Richard Swinburne

Sentences can be thought of as expressing propositions or statements. The logical nominalist is right, against the logical Platonist, to hold that propositions and statements are not really existing things but mere useful fictions. A sentence is logically necessary if its negation entails a contradiction, given that its referring expressions in fact pick out the objects that they do. A sentence's entailments are a matter of the human conventions for the use of that sentence. There are kinds of necessity other than logical necessity. In particular, there is what I call ‘ontological necessity’ – everlasting uncaused existence; and what I call ‘metaphysical necessary’. Something is metaphysically necessary in my sense if either it is ontologically necessary or it is inevitably caused to exist everlastingly by something ontologically necessary.

The Council of Chalcedon declared that one individual, Jesus Christ, had two natures – divine and human. His divine nature must be regarded as consisting of the essential divine properties plus the specific properties essential to the second member of the Trinity. The human nature must be regarded not as a substance, but as the contingent properties analysed in Ch. 1 that make someone human. New Testament and later‐Christian doctrine require that we understand the two collections of properties as instantiated somewhat separately from each other, so that Christ has two minds, a divine one and a human one, the human one not being fully aware of the divine one. Although Christ could have done no wrong, he could – but did not – yield to temptation to do less than the best.

O artigo discute a forma de um argumento em favor da ressurreição de Jesus do modo como o Cristianismo acredita que esta ocorreu, o qual, se bem-sucedido, seria um forte indício histórico da existência de Deus. O artigo sustenta que Deus teve boas razões para se encarnar por certos propósitos e que, se assim ele o fez, ele viveria um certo tipo de vida como um ser humano, que seria culminada por um supermilagre como sua ressurreição. Se encontrarmos um e apenas um ser humano em toda a história sobre o qual haja uma quantidade modesta de indícios do tipo que se esperaria se ele viveu aquele tipo de vida e uma modesta quantidade de indícios do tipo a ser esperado se aquela vida fosse culminada por um supermilagre como a ressurreição, isso é um indício bem forte de que aquele ser humano era Deus encarnado. Assim, aqueles indícios aumentariam significativamente a probabilidade de que Deus existe.This article discusses the form of an argument for the Resurrection of Jesusas Christianity believes it occurred, which, if successful, would be strong historical evidence for the existence of God. The article argues that God had good reason to become incarnate for certain purposes, and that if he did he would live a certain kind of life as a human, which would be culminated by a super-miracle such as his resurrection. If we find one and only one human in all history about whom there is a modest amount of evidence of a kind to be expected if he lived that kind of life and a modest amount of evidence of a kind to be expected if that life was culminated by a super-miracle such as the resurrection, that is very strong evidence that that human was God incarnate. Hence that evidence would greatly increase the probability that there is a God.

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.

The hypothesis that Jesus rose bodily from the dead is rendered probable in so far as: (1) evidence makes it probable that there is a God, (2) God has reason to become incarnate - to provide atonement for our sins, to identify with our suffering, and to reveal teaching (and so to lead a particular kind of human life, including teaching that he was divine and making atonement, a life culminated by a super-miracle such as his resurrection from the dead), (3) there is evidence of a modest degree of probability to be expected if Jesus was the only prophet in human history who led a life of the above kind, which was culminated in the right sort of way. So, given other evidence that there is a God (and a priori reason to suppose that he would become incarnate),and other evidence about the life of Jesus and other prophets, only a modest amount of historical witness testimony to the Resurrection is necessary in order to show that it occurred