Richard Swinburne

This is a response to Cavin and Colombetti’s paper criticizing a claim of mine elsewhere, that God would not permit anyone to deceive the world by manufacturing evidence which made it probable that Jesus was God incarnate when that was not so. I analyze four different cases of A allowing B to hold a false belief, and I argue that only two of them constitute deception by A, one being “straightforward” deception and the other “tacit” deception. What I should have claimed earlier is that God would not deceive us on this matter, including doing so by permitting someone else to manufacture deceptive evidence.

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?

The great religions often claim that their books or creeds contain truths revealed by God. How could we know that they do? In the second edition of Revelation, renowned philosopher of religion Richard Swinburne addresses this central question. But since the books of great religions often contain much poetry and parable, Swinburne begins by investigating how eternal truth can be conveyed in unfamiliar genres, by analogy and metaphor, within false presuppositions about science and history. In the final part of the book, Swinburne then applies the results of Parts I and II to assessing the evidence that the teaching of the Christian Church constitutes a revelation from God. In the course of his philosophical exploration, Swinburne considers how the church which Jesus founded is to be identified today and presents a sustained discussion of which passages in the Bible should be understood literally and which should be understood metaphorically. This is a fuller and entirely rewritten second edition of Revelation, the most notable new feature of which is a long chapter examining whether traditional Christian claims about personal morality (divorce, homosexuality, abortion, etc.) can be regarded as revealed truths. A formal appendix shows how the structure of evidence supporting the Christian revelation can be articulated in terms of the probability calculus (and shows that Plantinga's well-known argument from 'dwindling probabilities' against probabilistic arguments of this kind is not cogent).

Keith Ward understands the Trinity as “one conscious being” and the divine “persons” as three necessary modes of divine action. But he does not give a good reason for supposing that there must be just three modes of divine action. I argue that by contrast all the theories of the Trinity developed from the Nicene Creed by patristic and medieval writers, are “social” theories, or “three persons” theories. I defend my a priori argument for the justification of a social theory—that three persons are the necessary minimum for the realization of perfect love, and the necessary maximum for this.

ABSTRACTA ‘complex’ theory of personal identity analyses a person P2 being the same as an earlier person P1 in terms of some particular degree of physical or mental continuity between them. All such theories are open to an objection that the postulated degree of continuity is an arbitrary one, and many of them are open to the objection that more than one subsequent person could satisfy them. Necessarily, any subsequent person is either totally the same person as P1 or not at all the same as P1. P2 is identical with P1 if and only if P2 has the same soul as P1.

Although Gregory wrote very little about this. he acknowledged that natural reason can lead us from the orderliness of the physical world to the existence of God; in this, he followed the tradition of Athanasius and other Greek fathers. Unlike Aquinas, he did not seek to present the argument a; deductive: in fact his argument is inductive, and of die same kind as - we now realize - scientists and historians use when they argue from phenomena to then explanatory cause. Gregory wrote hardly anything about how one could obtain knowledge of the truths of the Christian revelation by arguments from non-question-beggining premises; but in his conversations with the Turks he showed that he believed that there are good arguments of this kind. Almost all of Gregory's writing about knowledge of God concerned how one could obtain this by direct access in prayer: this access, he held is open especially to monks, but to a considerable degree also to all Christians who follow the divine commandments.

This paper defends 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 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.

Arguments move from premises to conclusions. The premises state things taken temporally for granted; if the argument works, the premises provide grounds for affirming the conclusion. A valid deductive argument is one in which the premises necessitate, that is, entail, the conclusion. What I shall call a ‘correct’ inductive argument is one in which the premises in some degree probabilify the conclusion, but do not necessitate it. More precisely, in what I shall call a correct P-inductive argument the premises make the conclusion probable ; in what I shall call a correct C-inductive argument, the premises add to the probability of the conclusion. Arguments only show their conclusions to be true if they start from true premises; arguments of the above types which work and do start from such premises I will call sound arguments. Arguments are only of use to show to an individual that the conclusion is true if he already knows the premises to be true. Most of what I shall have to say today concerns arguments with respect to which there is no doubt that the premises are true.

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.

This paper consists of my responses to the comments by nine commentators on my book Are we Bodies or Souls? It makes twelve separate points, each one relevant to the comments of one or more of the commentators, as follows: I defend my understanding of “knowing the essence” of an object as knowing a set of logically necessary and sufficient conditions for an object to be that object; I claim that there cannot be thoughts without a thinker; I argue that my distinction of “mental” from “physical” events in terms of whether anyone has privileged access to whether or not they occur, is a clear one; and I defend my account of metaphysical modality and its role in defending my account of personal identity; I defend my view that Descartes’s argument in favor of the view that humans are essentially souls fails, but that my amended version of that argument succeeds; I claim that my theory acknowledges the closeness of the connection in an earthly life between a human soul and its body; I argue that my Cartesian theory of the soul-body relation is preferable to Aquinas’s theory of that; I argue that a material thing cannot have mental properties; I argue that any set of logically necessary conditions for an object to be the object it is, which together form a logically sufficient condition for this, mutually entails any other such set; I deny that a dualist needs to provide an explanation of how the soul has the capacities that it has; and finally I defend my view that souls have thisness, and claim that that is not a difficulty for the view that God determines which persons will exist.