Richard Swinburne

The Argument from Design

The object of this paper is to show that there are no valid formal objections to the argument from design, so long as the argument is articulated with sufficient care. In particular I wish to analyse Humes attack on the argument in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and to show that none of the formal objections made therein by Philo have any validity against a carefully articulated version of the argument.

Plantinga on warrant

Alvin Plantinga Warranted Christian Belief (New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2000). In the two previous volumes of his trilogy on ‘warrant’, Alvin Plantinga developed his general theory of warrant, defined as that characteristic enough of which terms a true belief into knowledge. A belief B has warrant if and only if: (1) it is produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly, (2) in a cognitive environment sufficiently similar to that for which the faculties were designed, (3) according to a design plan aimed at the production of true beliefs, when (4) there is a high statistical probability of such beliefs being true. Thus my belief that there is a table in front of me has warrant if in the first place, in producing it, my cognitive faculties were functioning properly, the way they were meant to function. Plantinga holds that just as our heart or liver may function properly or not, so may our cognitive faculties. And he also holds that if God made us, our faculties function properly if they function in the way God designed them to function; whereas if evolution (uncaused by God) made us, then our faculties function properly if they function in the way that (in some sense) evolution designed them to function.

Does Theism Need a Theodicy

To many atheists the existence of evil seems to provide a conclusive argument against the existence of God. God is by definition omnipotent and perfectly good; a perfectly good being will remove evil in so far as he can, an omnipotent being can remove any evil he chooses, so if there is a God there will be no evil, but there is evil, hence there is no God. Theists normally challenge this argument by challenging the premiss that a perfectly good being will remove evil in so far as he can. The theistic defence is usually put as the defence that many evils are logically necessary conditions of greater goods, and hence a perfectly good being may allow them to occur in order to bring about the greater good; so a perfectly good being may well allow some evils to occur.

The Objectivity of Morality

If I say “we are now living in England” or “grass is green in summer’ or ‘the cat is on the mat’ what I say will normally be true or false—the statements are true if they correctly report how things are, or correspond to the facts; and if they do not do these things, they are false. Such a statement will only fail to have a truth-value if its referring expressions fail to refer (e.g. there is no object to which ‘the cat’ can properly be taken to refer); or if the statement lies on the border between truth and falsity (e.g. the grass is blue-green) so that it is as true to say that the statement is true as to say that it is false. Are moral judgments normally true or false in the way in which the above statements are true or false? I will term the view that they are objectivism and the view that they are not subjectivism. The objectivist maintains that it is as much a fact about an action that it is right or wrong as that it causes pain or takes a long time to perform. The subjectivist maintains that saying than an action is right or wrong is not stating a fact about it but merely expressing approval of it or commending it or doing some such similar thing. I wish in this paper, first, to show that all arguments for subjectivism manifestly fail, and secondly to produce a strong argument for objectivism. But, to start with, some preliminaries.

Theodicy, our well-being, and God's rights

The evils of the world — the things intrinsically bad, such as pain and suffering and wrongdoing — seem to be such as an omnipotent and perfectly good God would not allow to occur. Theodicy is the enterprise of showing that appearances are misleading, that the existence of God (omnipotent, and perfectly good), is compatible with the occurrence of this world’s evils, and (more strongly) that their occurrence does not provide evidence against the existence of God.1 God is omnipotent, which is normally taken to mean that he can do anything logically possible. Fairly obviously, therefore, most recognise, he could prevent the evils of the world if he so chose. So the task of theodicy becomes the task of showing that it is compatible with his perfect goodness, that he allow them to occur. I suggest that God could allow evils to occur, compatibly with his perfect goodness, if four conditions are satisfied with respect to them. First, most obviously, if God is to allow an evil e, it must be that allowing e contributes to making possible some good g. More precisely, it must be logically impossible for God to bring about g in any other morally permissible way than by allowing e (or an evil equally bad) to occur. Note that I write ‘allowing e to occur’, not the stronger ‘bringing about e’. It may be that, as the traditional free will defence claims, free choice between good and evil is a great good. What that requires is allowing the agent the choice between bringing about good and bringing about evil, not his actually bringing about the evil. But it must be naturally possible for the agent to bring about the evil — i.e. it must be compatible with the prior state of things, both of the physical universe and of the direct action of God, that the agent bring about the evil. There are, I believe, other goods which God can make possible only by himself actually bringing about evils.

The Christian Wager

On what grounds will the rational man become a Christian? It is often assumed by many, especially non-Christians, that he will become a Christian if and only if he judges that the evidence available to him shows that it is more likely than not that the Christian theological system is true, that, in mathematical terms, on the evidence available to him, the probability of its truth is greater than half. It is the purpose of this paper to investigate whether or not this is a necessary and sufficient condition for the rational man to adopt Christianity.

How the divine properties fit together: reply to Gwiazda

Jeremy Gwiazda has criticized my claim that God, understood as an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly free person is a person ‘of the simplest possible kind’ on the grounds that omnipotence etc. as spelled out by me are omnipotence etc. of restricted kinds, and so less simple forms of these properties than maximal forms would be. However the account which I gave of these properties in The Christian God (although not in The Coherence of Theism ) shows that, when they are defined in certain ways, they all follow from one property of ‘pure, limitless, intentional power’. I argue here that a person who has these properties so defined is a person ‘of the simplest possible kind’.

Space, Time and Causality

Absolute versus Relative Space and Time.- Three Steps Towards Absolutism.- Reply to Mackie.- Absoluteness and Conspiracy.- Time And Causal Connectibility.- Prospects for a Causal Theory of Space-Time.- Verificationism and Theories of Space-Time.- Temporal and Causal Asymmetry.- Temporal and Causal Asymmetry.- Temporal and Causal Asymmetry.- Causality And Quantum Mechanics.- How the Measurement Problem Is an Artifact of the Mathematics.- Measurement, Unitarity, and Laws.- Causality, Relativity, and the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox.- Nonlocality and Peaceful Coexistence.- Quantum Logic and Ensembles.- Notes On Contributors.- Index Of Names.

Relations between Universals, or Divine Laws?

Armstrongs 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.

Evidence for the Resurrection

Here are some of the facts relevant to the resurrection: Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish prophet who claimed to be the Christ prophesied in the Jewish Scriptures, was arrested, was judged a political criminal, and was crucified. Three days after His death and burial, some women who went to His tomb found the body gone. In subsequent weeks, His disciples claimed that God had raised Him from the dead and that He appeared to them various times before ascending into heaven.