The Existence of God by Richard Swinburne (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Existence of God. By RICHARD SWINBURNE. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. Pp. ~96. $37.50. With this book Swinburne has made an excellent and important contribution to the philosophy of religion. It is much more controversial than his recent book, The Coherence of Theism, to which this is the sequel, at least in part insofar as its main issue, the existence of God, is the subject of more debate than the logical coherence of theism. Many readers will undoubtedly consider one or another part of this book mistaken, but no one interested in the philosophy of religion can afford to ignore it. Swinburne's basic idea is that, since no one has succeeded in producing an argument for or against the existence of God whose inferences are clearly valid and whose premisses are generally accepted as true by those whom the argument is intended to convince, it is reasonable to turn to weaker, inductive arguments to see whether there is sufficient evidence to render God's existence more (or less) probable than his non-existence. To this end Swinburne first devotes considerable attention (almost a third of the book) to the nature of explanation and the logic of inductive argument. In the rest of the book he examines in detail various sorts of inductive arguments for God's existence-cosmological and teleological arguments, arguments from consciousness and moral awareness, from providence, from miracles, and from religious experience-as well as the argument from evil for God's non-existence. He concludes: " On our total evidence theism is more probable than not. An argument from all the evidence in this book to the existence of God is a good P-inductive argument [an argument in which the premisses make the conclusion probable]. The experience of so many men in their moments of religious vision corroborates what nature and history shows to be quite likely-that there is a God who made and sustains man and the universe" (p. ~91). Swinburne's conclusion and the line of investigation leading to it rest heavily on a fundamental principle: "For large-scale theories [such as theism] the crucial determinant of prior probability is simplicity" (p. 53); " simplex sigillum veri (' The simple is the sign of the true ') is a dominant theme of this book " (p. 56) . This principle has been challenged in recent literature. For example, Nancy Cartwright in" The Truth Doesn't Explain Much" (American Philosophical Quarterly 17 (1981)) says " Covering law theorists [of whom Swinburne is one] tend to think that nature is wellregulated . . . I do not. . . . God may have written just a few laws and grown tired. Determinists, or whomever, may contend that nature must be simple, tidy, an object of beauty and admiration. But there is one outstanding empirical dictum in favor of untidiness: if we must make metaphysical models of reality, we had best make the model as much like our 478 BOOK REVIEWS 479 experience as possible. So I would model the Book of Nature on the best current Encyclopedia of Science; and current encyclopedias of science are a piecemeal hodgepodge of different theories for different kinds of phenomena , with only here and there the odd connecting law for overlapping domains. The best policy is to remain agnostic, or at least not to let other important philosophical issues depend on the outcome. We don't know whether we are in a tidy universe or an untidy one" (p. 161) . For those who share this view, the force of Swinburne's book will be significantly undercut from the outset. But disbelief in or even agnosticism about the simplicity of the universe is clearly at variance with the ordinary, common-sense assumption on which most men, including scientists, base their work and daily lives. And on practical grounds alone such disbelief or agnosticism seems to me a mistake. For example, some of the exciting recent research in elementary particle physics, attempting to unify theories of the electromagnetic, strong, and weak forces into a single theory and to find a single family to which quarks and leptons can both belong, is plainly driven by belief in the simplicity of nature, as physicists themselves acknowledge. (See, for example, Steven Weinberg...