Richard Swinburne

In this interview of me by Julian Baggini, I defend my view that the existence of evil (bad actions and bad states of affairs) does not count against the existence of God iff it is only by God allowing the evil that a certain good can be achieved; God does everything else he can to bring about that good; God has the right to allow the evil; and the outcome is sufficiently good. I argue that God as our creator has the requisite right and I suggest reasons why the various evils of our world make possible great goods.

I distinguish between the argument to the existence of God from the operation of laws of nature and the argument from the laws being of such a kind as (together with the boundary conditions of the universe) to lead to the evolution of humans. There could not be a ’scientific’ explanation of these data, but there could be a ’personal’ explanation that they were caused by a person in virtue of his powers and purposes. The simplest and so most probably true explanation is that they were brought about by God.

According to how we treat others, we acquire merit or guilt, deserve praise or blame, and receive reward or punishment, looking in the end for atonement. In this study distinguished theological philosopher Richard Swinburne examines how these moral concepts apply to humans in their dealings with each other, and analyzes these findings, determining which versions of traditional Christian doctrines--sin and original sin, redemption, sanctification, and heaven and hell--are considered morally acceptable.

A THEIST NEEDS A THEODICY, AN ACCOUNT FOR EACH KNOWN KIND OF EVIL OF HOW IT IS PROBABLE THAT IT SERVES A GREATER GOOD, IF HIS BELIEF IN GOD IS TO BE RATIONAL--UNLESS EITHER HE HAS OTHER EVIDENCE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WHICH OUTWEIGHS THE COUNTEREVIDENCE FROM EVIL, OR HE HAS FOUND THE RESEARCH PROGRAMME OF THEODICY PROGRESSIVE. IT IS NOT ENOUGH, CONTRARY TO WYKSTRA AND PLANTINGA, TO CLAIM THAT GOD MAY BE PURSUING GREATER GOODS BEYOND OUR UNDERSTANDING. HOW EVIDENCE FUNCTIONS HERE IS WELL CAPTURED BY THE PROBABILITY CALCULUS.

"This book is about miracles -- what they are, what would count as evidence that they have occurred. It is not primarily concerned with historical evidence about whether certain particular miracles (such as Christ rising from the dead or walking on water) have occurred, but it is primarily concerned with whether historical evidence could show anything about such things and whether it matters if it can. It is concerned with the framework within which a historical debate must be conducted. It contains a selection of writings written from different viewpoints by philosophers, classical and modern. The reader is left to form his or her own view on who wins the argument." [Introduction].

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.

Plantinga defines S's belief as ‘privately rational if and only if it is probable on S's evidence’, and ‘publicly rational if and only if it is probable with respect to public evidence’, and he claims that ‘it is an immediate consequence of these definitions that all my basic beliefs are privately rational’. I made it explicitly clear in my review that on my account of a person's evidence (quoted and used by Plantinga) as ‘the content of his basic beliefs (weighted by his degree of confidence in them)’, that is not the case. I emphasize ‘weighted by his degree of confidence in them’. I wrote explicitly: ‘for more or less any belief, however convinced you are of it initially, other evidence of which you are equally convinced could rend it overall improbable’. Put technically, in probabilistic terms, basic beliefs come to us with different degrees of prior probability varying with our degree of confidence in them, but a belief with a high prior probability can in the light of other beliefs of our current set have a lower posterior probability. If you continue to hold on to a basic belief when its probability on the total evidence is below half, that belief is not privately rational. Footnotes1 Note: This brief discussion arises out of Richard Swinburne's critical notice of Alvin Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief (New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2000) and Plantinga's reply in Religious Studies, 37 (2001), 203–214, 215–222.

Richard Swinburne presents a substantially rewritten and updated edition of his most celebrated book. No other work has made a more powerful case for the probability of the existence of God. Swinburne gives a rigorous and penetrating analysis of the most important arguments for theism: the cosmological argument; arguments from the existence of laws of nature and the 'fine-tuning' of the universe; from the occurrence of consciousness and moral awareness; and from miracles and religious experience. He claims that while none of these arguments are deductively valid, they do give inductive support to theism and that, even when the argument from evil is weighed against them, taken together they offer good grounds to support the probability that there is a God. The overall structure of the discussion and its conclusion have been retained for this new edition, but much has been changed in order to strengthen the argumentation and to take account of Swinburne's subsequent work on the nature of consciousness and the problem of evil, and of the latest philosophical and scientific writing, especially in respect of the laws of nature and the argument from fine-tuning. This is now the definitive version of a classic in the philosophy of religion.

A logically impossible sentence is one which entails a contradiction, a logically necessary sentence is one whose negation entails a contradiction, and a logically possible sentence is one which does not entail a contradiction. Metaphysically impossible, necessary and possible sentences are ones which become logically impossible, necessary, or possible by substituting what I call informative rigid designators for uninformative ones. It does seem very strongly that a negative existential sentence cannot entail a contradiction, and so ”there is a God’ cannot be a metaphysically necessary truth. If it were such a truth, innumerable other sentences which seem paradigm examples of logically possible sentences, such as ”no one knows everything’ would turn out to be logically impossible. The only way in which God could be a logically necessary being is if there were eternal necessary propositions independent of human language or God’s will, such that the proposition that there is no God would entail -- via propositions inaccessible to us -- a contradiction. But if there were such propositions, God would have less control over the universe than he would have otherwise.

This is my response to the critical commentaries by Hasker, McNaughton and Schellenberg on my tetralogy on Christian doctrine. I dispute the moral principles invoked by McNaughton and Schellenberg in criticism of my theodicy and theory of atonement. I claim, contrary to Hasker, that I have taken proper account of the ‘existential dimension' of Christianity. I agree that whether it is rational to pursue the Christian way depends not only on how probable it is that the Christian creed is true and so that the way leads to the Christian goals, but (in part) on how strongly one wants those goals. Hasker is correct to say that I need to give arguments in favour of the historical claims of Christianity, and I outline how I hope to do that.

FAILURE TO OBSERVE OBLIGATIONS PRODUCES OBJECTIVE GUILT; FAILURE TO OBSERVE BELIEVED OBLIGATIONS PRODUCES SUBJECTIVE GUILT. A GUILTY PERSON MUST MAKE ATONEMENT. ATONEMENT CONSISTS OF REPENTANCE, APOLOGY, REPARATION AND PENANCE. THE PROCESS OF UNDOING THE WRONG IS COMPLETED WHEN THE WRONGED PERSON FORGIVES. NO ONE CAN MAKE THE GUILTY ONE’S REPENTANCE AND APOLOGY FOR HIM, BUT ANOTHER CAN PROVIDE THE MEANS OF REPARATION AND PENANCE. WHEN HUMANS SIN AGAINST GOD THEY NEED TO APOLOGISE WITH REPENTANCE, AND PLEAD THE ATONING SACRIFICE WHICH CHRIST HAS PROVIDED.

Christianity, Islam, and Judaism all claim that God has given humans a revelation. Divine revelation may be either of God, or by God of propositional truth. Traditionally Christianity has claimed that the Christian revelation has involved both of these. God revealed himself in his acts in history; for example in the miracles by which he preserved the people of ancient Israel, and above all by becoming incarnate as Jesus Christ, who was crucified and rose from the dead. And God also revealed to us propositional truths by the teaching of Jesus and his church. Some modern theologians have denied that Christianity involves any propositional revelation, but there can be little doubt that from the second century until the eighteenth century, Christians and non-Christians were virtually unanimous in supposing that it claimed to have such a revelation, and so it is worthwhile investigating its traditional claim. This article is concerned with the Christian claim to have a propositional revelation. The first section describes the process by which Christians of past centuries have come to believe that certain propositions have been revealed. The second assesses alternative philosophical accounts of what constitutes a belief that such-and-such propositions have been revealed, being a ‘justified’ belief.

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).