Richard Swinburne on Arguing God Through Analytic Philosophy

Taken from the Closer to Truth website, where a higher-quality version of this video (with a higher frame-rate!) can be found:

http://www.closertotruth.com/topic/Arguing-God-with-Analytic-Philosophy-/95

There you will also find parts 2 and 3 of this video interview.

For more discussion regarding the merits and value of various arguments for the existence of God, please see the Partially Examined Life podcast:

http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2011/09/15/episode-43-arguments-for-the-...

Arguing God from Design, by Richard Swinburne

For at least 3,000 years, thinkers have argued that the orderliness of the universe shows that it was made and sustained by a creator God—in other words, it was designed. Here is my modern version of this argument.

Our world is a very orderly place. It is governed almost entirely by "laws of nature." But "laws of nature" are simply statements about the powers and liabilities of things. Newton's law of gravity, for example, states that every material body has the power to attract each and every other material body with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their distance apart—and the liability always to exercise that power on every other material body in the universe. There is enormous uniformity in the behavior of material objects. In certain respects (such as those described by Newton's law), they all behave in the same way, and then they fall into a few distinct kinds (electrons, protons, neutrons, etc.), all the members of which behave in the same way as each other in further respects.

Yet our universe is not just any simple orderly universe. Its laws and initial conditions (the distribution of matter-energy at the time of the big bang and the velocity of the bang) led to the evolution of humans. In almost any possible universe, each material object would behave in a very complicated way different from that of every other material object—and almost any other universe in which material objects behaved in simple ways would not have been able to lead to the evolution of humans. How can we explain the enormous human-producing coincidence?

An explanatory hypothesis is probably true insofar as it is simple and leads us to expect otherwise unexpected data. The hypothesis of theism is that there is a God that is an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly free being. An omniscient being will know what things are good, and if this being is also perfectly free, will not be deterred by irrational desires from pursuing the good. Humans have a kind of goodness that even God does not possess: the power to choose between good and evil. So it is to be expected that a God will bring about humans, and so the necessary conditions for their existence. But we'll only be able to choose to bring about good or evil if there are simple laws of nature that cause our actions to have predictable effects, and only if those laws are human-producing will we exist at all.

Therefore, the otherwise unexpected orderliness of the universe is to be expected if there is a God. Of course, we could not observe anything except an orderly universe (for if the universe were not orderly, we would not exist). But that doesn't mean the order does not need explaining—just as the mere fact that fetuses develop into humans still needs explaining, even though if they did not develop into humans, humans would not be around to observe and explain things. It may be, as some physicists believe, that our universe is only one of many universes, which together form a "multiverse."

But the only reason they can have for believing in other universes is that the most general laws of our universe are such as to produce other universes, and that means that the multiverse itself—our multiverse (unlike most possible multiverses)—is governed by laws such as to produce, at some time, a human-evolving universe. So the argument takes off from the orderliness of our multiverse rather than just the orderliness of our universe. And my "argument from design" remains an enormously powerful argument for the existence of God.

Category:

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• analytic
• philosophy
• theology
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• dawkins
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• design
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[M3PanoS]

This guy's such a beast

[marcella83able]

lol if this is and illusion than u would u would have to admit that there must be something real as in to say its a illusion of something u have ever heard nor seen a illusion unless it was in reference to something real so the everything is a illusion trick or op out doesn't work

[gunner23]

The lighting isnt exactly Kubrickian.

[LaserBlowFish]

@tynytian No, all of the arguments for an unembodied mind fail to establish that positing such an entity is necessary, we have no evidence for its existence and everything we do know can be explained very simply without it, therefore by Swinburne's own criteria that he outlines in this video, we are not justified in positing it.

[LaserBlowFish]

@Drgamedood How can you have immense respect for the him if he makes arguments like the ones in bit.ly / xiSxLv for dualism ? You can effortlessly defeat his argument by simply recognizing that the "central I" is merely an illusion, that in reality there are multiple different things meant by it depending on the context and usually it's always a composite object rather than something separate.

[tynytian]

@LaserBlowFish So, your rebuttal is basically this: We have never seen an unembodied mind or person, therefore there is no such thing. Weak, man, very weak.

[LaserBlowFish]

@LaserBlowFish And I see he makes a rebuttal to something like this in the third part of this interview, however while being too preoccupied with make a coherent picture of theism he fails to consider global coherence with everything else we know. Whilst you could image personhood without physicality, we have no examples of such and we can explain everything about personhood without resorting to this additional entity that is detached from the body.

[LaserBlowFish]

@LaserBlowFish immaterial -> inanimate

[LaserBlowFish]

I think all personal explanations ulimately reduce to immaterial explanations. When we say a person caused something to happen what is really being said is that a particular configuration of matter and energy (the person) transitioned due to the laws of physics in such a way that it resulted in the thing being explained. So if this is right then you can't explain the existence of matter and energy with a personal explanation because "persons" themselves require matter and energy.

[FillTheirVoid]

Swinburne WRECKED HOUSE.