Richard Swinburne
Richard Swinburne (b.1934) is an Oxford professor of philosophy of religion. Swinburne is a Christian apologist - someone who sets out to defend the Christian religion's ideas. He also writes about religious experience and science. He has written many technical works of religious philosophy over the last 50 years but also some popular philosophy aimed at the general reader.
A good example of his more popular work is Is There A God? (1996, revised 2010). Swinburne is a key scholar for the influence of religious experience in the argument for God's existence.
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one of the most important Christian theologian/philosophers of our era - J. W. Wartick
Religious Experience
Swinburne defines religious experience as
an experience of God or of some other supernatural thing - Richard Swinburne
Swinburne's definition includes experiences that don't feature ‘God’, but instead involve an angel, a saint or prophet or other religious figure (eg. apparitions of the Virgin Mary).
Swinburne argues for 5 types of religious experience. The first two are public experiences:
The other three are private experiences:
Swinburne argues for 5 types of religious experience. The first two are public experiences:
- Perceiving a perfectly normal phenomenon (eg. a sunset) but interpreting it religiously
- Perceiving a very unusual public object (eg. the resurrection) which invites a supernatural interpretation
The other three are private experiences:
- An experience which can be described using everyday language (eg. a dream)
- An experience which cannot be described using everyday language (eg. a mystical experience)
- A conviction that God has been experienced in someway despite lack of material evidence (eg. a sense of forgiveness or redemption)
Principle of Credulity
Swinburne argues that we should trust our own religious experiences. He calls this the Principle of Credulity which means that:
we ought to believe that things are as they seem to be, until we have evidence that we are mistaken - Richard Swinburne
Swinburne doesn't think this is gullible or irrational. He argues that denying the Principle of Credulity would be the irrational thing to do.
If you say ... never trust appearances until it is proved that they are reliable, you will never have any beliefs at all - Richard Swinburne
Swinburne argues that trusting a religious experience is the same as trusting your ordinary senses:
Just as you must trust your five ordinary senses, so it is equally rational to trust your religious sense - Richard Swinburne
Swinburne is aware that we usually trust our ordinary senses because they agree with the sense-experiences of other people. They claim to see (or hear or smell) the same things we do. However, religious sense often doesn't agree with other people - many don't have religious experiences at all and those that do have them disagree with each other.
However, Swinburne argues that we trust our ordinary senses even when no one else is about to back them up. Sometimes people disagree with what we see or hear and then we have to decide who is mistaken. If the other person is colour blind, they will not see the same colours that we see, but that doesn't mean we should doubt what we are seeing. In the same way, people who don't have religious experiences might be spiritually blind.
However, Swinburne argues that we trust our ordinary senses even when no one else is about to back them up. Sometimes people disagree with what we see or hear and then we have to decide who is mistaken. If the other person is colour blind, they will not see the same colours that we see, but that doesn't mean we should doubt what we are seeing. In the same way, people who don't have religious experiences might be spiritually blind.
As for the differences between religious experiences within different religions, Swinburne argues that the extent of the differences has been exaggerated. If God exists, he may present himself in different ways to persons who are in different cultural circumstances.
Swinburne sums up the Principle of Credulity like this:
(in the absence of special considerations), if it seems ... to a subject that x is present (and has some characteristic), then probably x is present (and has that characteristic) - Richard Swinburne
The important phrase here is "in the absence of special considerations". Swinburne isn't saying that everything we experience therefore exists. Sometimes we fool ourselves. Special considerations might include things like:
- The experience occurred under circumstances that generally produce unreliable results (eg. intoxication from drugs or alcohol) or experient is unreliable (eg. a notorious liar or someone with a motive to deceive).
- The experient could not interpret the experience reliably (eg. very young)
- There is evidence that goes against what the experient claims
- There is reason to think that whatever the experient claims to perceive is not the real source of the experience
Principle of Testimony
Even if we trust our own "religious sense", most of the time we are being asked to trust the testimony of other people who claim to have had religious experiences - or revelations in scriptures. Swinburne's Principle of Testimony suggests that, not only is it reasonable to trust your own religious sense, it's also reasonable to trust other people's testimony about their religious experiences.
(in the absence of special considerations) the experiences of others are (probably) as they report them - Richard SWinburne
Swinburne again uses the phrase "in the absence of special considerations". He's not saying you should always believe anything people tell you:
Swinburne is saying that we go through life trusting the testimony of others on all sorts of subjects: we believe what other people tell us unless we've got some reason to doubt them (like, if they've lied to us before). Swinburne is stating that atheists shouldn't make a special exception for religious experiences. We should treat testimony about religious experiences the same way we treat testimony about everything else and only discount it if there are special reasons.
Critics might reply that people present all sorts of weird, crazy testimony (UFO abductions! lake monsters! Elvis not being dead!). We don't accept these ideas even though the people proposing them might seem otherwise-sane and respectable.
Swinburne responds with the prior probability argument. He states that the prior probability of God existing is quite high. Even if you don't agree with Swinburne that it's over 50%, you'd probably agree that it's more likely than UFOs abducting people. This means that testimony about God should be taken seriously - but you're still free to dismiss stories about the Loch Ness Monster or Elvis Presley being alive and well and working in a chip shop in Swindon because these things were very unlikely before the testimony came along.
- Some people are proven liars
- Some people are known to be drug-users or suffer from mental disorders
- Some people have something to gain from fooling us
Swinburne is saying that we go through life trusting the testimony of others on all sorts of subjects: we believe what other people tell us unless we've got some reason to doubt them (like, if they've lied to us before). Swinburne is stating that atheists shouldn't make a special exception for religious experiences. We should treat testimony about religious experiences the same way we treat testimony about everything else and only discount it if there are special reasons.
Critics might reply that people present all sorts of weird, crazy testimony (UFO abductions! lake monsters! Elvis not being dead!). We don't accept these ideas even though the people proposing them might seem otherwise-sane and respectable.
Swinburne responds with the prior probability argument. He states that the prior probability of God existing is quite high. Even if you don't agree with Swinburne that it's over 50%, you'd probably agree that it's more likely than UFOs abducting people. This means that testimony about God should be taken seriously - but you're still free to dismiss stories about the Loch Ness Monster or Elvis Presley being alive and well and working in a chip shop in Swindon because these things were very unlikely before the testimony came along.
Order & Regularity
Swinburne defends the Design Argument by pointing out the order in the universe in terms of regularity. Swinburne suggests there are two types of regularity in the universe:
Regularities of co-presence refers to the tendency for things to turn up together in orderly patterns. An example of this in terms of intelligent agency is the roads in a town, which meet and intersect or cross each other with bridges; many meet at right angles or merge together at junctions. Another example is books in a library, arranged alphabetically or according to the Dewey Decimal System.
However, Swinburne doesn't regard regularities of co-presence as particularly convincing examples of design. Swinburne is more impressed by a different type of order: temporal order or regularities of succession. This refers to orderly processes that operate the same way every time. In other words, the laws of nature. Most examples of order consist of both types of regularity. For example, a watch consists of regularities of co-presence (all the cogs and springs in the right position) and succession (the laws of physics which make it all work).
- Regularities of co-presence (spatial order)
- Regularities of succession (temporal order)
Regularities of co-presence refers to the tendency for things to turn up together in orderly patterns. An example of this in terms of intelligent agency is the roads in a town, which meet and intersect or cross each other with bridges; many meet at right angles or merge together at junctions. Another example is books in a library, arranged alphabetically or according to the Dewey Decimal System.
However, Swinburne doesn't regard regularities of co-presence as particularly convincing examples of design. Swinburne is more impressed by a different type of order: temporal order or regularities of succession. This refers to orderly processes that operate the same way every time. In other words, the laws of nature. Most examples of order consist of both types of regularity. For example, a watch consists of regularities of co-presence (all the cogs and springs in the right position) and succession (the laws of physics which make it all work).
The universe might so naturally have been chaotic, but it is not – it is very orderly - Richard Swinburne
Cumulative Experience
If just one of scientific discovery is evidence for an intelligent designer, then more of them turning up creates cumulative evidence - evidence that "stacks" making the conclusion more likely than with just a single piece of evidence. This is what Swinburne means by a cumulative argument for God's existence.
The case for the existence of God is a cumulative one - Richard Swinburne
Swinburne goes further than biology. He argues that order and regularity in physics, chemistry and astronomy all add to the cumulative experience of design. Swinburne doesn't just use different forms of the Design Argument to make up cumulative experience; he also includes the Cosmological Argument and the Ontological Argument too. He argues that, when you put all these arguments together, the cumulative evidence for God grows very convincing.
Cumulative experience is intended to show that, even though individual arguments or pieces of evidence taken by themselves don't make a completely convincing case for God's existence, when taken together, they make a cumulative case for God's existence that makes more sense than any alternative hypothesis. This is an important point. Swinburne uses statistical language to explain cumulative probability. His point is that cumulative experience doesn't show that God is 100% likely to exist. It just shows that God is more likely than any other explanation. In other words, when you look at all the difference evidence for Design, God's probability is greater than 50% - more likely than not.
Cumulative experience is intended to show that, even though individual arguments or pieces of evidence taken by themselves don't make a completely convincing case for God's existence, when taken together, they make a cumulative case for God's existence that makes more sense than any alternative hypothesis. This is an important point. Swinburne uses statistical language to explain cumulative probability. His point is that cumulative experience doesn't show that God is 100% likely to exist. It just shows that God is more likely than any other explanation. In other words, when you look at all the difference evidence for Design, God's probability is greater than 50% - more likely than not.
The Anthropic Principle
The Anthropic Principle is the idea that the universe seems particularly suited to bring about and support human life. This is a modern version of the Design Argument, building on Richard Swinburne's concept of regularity. It accepts things that many fundamentalists object to (like evolution and the universe being billions of years old) but it's a Design Argument because it finds something "suspicious" in the fact that the universe has "human friendly" laws and the evolution, through chance, produced humans at all.
The very success of science in showing us how deeply orderly the natural world is, provides strong grounds for believing there is an even deeper cause for that order - Richard Swinburne
Alternatives to Design: Deism
Critics argue that the Design Argument leads only to the non-interventionist God of Deism, but Richard Swinburne argues that you can infer the rest of God's characteristics, including his Goodness and Benevolence, from the Design Argument.
The orderliness of the Universe makes it a beautiful Universe, but, even more importantly, it makes it a Universe which humans can learn to control and change - Richard Swinburne
Swinburne argues that a good God would design a universe in which human beings can grow, explore, become independent and make morally significant decisions. Since this is the sort of universe we actually live in, Swinburne concludes that the Designer is a good God.