The Existence of God

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Clarendon Press, Mar 25, 2004 - Philosophy - 372 pages
Richard 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 offer good grounds to support the probability that there is a God. The overall structure of the discussion and its conclusion have been retained for this new edition, but much has been changed in order to strengthen the argumentation and to take account of Swinburne's subsequent work on the nature of consciousness and the problem of evil, and of the latest philosophical and scientific writing, especially in respect of the laws of nature and the argument from fine-tuning. This is now the definitive version of a classic in the philosophy of religion.

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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
Concordance
355

8 Teleological Arguments
153
9 Arguments from Consciousness and Morality
192
10 The Argument from Providence
219
Index
357
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