Richard Swinburne

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.

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

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.

Part I of Language and Time is a defence of the tensed theory of time, the view that assertions about events happening now or being past or future are irreducible to tenseless assertions about the dates at which events happen or about their occurrence before or after other events. It claims that tensed sentences are not translatable by tenseless sentences, nor do they have the same truth conditions as tenseless sentences. They are reducible in neither of these senses either to tenseless date sentences—e.g. “it is raining today” does not have the same truth conditions as “it is raining on 22 February 1994”; nor to token reflexive sentences—e.g. “it is raining now” does not have the same truth conditions as “it is raining simultaneously with this utterance”. Hence, Smith argues, since evidently some tensed sentences are true, they must express propositions of a different kind from tenseless propositions—viz. tensed propositions.

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

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.

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