The Existence of GodRichard 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 make it overall probable that there is a God. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
1 Inductive Arguments | 4 |
2 The Nature of Explanation | 23 |
3 The Justification of Explanation | 52 |
4 Complete Explanation | 73 |
5 The Intrinsic Probability of Theism | 93 |
General Considerations | 110 |
7 The Cosmological Argument | 133 |
11 The Problem of Evil | 236 |
12 Arguments from History and Miracles | 273 |
13 The Argument from Religious Experience | 293 |
14 The Balance of Probability | 328 |
The Trinity | 343 |
Recent Arguments to Design from Biology | 346 |
Plantingas Argument against Evolutionary Naturalism | 350 |
| 355 | |
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Common terms and phrases
agnosticism argued argument from design Argument from Moral background knowledge basic actions Bayes's theorem behaviour beliefs best action brain events bring C-inductive argument causal cause Chapter complete explanation consequence cosmological argument create creatures desires discuss divine equal best example existence existence of God explanatory power finite free choice full explanation fundamental laws give given God’s human bodies humanly free agents hypothesis of theism improbable inductive infinite number initial conditions instantiation intentions intrinsic probability kind laws of nature Leibniz logically possible matter mental events natural evils natural laws Newton’s Newton's laws normal observed occur operation P(ejh particular perception perceptual claims personal explanation phenomena physical objects physical universe postulate powers and liabilities predict premisses principle prior probability produce properties rational reason region of basic religious experience scientific explanation seems sensations sense simple simpler simplicity substances suffering suppose teleological argument theory things true