Richard Swinburne

In order for God to allow a bad state E to occur, he must have the right to allow it to occur, to allow it must be the only morally permissible way in which he can bring about a good G, God does everything else logically possible to bring about G, and the expected value thereby of allowing E is positive. Unless he has strong prior reasons for believing that there is a God, a theist needs to have such a theodicy with respect to all known evils, explaining why a good God would allow them to occur, if his belief that there is a God is to be rational.

A substantial balance of evidence favours the view that human souls have libertarian free will, that is the freedom to choose between alternative actions, despite all causal influences acting on them. Free will thus entails soul indeterminism, which entails brain indeterminism. There is no reason to suppose that the same laws govern the behaviour of the brain as govern any other physical system, since the brain is different from any other physical system in being in causal interaction with a soul. In any case, its indeterminism may be ensured by Quantum indeterminism. The main evidence for soul indeterminism is, however, the fact that human counter‐suggestibility would be compatible with determinism only on the assumption of an a priori very unlikely mechanism for the production of beliefs. New Appendices E, F, and G discuss the relevance to this topic of different interpretations of Quantum Theory, of Gödel's Theorem and of Libet's experiments.

We have no grounds for supposing that a foetus has a soul until it is conscious, and no grounds for supposing that it is conscious until there occur in it brain processes similar to those that accompany consciousness in more developed human brains. The higher animals have souls. While scientists may discover vast numbers of correlations between mental events and brain events, it is most improbable that they will be able to explain why there are the correlations that they are, or any correlations at all – that is, why neural systems of a certain complexity give rise to souls. The very success of science in achieving vast integrations of theories in physics and chemistry was achieved by separating off from the physical world colours, tastes etc; but this cannot be done when we are looking for a theory with psychophysical laws.

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.

If humans are to have the opportunity to choose to love God, they must have the opportunity to choose to reject him—to sin. Agnosticism gives humans, the opportunity to choose freely to do good or evil without any awareness of God's presence making it too easy to do good. Death is not a bad state, but the end of a good state; and there are considerable advantages in human mortality. Though it is good that death should be followed by a life after death, it is good that this should not be too evident to humans.

God does not need to become incarnate, i.e. human, to forgive us, but it is good that he should do so to make his forgiveness available to us by means of an atonement for our sins; and also for many other reasons – to identify with our sufferings, show us how much he loves us, and reveal truths to us. Evidence that Jesus was God Incarnate is provided by the kind of life he led, and its culmination in the Resurrection. Other accounts of the ‘incarnation’ – monophysitism, Nestorianism, the Kenotic Theory, and modern humanistic Christologies – are less probable than the Chalcedonian one. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the Virgin Birth, and the Ascension of Christ.

A substance is a concrete individual thing that exists all at once. Although the world can be cut up into substances in different ways, any full description of the world will include both material objects and immaterial souls as substances. Souls have essentially mental properties, ones to which the subject has privileged access such as thoughts and sensations. The essential part of a human being is a human soul, one with a structure and a capacity for logical thought, moral belief, and free will, and certain limited powers exercised through a human body. No human being is essentially human.

Each human owes atonement to God for his own sins, and owes it to his fellow humans to help them to make atonement to God for their sins. Only an individual sinner can repent and make apology, but others can provide him with the means to make reparation. Jesus Christ, who, being God, owed nothing to God, provided his life and death as something that we can offer to God as our reparation for our own sins and those of our fellows. This model of atonement, tantamount to the ‘satisfaction’ model of Anselm and the to the biblical model of ‘sacrifice’, is the most satisfactory of the traditional theological models of the Atonement.

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 second part of this book applies the results of its first part about moral responsibility to traditional Christian doctrines. I assume that there is a God of the traditional kind who became incarnate in Jesus Christ, was crucified and rose from the dead; and then ask what follows about our moral responsibility to God, and his to us. This chapter argues that the command or commendation of God can change the moral status of some but not all actions, making them good or obligatory, bad or wrong, when they would not otherwise be so. God does not issue commands that cover the whole of our lives, although he does make it supererogatorily good for us to use our lives in certain ways; and only those who do so use their lives will attain salvation. It is good to hope for one's own salvation.

This chapter distinguishes various kinds of moral goodness. Actions may be objectively good and/or subjectively good; and they may be supererogatory or obligatory. Actions may be objectively or subjectively bad, and wrong or merely infrarvetatory. There is goodness either in good actions being done naturally, or in their being done contrary to inclination. There are three kinds of goodness of character: agents may be naturally inclined to do actions that are in fact good, they may have correct moral beliefs, and they may be naturally inclined to do actions that they believe to be good.