compassion with people in serious trouble, free choice of the good despite temptation, and being of use to others in providing knowledge and opportunities of certain sorts for them.

Epiphenomenalism claims that all conscious events are caused immediately by brain events, and no conscious events cause brain events. In order to have a justified belief in a theory someone needs a justified belief that it or some higher-level theory predicts certain events and those events occurred. To have either of the latter beliefs we depend ultimately on the evidence of apparent experience, memory, and testimony, which is credible in the absence of defeaters; it is an undermining defeater to a belief produced by apparent memory that it was not caused by a past belief, and to a belief produced by apparent testimony that it was not caused by an intention to say what the speaker believes. A justified belief in epiphenomenalism requires either evidence about when conscious events occurred or evidence about what some theory that brain events are caused solely by physical events predicts, but epiphenomenalism rules out the availability of the evidence of apparent memory and testimony on these matters. Hence only a rare individual scientist who could hold in her mind at one time the proof that a theory makes certain predictions could have a justified belief that epiphenomenalism is true. It follows that recent neurophysiological work in the tradition of Libet has no tendency whatever to provide a justified belief in epiphenomenalism