Is There a God? by Richard Swinburne
Egan, Robert J
When philosophers talk about God Robert J. Egan Many Commonweal readers will remember a time when caring about philosophy seemed an integral part of being a Catholic. With a robust confidence in...
...He insists, rather, that science and reason actually provide good grounds for belief in God...
...And it is very hard for me to understand how questions like "Why is there anything rather than nothing...
...the existence of conscious humans within it with providential opportunities for molding themselves, each other, and the world...
...Among these Christian analytic philosophers, Richard Swinburne-since 1985 a professor at the University of Oxford-has been a distinguished, prolific, and influential figure...
...At most of these places, the "philosophy of religion," if it was taught at all, was taught as a debunking of the meaning and credibility of traditional religious talk...
...Many are insisting that speech about God must always be tied more closely to the interpretation of sacred texts and images, to the formation of certain kinds of character, and to particular traditions of communal religious practice...
...They invite us back to a way of thinking and talking about God which prescinds from what may be known through particular traditions understood as revelatory and adheres simply to available evidence and the rules of rational argument...
...And others would insist that the God worshiped by Jews, Christians, and Muslims can be spoken of truthfully only in conjunction with the struggles of the poor and victims of injustice to change the circumstances of their lives and to envision a future with hope...
...Nevertheless, these developments have somewhat changed the fortunes of philosophy of religion in analytic circles...
...Of course, the parameters of rational plausibility in the minds of analytic philosophers (and theoretical physicists) are sometimes difficult for the rest of us to gauge or assess...
...Given this situation, Catholics gradually lost their confidence in academic philosophy as an aid in understanding their faith and its prospects in the contemporary world...
...The Evolution of the Soul Oxford: Clarendon Press., 1986...
...Theology entered an exciting period of rediscovery and controversy, reaching a new and surprisingly large audience, while philosophy in the Catholic world, on the other hand, became increasingly techBook discussed in this essay Is There a God...
...During these years, the philosophy departments of Catholic colleges and universities welcomed, among others, existentialists, phenomenologists, prag-matists, Hegelians, critical Marxists, Witt-gensteinians, Whiteheadians, and transcendental Thomists, all of whom continued to address large issues, but mostly for small, professional audiences...
...But even for many believers today, the possibility of true and compelling speech about God has come to seem more complicated, ambiguous, and circuitous than Swinburne's argument allows...
...It explains the fact that there is a universe at all, that scientific laws operate within it, that it contains conscious animals and humans with very complex intricately organized bodies, that we have abundant opportunities for developing ourselves and the world, as well as the more particular data that humans report miracles and have religious experiences....The very same criteria which scientists use to reach their own theories lead us to move beyond those theories to a creator God who sustains everything in existence...
...some historical evidence of miracles in connection with human needs and prayers, particularly in connection with the foundation of Christianity, topped off finally by the apparent experience by millions of his presence, all make it significantly more probable than not that there is a God...
...All this changed suddenly in the years after the Second Vatican Council...
...He defends Cartesian dualism...
...Even among analytic philosophers, some of whom are themselves Christians, thoughtful attention is, here and there, being turned again to questions about religious belief, experience, and practice, including questions about the existence of God...
...Philosophy was thought to provide reasonable foundations for the assent and obedience of faith...
...It also provided many Catholics with a coherent way of thinking and talking about life in a secular and pluralistic society...
...It was philosophy that established the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, the basic principles of a natural moral law, even the existence of God...
...It is hard for me to see how God can be discussed at all without reference to mystery, awe, or the hard, harrowing work of love, or how the word "God" can be given all these particular meanings-or even any meaning-outside specific traditions of religious practice, experience, and symbolism...
...It is hard for me to see how positing the existence of an infinite, eternal, omniscient, and omnipotent person can ever be called a simple hypothesis that explains anything, much less everything...
...Certainly American Catholic intellectual life has suffered from the loss of this confidence...
...The Christian God Oxford: Clarendon Press...
...At a time when theology was thought to be primarily the concern and prerogative of the clergy, Christian philosophy became the ordinary framework of self-understanding for many educated lay Catholics...
...But interest has also been growing in the subject among some scholars who take religion seriously and treat it with respect...
...American Catholics, who have inherited a strong confidence in philosophy, might well welcome such an invitation...
...1977...
...This still remains a minority viewpointmany representatives of the mainstream analytic school still cannot bring themselves to believe in human "consciousness," much less in an infinite, eternal personal being...
...While some Catholic theologians continued a dialogue with major figures of Continental thought-Martin Heidegger, Paul Ricceur, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jurgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida-few paid much attention to developments in the analytic tradition...
...Many believe that authentic speech about God must always have a mystagogical dimension-must be a speaking which itself leads to repentance, illumination, gratitude: to an experience of God...
...Others will question the force of any arguments of the kind Swinburne puts forward in the radically pluralistic, ambiguous, postmodern situation of our own culture...
...In fact, philosophical reflection on the meaning and truth of religion is moving in several different directions at the present time...
...With a robust confidence in human reason, Catholics looked to the study of philosophy for answers to many of the most important questions of the age...
...Swinburne is fully at home in theoretical science and analytic philosophy...
...Included also is a summary discussion of why God allows evil, a subject Swinburne intends to return to in a future book on Providence...
...He loves argument...
...He decided as a young man to use the tools of clarity and rigor to make Christian theology "intellectually respectable again...
...These arguments make sense within some general agreement about reality and how to talk about it, but such an agreement is getting harder to imagine...
...Can God-talk really be evaluated without reference to the communities of discourse bearing these traditions and learning its sense and relevance from their struggles, suffering, and longing...
...can be asked from the perspective of a detached observer...
...Some of this remains detached and distant from its subject matter-curious, ironic, and amused...
...Richard Swinburne Oxford University Press, $19.95,144 pp...
...Even those who find this way of arguing about God not fully persuasive can admire the beauty and integrity of this experience...
...He believes that most Continental philosophy-Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger-is characterized by "a certain sloppiness of argument, a tendency to draw big, vague general pictures of the universe, without spelling them out very precisely or justifying them very thoroughly...
...The conclusion of this book," Swinburne writes, "is that the existence, orderliness, and fine-tunedness of the world...
...Revelation: From Metaphor to Analogy Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992...
...The whole edifice of neoscholasticism seemed to collapse overnight...
...Finally, using these criteria, he advances several arguments for positing the existence of God based on various phenomena that seem to him to require such an explanation...
...Swinburne reconstructs the truth claims of Christian faith in ways that he means to seem reasonable, but one well may wonder, to whom...
...I doubt that many atheists or agnostics will find these arguments compelling...
...They involve a crossing over into the contested and recently somewhat pacified territory between theology and natural science...
...In a series of brief, well-focused chapters, he first establishes the meaning and coherence of the idea of God, then establishes appropriate criteria for adequate theories and their justification...
...1994...
...See also: Reason and the Christian Religion: Essays in Honor of Richard Swinburne Padgett, Alan G., ed...
...nical, specialized, and diversified...
...To me it seems strange, extravagant, unnerving...
...1989...
...The Existence of God Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979...
...Many Catholics would be glad to hear the news...
...He believes in the possibility of purely rational "foundations" for thought...
...Major works by Richard Swinburne on the Philosophy of Religion The Coherence of Theism Oxford: Clarendon Press...
...In this work, intended for a wider audience, Swinburne argues against the popular conviction that religious belief is "entirely nonrational" and that the existence of God is, as he puts it, "intellectually, a lost cause...
...Many are advocating a more comparative approach to the philosophy of religion at long last, insisting that examples must be drawn from many different world views-Taoist, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and others...
...Authors like Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson were crucial in shaping the intellectual lives of many Catholics earlier in this century...
...Responsibility and Atonement Oxford: Clarendon Press...
...The postponed questions of a century-and-a-half-questions about human subjectivity, historical consciousness, religious pluralism, the role of experience, and the ideals of democracy-broke over the walls of Catholicism like a tidal wave...
...It is again an exciting and exacting discipline...
...For all that, there is much that is moving and admirable in this elegantly stated and thoughtful book, which gives voice in these complex times to a confident and serene experience of Christian faith deeply in harmony with scientific investigation, wide learning, and rigorous argument...
...Can we imagine the relationship between words and things in such a straightforward and confident way...
...Using these same criteria," he says, "we find that the view that there is a God explains everything we observe, not just some narrow range of data...
...He thinks of all this as "a kind of philosophy nearer to literature than to science...
...His recent book, Is There a God?, is a condensed version of his earlier study, The Existence of God (1979...
...Faith and Reason Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981...
...Before the 1960s, it was philosophy- rather than theology-that provided the organizing principles and theoretical foundations for Catholic higher education in this country...
...Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994...
...Nevertheless, in the last twenty years, there has been a unexpected revival of interest in the philosophy of religion...
...At state schools and most other private universities, in the meantime, philosophy departments were dominated by an Anglo-American analytic tradition which had grown increasingly positivist and either bored by religious faith or openly hostile toward it...
...And Catholics more generally tended to lose interest in this conversation: whether about language analysis, hermeneutic theory, the fading specter of Marxism, the complexities of decon-struction and postmodernism, or the rise of neopragmatism...
...The core of his argument is a theory of explanation summarized in his second chapter...
...There he recounts how various investigators-scientists, historians, and detectives-move from observed data to theories that account for the data using certain criteria to conclude that a particular theory is most likely to be true...
...The mood of most American and Western European philosophy was increasingly secular...
...Can the step to the reality of immortal souls or the existence of an infinite person ever really be so neatly calculated...
...Robert J. Egan, S.J., a frequent contributor to Commonweal, teaches theology and spirituality at Saint Michael's Institute and Gon-zaga University in Spokane, Washington...
...It is not possible, here, to examine these arguments in detail...
Vol. 124 • January 1997 • No. 2
