God, Reason, and Theistic Proofs by Stephen T. Davis, and: Is There a God? by Richard Swinburne (review)

334 BOOK REVIEWS God, Reason, and Theistic Proofs. By STEPHENT. DAVIS. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1997. Pp. xiv +204. $26.00 (paper). ISBN 0-8028-4450-2. Is There a God? By RICHARD SWINBURNE. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. 144. $10.95.(paper). ISBN 0-19-823545-3. These two books share the conviction of John Paul II's latest encyclical, Fides et Ratio, that there can be no contradiction between faith and reason, theology and philosophy, science and religion. While Davis is concerned with "proofs" for the existence of God, Swinburne is interested in establishing the "probability" of God's existence. Davis defines a theistic proof as an attempt to prove, by sound and valid argument, that God exists. The God he has in mind is the God of theism: "a unique, eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing, and personal spirit who created the heavens and the earth and who works for the salvation of human beings" (1). Theistic proof may have various purposes, but fundamentally they are meant "to demonstrate the existence of God and thus the rationality of belief in the existence of God" (6). Before considering individual proofs, Davis effectively addresses certain objections to the whole notion oftheistic proofs, including the contentions that they are unconvincing to skeptics and irrelevant to believers, that they do not attain the living God of the Bible, and that they tend to place God on the same level as finite beings. The heart of Davis's project is a careful consideration of various kinds of theistic proofs. Using his considerable talents in logic, he presents each type of argument and reviews various objections that have been raised historically against it. He begins with Anselm's ontological argument, considering pros and cons from Gaunilo to Richard Swinburne. One of Gaunilo's objections, which Davis titles "the boy scout objection," is of particular interest since it is similar to Aquinas's objection (STh I, q. 2, a. 1, ad 2). The argument is that, while a boy scout may be able to rub two sticks together to make a fire, one cannot, as it were, rub two ideas together and produce an actually existent reality. The argument rests on the distinction between existence in idea and existence in reality, a distinction that Davis carefully employs earlier in his work, but seems to downplay in his response here (3, 27). This may account for his conclusion that "there are versions of the ontological argument that have not been refuted" (10). In his presentation of cosmological arguments, Davis gives special attention to Aquinas's first three "ways." Recognizing that each of these ways presupposes the impossibility of an infinite regress (whether of movers or causes or contingent beings), Davis offers his own arguments in support of Aquinas's position that an infinite causal regress is not possible. BOOK REVIEWS 335 In dealing with arguments from design, Davis emphasizes their contemporary versions (chap. 6). Science now recognizes that any number of very slight variations in any number of factors at the moment of the "big bang" might have prevented the formation of the universe as we know it. How, then, can we account for the initial "fine tuning" that made our universe possible? Davis argues for the theistic solution that posits God as the initial designer. He refutes other explanations including the "weak" version of the anthropic principle and the hypothesis of many universes. He concludes that "we should not be surprised that we do not observe a universe that is incompatible with our existence. But we should be surprised that we do observe that we as living and intelligent creatures exist" (113). In the final section of the chapter, Davis salutes Richard Swinburne as "one of the foremost contemporary proponents of theistic proofs" (116). He questions, however, whether Swinburne adequately establishes the premise of divine simplicity upon which his argument from design depends. Davis notes that our philosophical and theological understanding of God is far from simple and argues that divine simplicity as such is by no means obvious: "It is not easy to see how God can be simple. Since there exists in any omniscient mind a complete...