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God as the Simplest Explanation of the Universe1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 June 2011

Richard Swinburne
Affiliation:
Oriel College, Oxford

Extract

I have argued over many years that theism provides a probably true explanation of the existence and most general features of the universe. A major reason for this, I have claimed, is that it is simpler than other explanations. The present paper seeks to amplify and defend this latter claim in the light of some recent challenges.

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2011

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References

2 See for example, my The Existence of God, second edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004) chs. 3 and 5Google Scholar.

3 See Armstrong, D. M., What is a Law of Nature? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tooley, Michael, ‘The nature of laws’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 7 (1977), 667–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dretske, F. I., ‘Laws of Nature’, Philosophy of Science 44 (1977), 248–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Armstrong construes universals in an Aristotelian way (that is, as existing only when instantiated). But that will not explain why their first instantiation had the character it did, e.g. why the first piece of iron expanded when heated. That could only be explained if the universals were already tied together, and that would involve their existing before being instantiated, and so in a ‘Platonic heaven’.This latter is the view of Tooley, and it is in his way that I have spelled out the RBU account.

4 Harré, R. and Madden, E. H., Causal Powers (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975)Google Scholar; Ellis, Brian, Scientific Essentialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

5 For further argument in defence of the SPL account see 179–85 of my Relations Between Universals, or Divine Laws?’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 84 (2006), 179–89Google Scholar.

6 For a fuller account of these criteria, but one which does not distinguish the different roles some of them play on the RBU and SPL accounts of laws of nature, see my Epistemic Justification, ch. 4.

7 But couldn't there be a being which just recognized things as ‘grue’ without doing so in virtue of their colour and the date? There could certainly be a being which classified together (in virtue of their similarity to paradigm examples) the same objects as we would call ‘grue’ (on the grounds of their satisfying the stated definition). But he would be picking out a different property (‘grue*’) which – as far as his experience went – was coinstantiated with ‘grue’. Yet there could be no guarantee that the two properties individuated in different ways would always coincide. We have no access to the property of being grue* and so cannot use it in our explanations of things.

8 See The Existence of God, chs. 6–13, and the shorter and simpler book Is There a God? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).Google Scholar chs. 4–7.

9 A simple hypothesis is no less simple for entailing complicated consequences. Christianity claims that God the Father inevitably in virtue of his nature brings about the other two members of the Trinity, all of whom together constitute one God. (For a argument in justification of this Chrisitan claim see my The Christian God, especially ch. 8.) But I suggest that arguments to the existence of that one God must proceed via arguments to the existence of one person on whom everything else depends, and so to the existence of God the Father, whose postulated properties are the same as those attributed to the God of Islam or Judaism.

10 For argument in defence of this claim see my The Coherence of Theism, revised edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 223–9Google Scholar; and The Christian God, ch. 4 and 137–44.

11 It is generally agreed that knowledge is true belief not acquired by luck, although there are different views about what ‘not acquired by luck’ involves. I shall be arguing shortly that all the divine properties which I have been discussing belong to God essentially and so not by luck. So God's true beliefs will amount to knowledge. It will simplify the present discussion if I assume this already established.

12 Philosophers have found it very difficult to analyse an intuitively simple concept of omnipotence (maximum logically possible power) in such a way as to avoid various paradoxes. For the history of attempts to analyse the concept of omnipotence, see Leftow, Brian ‘Omnipotence’ in Flint, T. P. and Rae, M. C. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar. I hope that my analysis avoids all such paradoxes, but if it doesn't the concept is a simple one which makes clear the kind of qualifications which are necessary to avoid paradoxes.

13 That is, he cannot affect ‘hard facts’ about the past, these being ones whose truth conditions are solely in the past.

14 For my reasons for this assumption see for example pages 151–55 of my ‘What Difference does God make to Morality’ in Garcia, R. K. and King, N. L. (eds.), Is Goodness Without God Good Enough? (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009.)Google Scholar

15 William Rowe (among others) has argued that unless God always does an action better than any incompatible actions, God cannot be ‘perfectly good’, and so there cannot be a God of the traditional kind. See his Can God be Free? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006).Google Scholar Like many others, I find this view highly implausible.

16 Contingent moral truths are ones made true by a conjunction of a necessary moral truth and a contingent non-moral truth. For example, it would be contingently true that I ought to pay you £20 if I have promised to pay you £20 (contingent non-moral truth) and people ought always to keep their promises (necessary moral truth). The contingent non-moral truths which, together with necessary moral truths, create contingent moral truths are normally truths about the past – truths about past commitments or truths about what past evidence shows is likely to happen in future. Hence a being who knew all truths about the past and all necessary truths would normally know all moral truths about what would be good for him to do now. But insofar as whether an action available to such a being who is also omnipotent and perfectly free (in my sense) is good now depends on what is yet to happen (and not merely about what present evidence shows about what is likely to happen), then such a being would predetermine the future in order to enable him to do what is good now. Hence only the kind of omniscience entailed by omnipotence is necessary for God's perfect goodness.

17 For fuller discussion of this see The Christian God, 150–1.

18 In deriving this restriction I am following the convention of calling a belief about the future true now iff in the future it will be true, even when its truth is not yet inevitable. This is a convention which we do not always follow when we talk of a belief ‘not yet’ being true. But if we do not count a belief whose truth or falsity is not yet inevitable, as not now being either true or false, then God's omniscience can be construed simply as having all true beliefs. I do not however think that it is any less simple to understand only beliefs whose truth value is inevitable as having a truth value, than to follow our more normal convention.

19 Thus Aquinas: ‘Knowledge in God is not … a disposition (habitus)’, Summa theologiae Ia.14.ad 1.

20 Thus Aquinas: ‘[God] sees everything at once and not successively’, ibid. Ia.14.7.

21 That God is timeless has been the dominant theological view from at least the fourth century onwards. However, in my view the biblical authors thought of God as everlasting, and God's eternity has not been the subject of dogmatic definition. Nelson Pike's well-known book God and Timelessness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970)Google Scholar concluded with his remark that he had not been able ‘to find any basis for [the doctrine of divine timelessness] in biblical literature or in the confessional literature of either the Catholic or Protestant churches’ And it is disputable whether even all western theologians of the high middle ages were committed to an explicit doctrine of divine timelessness – see Fox, R., Time and Eternity in Mid-Thirteenth-Century Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.)CrossRefGoogle Scholar As regards omnisciecne, although there are a number of biblical passages which – read in their natural sense – do imply that God does not know infallibly what God or humans will do (e.g. Genesis 6:6, Jonah 3:10, and Revelation 3:5 which implies that God may change what is written in the Book of Life), most biblical passages imply that God is omniscient in the more natural sense; and the vast majority of subsequent Christian tradition is committed to that view. However this matter has not been the subject of any definition binding on Orthodox, or any definition which might be regarded by Catholics as infallible apart from the statement of the First Vatican Council that ‘all things are open and laid bare to [God's] eyes, even those which will be brought about by the free activity of creatures’. (See Tanner, N. P. (ed.), Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (London: Sheed and Ward, 1990), 806.)Google Scholar However, The Council authorised no anathema against those who held a rival view; and (as far as I can see) this view is not mentioned in the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1994)Google Scholar which ‘aims at presenting an organic synthesis of the essential fundamental contents of Catholic doctrine’ (9).

22 For that familiar account, which may only be applicable to the later medievals, see my The Christian God, Clarendon Press, 1994, ch. 7. For these thinkers God's simplicity was a matter of his not having parts, and all his essential properties being the same as each other and the same as God. I claim that God has no parts, and that (not having thisness) he is whatever instantiates his essential properties. I claim that God has just one essential property – everlasting omnipotence – together with the absence of a property. For a rather different account of Augustine's views on God's simplicity, see Leftow, Brian, ‘Divine Simplicity’, Faith and Philosophy 23 (2006), 365380CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 See his Value and Existence (Basil Blackwell, 1979).

24 See my The Resurrection of God Incarnate (Oxford University Press, 2003), 44–5Google Scholar for the obligation on a creator to share the suffering of those whom he causes to suffer for the sake of some great good. The argument which I use this point to develop here is that a good-producing physical object would have to produce a world with less suffering than would a good God who is prepared to share that suffering with creatures whom he makes to suffer for the sake of a great good.

This paper has been published, with the kind agreement of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, in European Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 2 (2010), 124Google Scholar.