Swinburne Richard,2004-The Existence of God

“I shall, however, argue that, although reason can reach a fairly well-justified conclusion about the existence of God, it can reach only a probable conclusion, not an indubitable one. For this reason, there is abundant room for faith in the practice of religion.”

“I take the proposition ‘God exists’ [...] to be logically equivalent to ‘there exists necessarily a person without a body (i.e. a spirit) who necessarily is eternal, perfectly free, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, and the creator of all things’.”

“One unfortunate feature of recent philosophy of religion has been a tendency to treat arguments for the existence of God in isolation from each other. [...] But clearly the arguments may back each other up or alternatively weaken each other. [...] The crucial issue [...] is whether all the arguments taken together make it probable that God exists, whether the balance of all the relevant evidence favours the claim of theism or not.”

“In the central case of personal explanation we explain a phenomenon E as brought about intentionally by a rational agent P. [...] Personal explanation looks very different from scientific explanation. In scientific explanation [...] we explain an event E by past events or states C and natural laws L. In personal explanation we explain E as brought about by an agent P (not by an event or state) in order to realize intentions for the future.”

“A theory has high explanatory power in so far as it has high predictive power and the evidence has low prior probability. [...] I stress the enormous importance of the criterion of simplicity [...]. The trouble [...] is that, for any finite collection of phenomena, there will always be an infinite number of different theories [...] from each [of which] can be deduced statements reporting the phenomena observed with perfect accuracy.”

“Hence a perfectly free and omniscient being can never do actions that are morally bad [...]. So God’s perfect goodness [...] follows from his omniscience and his perfect freedom. I conclude that theism postulates one person of a very simple kind - a person who is essentially omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly free and eternal. Such a being will necessarily be an omnipresent spirit, creator of all things, and perfectly good.”

“Hence the occurrence of certain phenomena will confirm - that is, raise the probability of - the existence of God if and only if it is more probable that those phenomena will occur if there is a God than if there is not. [...] The force of the arguments [...] will depend [...] on the explanatory power of theism with regard to those phenomena; how much more likely does the existence of God make the occurrence of those phenomena than it would be if we do not assume the existence of God.”

“Like Leibniz, I conclude that the existence of the universe over finite or infinite time would be, if only scientific explanation is allowed, a brute inexplicable fact. [...] The existence of the (physical) universe over time comes into my category of things too big for science to explain. If the existence of the universe is to be explained, personal explanation must be brought in.”

“If this order in the world is to be explained by many gods, then some explanation is required for how and why they cooperate in producing the same patterns of order throughout the universe. [...] If there were more than one deity responsible for the order of the universe, we would expect to see characteristic marks of the handiwork of different deities in different parts of the universe.”

“Such a coincidence cries out for explanation in terms of some single common source with the power to produce it. [...] Theism leads us to expect a world at some phenomenal level, simple and reliable. [...] Hence the operation of laws of nature is evidence - one strand of a cumulative argument - for the existence of God.”

“But one of its premisses was shown by Darwin and his successors to be clearly false. [...] This discovery led to the virtual disappearance of the teleological argument from popular apologetic - mistakenly, I think, since it can easily be reconstructed in a form that does not rely on the premisses shown to be false by Darwin. [...] Only certain processes acting on a certain initial kind of inorganic matter would have produced human bodies.”

“A God [...] has good reason for bringing about embodied humanly free agents [...]. God could achieve this either by creating such bodies entire, or by creating and keeping in existence a universe designed to bring them about by a long evolutionary process. [...] It is not too surprising that God should take the long [...] evolutionary route to produce human bodies.”

“God has good reason to cause the existence of souls and join them to bodies, in the goodness [...] of the existence of humanly free agents who would need to have bodies through which to have enjoyable sensations, form largely true beliefs about the world, and form their own purposes in the light of these beliefs, which would make a difference to the world. [...] Hence the argument from consciousness is a good C-inductive argument for the existence of God.”

“The arguments of the present book are [...] more accurately described as arguments to the existence of one divine being, a person on whom all else depends. That is theism, the view common to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Theism is, however, compatible with the Christian doctrine of the Trinity [...]. In describing my arguments as arguments to ‘the existence of God’ I am therefore oversimplifying.”

“Now there is considerable doubt whether Behe has shown that there are such systems. [...] But even if there are such systems, that fact may make no difference to the cogency of the argument from spatial order [...]; it may not either add to or diminish its strength. [...] But in my view current science seems to suggest that neither of the two theses [needed to make such systems crucially relevant] is very probable.”

“Any phenomenon can be evidence of design only if it is the kind of thing a designer would have sought to bring about. Different designers have different purposes. [...] No phenomenon shows design as such without at the same time showing something about the sort of being who designed it.”