Richard Swinburne

Richard Swinburne presents a new edition of the final volume of his acclaimed trilogy on philosophical theology. Faith and Reason is a self-standing examination of the implications for religious faith of Swinburne's famous arguments about the coherence of theism and the existence of God.By practising a particular religion, a person seeks to achieve some or all of three goals - that he worships and obeys God, gains salvation for himself, and helps others to attain their salvation. But not all religions commend worship, and different religions have different conceptions of salvation. Faced with these differences, Richard Swinburne argues that we should practice that religion which has the best goals and is more probably true than the creeds of other religions. He proposes criteria by which to determine the probabilities of different religious creeds, and he argues that, while requiring total commitment, faith does not demand fully convinced belief. While maintaining the same structure and conclusions as the original classic, this second edition has been substantially rewritten, both in order to relate its ideas more closely to those of classical theologians and philosophers and to respond to more recent views. In particular he discusses, and ultimately rejects, the view of Alvin Plantinga that the 'warrant' of a belief depends on the process which produced it, and John Hick's contention that all religions offer valid paths to salvation

Christianity and other religions claim that their books and creeds contain truths revealed by God. How can we know whether they do? Revelation investigates the claim of the Christian religion to have such revealed truths; and so considers which parts of the Bible are to be regarded as literal history, and which as metaphorical truth. This entirely rewritten second edition contains a long new chapter examining whether traditional Christian claims about personal morality can be regarded as revealed truths.

The central doctrine of Christianity is that God intervened in human history in the person of Jesus Christ in a unique way; and that quickly became understood as the doctrine that in Jesus Christ God became man. In AD 451 the Council of Chalcedon formulated that doctrine in a precise way utilizing the current philosophical terminology, which provided a standard for the orthodoxy of subsequent thought on this issue. It affirmed its belief in ‘our Lord Jesus Christ, … truly God and truly man, … in two natures … the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person’. One individual, one thing that is; and being a rational individual, one person. An individual's nature are those general properties which make it the sort of individual it is. The nature of my desk is to be a solid material object of a certain shape; the nature of the oak tree in the wood is to take in water and light, and to grow into a characteristic shape with characteristic leaves and give off oxygen. Chalcedon affirmed that the one individual Jesus Christ had a divine nature, was God that is; and it assumed that the divine nature was an essential nature.

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

Armstrong's theory of laws of nature as relations between universals gives an initially plausible account of why the causal powers of substances are bound together only in certain ways, so that the world is a very regular place. But its resulting theory of causation cannot account for intentional causation, since this involves an agent trying to do something, and trying is causing. This kind of causation is thus a state of an agent and does not involve the operation of a law. It is simpler to suppose that non-intentional causing is also causing by substances (and not events) in virtue of their powers to act. That raises again the question of why their powers are bound together only in certain ways. The most probable answer is that God, the simplest kind of person there could be, brings this about because it is necessary for the existence of finite rational creatures such as ourselves.

Empiricists have sought to follow Hume in claiming that causality is a relation between events reducible to something more basic, e.g., regularities or counterfactuals. But all such attempts fail through their inability to distinguish cause from effect. The alternative is that causation is irreducible. Regularities are evidence of causation but do not constitute it. We understand what causation is through performing intentional actions which necessarily involve trying, which in turn just is exercising causal power