T h r o u g h a G l a s s,

Darkl y
 2
 T h r o u g h a G l a s s,
Darkl y

3
 4
 T h r o u g h a G l a s s,
Darkl y

Ben Mines

5
 6
 It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to
atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds
about to religion.

Francis Bacon, Essays, 1625

7
 8
 Contents

1. Preface 5

I. THE COHERENCE of BARE THEISM

2. Introduction 11
3. An Immaterial Person 15
4. The Attributes of God 25
5. The Problem of Evil 37
6. The Hiddenness of God 43
7. The Ontological Argument 55
8. Conclusion
II. EVIDENCE for BARE THEISM
9. Introduction 73
10. The Modal Cosmological Argument 77
11. The Kalam Cosmological Argument 87
12. The Argument from Cosmic Teleology 97
13. The Argument from Biological Teleology 107
14. The Argument from Consciousness 121
15. The Argument from Adequation 133
16. The Argument from Moral Experience 145
17. The Argument from Desire 159
18. The Argument from Religious Experience 169
19. Conclusion 185
III. THE COHERENCE of CHRISTIAN THEISM
20. Introduction 191
21. The Incarnation 197
22. The Trinity 211
23. Religious Pluralism 221
24. Scientific Objections 233
25. Violence in the Old Testament 251
26. The Doctrine of Hell 263
27. Conclusion 273
IV. EVIDENCE for CHRISTIAN THEISM
28. Introduction 278
29. The New Testament 285
30. The Life of Jesus 297
31. The Resurrection of Jesus 311
32. Conclusion 331

9
 10
 Preface

There is a scene in a novel by De Vries in which the parish priest

and the village atheist get into an argument about religionan
argument that lasts all night and is so intense and evenly matched
that, by the time the sun comes up, the priest has become an
atheist and the atheist believes in God. In the real world, debates
about religion tend to end less dramatically. Most of the debates
that I have had with atheists have ended in a deadlock.
Sometimes this is due to paradigm pressures. Sometimes it is
because the arguments are not presented or evaluated with
sufficient care. But there have been times when my opponent is
open and rational and recognises the force of my argument but
rejects it because it depends for its tenability on an unspoken
assumption that has not been defended and which, it turns out, he
does not accept.
What I mean is easily illustrated. Suppose that John is told
there is entertainable historical evidence for the resurrection of
Jesus. No matter how compellingly this is argued, he will never
accept it if he believes on other grounds that there is no God. The
proper starting point for a debate with him is therefore the
existence of God. But, again, he will never be persuaded to accept
evidence for the existence of God if he believes that the very
concept of God is logically incoherent. And in that case the
proper starting point for the debate is the rational coherence of
theismarguments to show that it is not logically impossible that
God exists.
What has been said here of God can be said, mutatis
mutantis, of Christianity. For suppose for a moment that it can
be shown that it is possible and probable that God exists. Could
there now be any possible objection to presenting historical
evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth? Yes. For it is
logically possible that God exists and that Christianity is false
either because some other religion is true or because, his existence
notwithstanding, God has not revealed himself to humanity and
therefore no religion is true. And this, moreover, is something that
could be known if the very concept of Christianity were logically

11
incoherent. And so, once one has made the case for bare theism, it
will be necessary to defend Christian theism against the charge of
incoherence before presenting historical evidence to show that it is
probable that Christian theism is true.
The right sequence of arguments in support of Christianity is
therefore: arguments to show that it is possible God exists;
arguments and evidence to show that it is probable God exists;
arguments to show that it is possible Christianity is true;1 and,
finally, arguments and evidence to show that it is probable.
Christianity is true. All this can be illustrated with the following
pyramid,

This lays out the basic structure of what follows. To make sure
that all the key arguments and objections are accounted for, I
have assumed that my reader is an atheist of the most skeptical
sort possiblenot only does he claim that there is no evidence for

1 I should add here that some of the a priori arguments for Christian theism may do
more than simply defend it against incoherence. For example: an argument that, if there is
a God, he would more probably than not become incarnate would, if successful, give us
grounds in advance of the historical evidence for thinking that an event like the
Resurrection will occur. More on this in Chapter 21.

12
the existence of God, he claims that the very concept of God is
illogical. In due course we will ascend to the arguments for the
existence of God, the problem of religious pluralism and the
historical case for the resurrection of Jesus. But we must enter the
debate on the ground floor with the coherence of theism.

Rational Permission and Rational Obligation

Here the distinction between what philosophers call "rational
permission" and "rational obligation" is very helpful and
beautifully illustrated by J. P. Moreland in his book Scaling
Secular City.
Suppose you are expecting a visit from a friend at 3 o'clock in
the afternoon and at 2:58 PM your wife tells you that a man is
walking down the driveway towards the house. You are rationally
permitted to believe that the man is your friend. (It might not be
your friend but it would not be irrational for you to believe that it
is.) Suppose now that your wife tells you that the man walking
down the drive is in a police uniform and your friend, too, is a
policeman. You are now rationally obligated to believe it is your
friend. (It might not be your friend but it would be irrational not
to believe that it is.)
With the help of these concepts, my task can now be stated in a
single sentence: To demonstrate that God is a logically coherent
concept in order to gain rational permission to present the
evidence for his existence; then, having made the case for his
existence, to demonstrate that Christianity is logically coherent in
order to gain rational permission to present the evidence for the
resurrection of Jesus.
The following pages represent, in short, the best arguments for
Christianity in their most logical and persuasive sequence. I have
taken pains to present them as clearly and succinctly as I can and
I hope that my reader will find them helpful.

13
 14
 I
The Coherence of Bare Theism

15
 16
 2
Introduction

What does it mean to say that something is incoherent? The

answer is appealingly simple. In philosophy, an entity or state of
affairs is incoherent if it contains a contradiction. Thus, the two
paradigmatic examples of incoherence in the literature are the
square circle and married bachelor. That these are simply
contradictory pairings of words that do not pick out entities in the
real world is something we can know by means of rational
reflection alone without needing to undertake an investigation or
conduct an experiment. It follows that any mathematician who
did seek a Euclidian proof or disproof of the square circle (or
any sociologist who applied for a research grant to prove or
disprove the existence of the married bachelor) would be acting
irrationally. To express all this somewhat differently: If it can be
shown that some postulated entity or state of affairs contains or
entails a contradiction we have the strongest possible epistemic
justification for affirming that it does not exist. We would not then
need any evidence to falsify the claim that it exists and, a fortiori,
would never be justified in looking at evidence purporting to
prove its existence.
The question we are asking is whether God is a logically
coherent concept. For if it can be shown that it is not logically
coherent to even suppose that there is a God (if it can be shown
that the claim, God exists, is analogous to the claim, Square
circles exist; that is, absurd and disprovable by first principles)
then the whole debate over the evidence for and against the
existence of God would be irrational and unnecessary. Before
coming to the evidence, it is therefore necessary to defend the
claim that God exists against the charge of incoherence.
The first issue, given satisfactory criteria for what qualifies as a
person, will be whether it is coherent to suppose that an
immaterial person exists; the second, whether the attributes of
God (such as omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and so
on) entail logical contradictions; and the third, whether these
same attributes are incoherent in view of certain features of

17
human experiencesuch as the fact that God is said to be
perfectly good and all-powerful while our world is filled with evil
and suffering.2

Definition of Key Terms

Before going further, it will be helpful to define some key terms. I
will understand "God" to mean An immaterial person that is
omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, necessary, eternal
and perfectly good. And I will understand "incoherent" to mean
that some state of affairs is logically impossible because it contains
or entails a contradiction. However, philosophers recognise two
different kinds of logical incoherence that will be of use in this
discussion: Strict logical incoherence and broad logical
incoherence. I will briefly define these now.
In a case of strict logical incoherence the contradiction is
explicit in the description of some entity or state of affairs. The
phrases square circle and married bachelor are both good
examples of this. The words square and circle together mean, "a
round polygon that has four equal sides." And married and
bachelor together mean, "an unmarried man who is married."
All that is required to see the incoherence in each case is an
understanding of the words in the description. A polygon cannot
be round and have four sides and a man cannot be married and
unmarried. Both commit us to saying, P is q and not-q which is
a contradiction. Contradictory things are unactualizable and so
cannot exist.
In a case of broad logical incoherence, on the other hand, the
contradiction is entailed by the description of some entity or state
of affairs. The sentence, The Prime Minister of England is a
prime number is an example of this. Here the contradiction is
implicit in the description because "Prime Minister" and "prime
number" are not in direct logical opposition in the way that

2 Referring to "features of human experience" in a discussion of this nature involves a
slight relaxation of the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions. In doing so
I take a hint from Wittgenstein who stressed the importance of including very basic
empirical propositions of the sort we are taught as children (such as that, "the Earth is
round and men's heads are not full of sawdust and cars do not grow out of the ground")
among our first principles. "Propositions of the form of empirical propositions," he writes,
"and not only propositions of logic, form the foundation of all operating with thoughts."

18
"square circle" and "married bachelor" are. To perceive the
incoherence, we therefore need to follow out the entailments of
the sentence. In the present case, we would do this as follows. A
prime number, being an abstract mathematical entity, is
immaterial; a Prime Minister, being the head of an elected
government of human beings, is material. The sentence, The
Prime Minister is a prime number therefore commits us to
saying that something is both immaterial and material which is,
finally, a strict logical contradiction of the sort "square circle" or
"married bachelor." We are saying, incoherently, that, P is q and
not-q.
With this understanding of God and of the two subtypes of
incoherence in hand, we will now consider whether the concept
of An immaterial person who is omnipotent, omniscient,
omnipresent, necessary, eternal and perfectly good is
logically incoherent in either the strict or the broad sense. I will
begin in the next section with the fundamental question of
whether or not an immaterial person of any kind is logically
coherent, before discussing the logical coherence of an immaterial
person with the attributes ascribed to God in classical
theology. On this subject Oxford professor of philosophy Richard
Swinburne has written an entire book, The Coherence of
Theism. And in the following pages, I will be paraphrasing
several of his arguments.

19
 20
 3
An Immaterial Person

In everyday use the word "person" means a human being.

However, in what follows I will be using the word in its more
general philosophical sense to mean, "a conscious entity that has
rational thoughts, memories, moral awareness, intentions,
continuity of identity and is able to perform various basic and
nonbasic actions." Basic actions are actions, such as moving one's
hand, that are produced directly by the intention to perform them
and do not depend on intermediary actions. Nonbasic actions are
actions, such as posting a letter, that are produced by a sequence
of intermediary basic actionsopening the front door, walking to
the post office, and so on. Given this definition of a person, is the
concept of an immaterial person logically incoherent in either
sense sketched out in the Introduction?
Note first that the words immaterial and person do not
stand in strict logical opposition in the way square and circle do.
Moreover, it is characteristic of cases of strict logical incoherence
that the entities and states of affairs that they postulate are
inapprehensible. It is not possible to visualise a perfectly circular
polygon with four equal sides or to rationally intuit what it means
for a man to be simultaneously married and unmarried. But the
concept of disembodied personhood does not have this property
of inapprehensibility. It is easy to imagine the experience of losing
your body and retaining your mental lifeas we do whenever we
read accounts by those who claim to have had out of body
experiences. And it is also possible to imagine what it would mean
if, so disembodied, we discovered we could move objects or
perform other actions simply by forming the intention to do so. So
much for the strict logical incoherence of the concept of an
immaterial person. But is it logically incoherent in the broad sense
which I have defined?
Whether you think so will depend on whether or not you are
prepared to affirm a metaphysical worldview known as
physicalism. Physicalism (also known as "naturalism" or
"materialism") is the view that only the physical exists and that

21
absolutely everything is reducible to it. On this view there can be
no such things as platonic objects, objective moral values or
immaterial beings and substances. Consciousness, the physicalist
claims, is either an epiphenomenon of physical brain states or
else just is a physical process in the brain. Whichever view is
adopted, it follows that mental states cannot possibly exist without
the physical substrate of the brain and so for the physicalist the
concept of an "immaterial person" is logically incoherent in the
broad sense.

1. Physicalism
Strictly speaking, inductive knowledge does not belong in an a
priori objection. Inductive knowledge is based on observation
and the phrase a priori objection means, an objection prior
to observation. And while it may be true that every mind of
which we have direct knowledge is embodied this does not prove
that unembodied minds are logically impossible; indeed, inductive
knowledge cannot prove that anything is logically impossible.
In the philosophy of science this is called, The problem of
induction. In inductive reasoning, one makes a series of
observations and infers a conclusion. For instance, having
observed many swans and found them all to be white, it seems
valid to conclude, All swans are white. But no number of
confirming observations, however large, can prove a universal
generalisation. Only deductive conclusions in mathematics and
philosophy are logically necessary; conclusions based on
observation, however reliable they seem, are always in principle
falsifiablea fact which led the philosopher C. D. Broad to
declare that, "induction is the glory of science and the scandal of
philosophy."
But suppose that we take a hint from Wittgenstein who
recommended a slight relaxation of the distinction between
analytic and synthetic propositions. Wittgenstein, that is, stressed
the importance of including very basic empirical propositions of
the sort we are taught as children (such as that, "the Earth is
round and men's heads are not full of sawdust and cars do not
grow out of the ground") among our first principles. "Propositions
of the form of empirical propositions," he writes, "and not only
propositions of logic, form the foundation of all operating with
thoughts." On this view, might the fact that every mind observed

22
is embodied count against the logical coherence of the concept of
an immaterial mind?
I will admit that I had some initial sympathy with physicalistic
accounts of the mind. The inference from all known examples of
minds to the idea that minds and bodies are indissociable seems
plausible and the observation that our bodily states (such as
drunkenness and fatigue) affect our mental states seems to support
it. However, even if we admit inductive knowledge into the
discussion, the objection to the concept of an immaterial mind
does not obtain. And this is because physicalism itself cannot
account for the mind. Consider, by way of analogy, a scientist
who claims that a certain bacteria cannot survive at low
temperatures because it has only ever been observed at high
temperatures. If it is later proven that the bacteria in question
cannot actually reproduce at high temperatures then clearly the
argument has lost all force. To tell the complete story of that
bacteria we will need to understand it in a way that includes its
independence from high-temperature environments.

2. Arguments Against Physicalism

This is a subject that will be discussed in detail in my Chapter
on the Argument from Consciousness. For now I will just provide
a very brief sketch of three forceful arguments from the literature
to establish my preliminary claim that a physicalistic account of
the mind is incompletable in principle.3

2.1 Mental States Are Irreducible

Reduction in the physical sciences is achieved by distinguishing
mental phenomena from more fundamental physical phenomena
and giving primacy to the latter. Warmth, for instance, is reduced
to molecular energy in thermodynamics. Thereafter, molecular
energy is understood to be what warmth, really is. Because
sensory perception is subjective and can show variation between
individuals and species, we therefore move toward a more
objective knowledge of the world when we understand it in this

3 For a more detailed discussion see Mind
and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-
Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False by Thomas Nagel and
Chapter 9 of The Existence of God and Chapter 7 of The Coherence of Theism by
Richard Swinburne.

23
way: when we understand warmth as the way in which molecular
energy is perceived in consciousness; or understand colour as the
way in which electromagnetic wavelengths are perceived in
consciousnessand so on. What the evidence of the history of
science shows, notes Swinburne, is that the way to achieve
integration of sciences is to ignore the mental. But an intractable
problem arises when we come to the mental itself: We
do not move towards a more objective understanding of
consciousness along analogous lines when we attempt to
understand consciousness as the way in which brain activity is
perceived in consciousness: It is simply incoherent to reduce
consciousness to some more fundamental physical phenomenon
and ignore the former because the former, consciousness, is the
very thing we are attempting to explain.

2.2 The Intentionality of Mental States

A second property of mental states that physicalism cannot
account for is what philosophers call their intentionality or
aboutness. By this they simply mean that thoughts are always
about or of something external to themselves. When you think
about shoes and ships and sealing-wax, for example, your
thoughts are in those moments of or about shoes and ships and
sealing-wax. That thoughts do have this property is inescapable:
The thought, "Thoughts do not have intentionality," if it is to be
meaningful, must itself be about intentionality and therefore
have intentionality. The denial of intentionality would therefore
suffer from what Plantinga calls, "self-referential inconsistency,"
and cannot be rationally affirmed.
The intractable problem intentionality raises for physicalism
can be drawn out in the following way.
Consider the word moon penciled on a piece of paper. In the
absence of a literate observer to read the word and associate it
with the moon, can the carbon particles of pencil lead and the
wood pulp that composes the sheet of paper be said to be "about"
the moon? Clearly not. And what can be said of a printed word
on the page can be said equally of physical brain states. A pattern
of firing neurones representing someone's thought about the
moon cannot, in the absence of a conscious observer to
experience that brain event as a thought about the moon, be said
to be "neurones about the moon" in any meaningful and objective

24
sense. Physical things (whether they be neurones or particles of
pencil lead or teapots or rocks) are not "about" other physical
things in the way that mental states are. And so an exhaustive
physicalistic description of mental states would leave something
essential to them out of account.

2.3 Privileged Access of Mental States

But the most essential property of mental states which physicalism
cannot account for is their personal immediacy to the subject who
experiences them. A mental property, as Swinburne puts it, is
one to whose instantiation the substance in which it is instantiated
necessarily has privileged access. To help us understand this
problem, Swinburne invites us to consider the following thought
experiment. It is a helpful preliminary to what follows to note
that people can enjoy a relatively normal mental life with only half
a brainafter a procedure known as a "hemispherectomy."
Suppose, firstly, that Swinburne is involved in a car accident
that destroys his body but leaves his brain intact; suppose,
secondly, that this occurs at a future date when brain transplants
are feasible; suppose, finally, that a whimsical surgeon is
responsible for the treatment of Swinburne and decides to
perform a bizarre experiment: He will transplant the left
hemisphere of Swinburne's brain in one donor body and the right
hemisphere of his brain into another donor body. Let us refer to
these two new bodies, each of which contains one half
of Swinburne's brain, as Person A and Person B. The operation is
a success. Person A and Person B recover and both somewhat
resemble Swinburne in terms of character and memory. The
question arises whether Swinburne has survived the operation.
The claim that Swinburne is now both Person A and Person B is
eliminable by a law of logic known as the identity of
indiscernibles. Very simply expressed: If Swinburne is identical to
Person A and Person B, then Person A and Person B are identical
to each other and are therefore the same personwhich they are
not.4 The remaining possibilities are that Swinburne is Person A

4
The Identity of Indiscernibles, also knows as "Leibniz's Law" after its formulator
Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz, is a principle of analytic ontology which states that no two
separate entities can have all their properties in common. The fact that Person A and
Person B are physically distinct should not mislead us. Swinburne is concerned not with

25
or that he is Person B or that he is neither because the operation
destroyed him.
The relevance of this thought experiment to physicalism is as
follows. Whether or not Swinburne survived the bizarre
experiment is an objective fact about the world. But it will not
be possible to know the answer by either the most thorough cross
examination of Person A and Person B or the most exhaustive
physicalistic description of their respective hemispheres. And so
an exhaustive physicalistic description of the universe would leave
something essential out of account; namely, who experienced
which brain states.
What arguments of this sort bring out is the "privileged
access" of the subject to his own mental lifewhat Searle calls
their, "first person ontology." "Others," Swinburne writes, "can
learn about my pains and thoughts by studying my behaviour and
perhaps also by studying my brain. Yet I, too, could study my
behaviour (I could watch a film of myself; I could study my brain
via a system of mirrors and microscopes) just as well as anyone
else could. But I have a way of knowing about pains and thoughts
other than those available to the best student of my behaviour or
brain: I experience them." And the problem this raises for
physicalism is that what makes a mental event a mental event is
not the public knowledge captured by physicalism but just this
private knowledge that physicalism cannot possibly capture.

3. Mind is Essentially Nonphysical

It is vital to note that all three problems under discussion are
intractable to the physical sciences. There is in principle no
physical evidence which can circumvent the irreducibility
of consciousness because the very structure of the reductive step,
"Consciousness is the way in which p is experienced
in consciousness," leaves consciousness unreduced no matter what
physical evidence is substituted for p. And we can no more expect
physical evidence to explain the intentionality of thought than we
can expect an exhaustive chemical analysis of the carbon particles

the body and brain per se but with the continuity of the personal identity and mental life
of preoperative Swinburnewhether this is transplanted into either or neither of the
postoperative bodies. It is obvious that the continuity of identity essential to personhood
could not survive division or (due to Leibniz's law) be doubly instantiated.

26
of pencil lead to eventually yield the meaning of the word moon
which to a literate English observer they compose. And, finally,
physical evidence is by definition public and so can never collapse
into or capture the privileged access of the subject to his own
mental life which is, moreover, its essential feature.
From here we can proceed by a disjunctive syllogism to the
conclusion that mind is an essentially nonphysical entity.5

P1. Mind is either essentially physical or nonphysical.

P2. It is not essentially physical.
C. Therefore, it is essentially nonphysical.

The logical structure of the argument is watertight. To avoid the

conclusion, the physicalist needs to falsify one of the premises:
Either by combing up with a new metaphysical category that is
neither physical nor nonphysical or by demonstrating that
mind can be reduced to the physical. However, both of these
escape routes are impassable in principle. The latter for reasons
just given and the former because the notion of a
metaphysical category neither physical nor nonphysical is as
incoherent as an entity that has zero mass and has mass n or
a colour that is neither primary red nor not primary red.
I began by noting that the concept of an immaterial person is
incoherent on a physicalistic account of the mind. If a mind "just
is" a physical brain state then of course the one cannot exist
without the other. However, we have seen that physicalism entails
the mind is reducible to the physical; that this cannot possibly be
true; and that, therefore, its antithesis cannot possibly be false.
The mind is an irreducibly nonphysical entity. And, of course, the

5 A disjunctive syllogism is a rule of inference having the form,

A or B.
Not A.
Therefore, B.

Its validity obviously depends on there being only two possible explanatory options.
Thus, Either John is in Tokyo or he is not in Tokyo is a valid first premise because
there is no third alternative; however, Either John is in Tokyo or he is in Osaka may not
be a valid premise because it is possible that John is in Seoul or Beijing.

27
falsity of physicalism leaves the skeptic without grounds
for rejecting the concept of an immaterial person.

4. The Lack of Identifying Criteria

Some recent writers, while conceding that we can make sense of
the concept of an immaterial person in all the above ways, have
questioned whether it would ever be possible to identify and
reidentify them; that is, whether there could ever be reliable
criteria for differentiating between two different immaterial
persons or even between one immaterial person encountered at
two different times. The objection, in short, is not that immaterial
persons are logically impossible but that if they did exist it would
be logically impossible to identify them.
Even so, this objection depends upon a physicalistic
understanding of personal identity in terms of bodily continuity.
Allowing that it is not logically impossible that there exist
immaterial persons, where a "person" is a conscious entity that
has rational thoughts, memories, moral awareness, intentions,
continuity of identity and who is able to perform basic and
nonbasic actions, it is not logically impossible that such persons
could provide proof of memory and character by performing basic
actions and so successfully identify themselves. Such basic actions
might include moving a planchette across a Ouija board during a
sance, causing a specific pattern of vibrations in the air to
produce a recognisable voice, or exciting a pattern of photons that
together produce a recognisable imageall things of a sort spirits
have been supposed to do.

5. Conclusion
We have seen that it is not incoherent in the strict sense to
suppose that immaterial persons exist; and we have seen that the
claim that it is logically incoherent in the broad sense depends on
a commitment to a physicalistic worldview that cannot possibly
account for our mental life. That we have a mental life of thoughts
and perceptions is the most fundamental feature of human
experience and the starting point for every other field of inquiry.
It follows that any worldview that fails utterly to account for our
mental life cannot be rationally affirmed. And so any
claim about that mental life which depends on physicalism
cannot be rationally affirmed either. It is therefore not logically

28
incoherent in either the strict or the broad sense to suppose that
immaterial persons exist and nor is there any incoherence in
supposing that such persons, if they exist, would be able to identify
themselves.
However, the proposition that God exists is not simply the
proposition that an immaterial person exists. God is also said to
be omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, necessary, eternal and
perfectly good. In the next chapter I will consider whether an
immaterial person with these divine attributes is a logically
coherent concept.

29
 4

30
 The Attributes of God

1. Omnipotence
The claim that God is omnipotent is the claim that God has
unlimited power to perform basic actions. While there is
no strict logical incoherence in postulating the existence of such a
being (the description A being with unlimited power does not
involve a contradiction in the way that square circle does) it is
sometimes claimed that omnipotence is broadly incoherent on
two grounds: It has paradoxical consequences and it is
incompatible with the existence of preventable human suffering.
The first type of objection is usually made by describing some
action such that a limit is imposed upon God whether he performs
it or not. Consider the question, "Can God create a stone too
heavy for him to lift?" or, "Can God create a universe too
wayward for him to control?" If God can create such a universe,
to take the second example, then there is an action he cannot
subsequently perform; namely, control it; and if he can not create
such a universe, then there is a different action that he cannot
perform; namely, create it. Either way, the argument goes, there
will be an action God cannot perform and so omnipotence is
logically impossible.
To see why this objection fails, we need to understand
omnipotence in a more careful way. Theologians have always
understood omnipotence to mean the power to perform
any logically possible action. To note that God could not create
a square circle imposes no limit on his powers because creating a
square circle is not an action whose difficulty lies in the brute force
required to perform it. In fact, it is not an action at all; rather, the
imperative Create a square circle is a logically incoherent
combination of English words which have no referent in the set of
all logically possible actions that belong to omnipotence.
This refinement defangs the objection completely. Stones so
heavy that unlimited forces cannot lift them and Universes
so wayward unlimited forces cannot control them both
belong with square circles and married bachelors to a class of

31
logically impossible entities. 6 The limitations in question are
limitations not of power but of logical possibility. In a like
case, the Bible teaches that God, being perfect, can do no evil and
this "limitation" can be understood in the same sense as those just
discussed: A morally perfect being who acts
immorally describes a logically incoherent state of affairs. God
cannot logically be expected to perform an action such that, if it
is performed, that action has the entailment that God did not
perform it.
The second objection to the coherence of omnipotence finds a
contradiction in the conjunction of omnipotence, moral
perfection, and the existence of preventable human suffering. The
claim is that if God is all good, he would want to end human
suffering; and if he is all powerful, he would have the ability to do
so. Of all the objections to the coherence of theism, this one
requires the most attention. I therefore address it separately in the
next chapter.

2. Omniscience
The claim that God is omniscient is the claim that God knows all
true propositions and believes no false ones. There is no strict
logical incoherence in postulating the existence of an omniscient
being because the description A being who knows all true
propositions does not contain a contradiction. However,
objections to the broad coherence of omniscience are
sometimes raised based on set theory, the impossibility of actual
infinities, incompleteness theorems and human free will. I will
now briefly discuss these in the order just given.
The proponent of the first objection begins by noting that
a Set of all sets is an incoherent concept because it generates a
new set not included in that superset of "all" sets. 7 He then
attempts to apply this paradox to the concept of a Set of all
truths and claims that it is inapprehensibleand therefore
incoherent to suppose that any being could be omniscient.

6 All paradoxes of this sort can be simplified to the question, "Can God abrogate his own
omnipotence?" As Swinburne notes, it is logically possible that the answer
to this question is yes but God never chooses to do so. In this scenario, too, the paradox
is circumvented: God, being omnipotent, can perform the proposed action but, in
choosing not to, remains omnipotent.
7 See Russell's Paradox.

32
However, the problem only arises from an arbitrary
and unnecessary insistence on the conceptual constructs of naive
set theory. It is perfectly coherent to qualify omniscience in other
ways. For example: The statement, For any proposition p, if it
is true, God knows it, nicely captures what the theist wants to
say about omniscience and entails no contradiction.
The proponent of the second objection assumes that
omniscience entails the apprehension of an infinite number of
discrete propositions. To show that this is incoherent, he then
appeals to a thought experiment by the mathematician David
Hilbert which appears to illustrate the impossibility of an actual
infinite number of things. Before this objection can be
appreciated, I need to give a brief sketch of the thought
experiment in question and I will do that now.
Hilbert asks us to imagine a fully occupied hotel with infinitely
many rooms. One might think that, since the hotel is fully
occupied, it could not accommodate a single new guest. However,
by moving the guest in Room 1 to Room 2, the guest in Room 2
to Room 3, and so on, to infinity, Room 1 will be made available
and no guest will be without a room. What's more: If every guest
moves into a room whose room number is double that of his own
(that is, if the guest in Room 1 moves to Room 2, the guess in
Room 2 to Room 4, Room 3 to 6, and so on, to infinity) all of the
infinitely many odd-numbered rooms will be available and the
hotel will be able to accommodate an infinite number of new
guestsand since this process can be repeated indefinitely, the
hotel will be able to accommodate infinitely many new guests
infinitely many times.
Hilbert's Hotel is absurd. And since nothing hangs on the
presentation of the problem in terms of guests and hotel rooms, it
has led some philosophers to believe that an actually infinite
number of entities of any sort is unactualizable. However, even
allowing that this is so and applies equally to concrete entities in
space as to propositions in an immaterial mind, omniscience need
not be conceptualised as comprising an infinite number of discrete
propositions. On the contrary, many theologians throughout
history have construed God's omniscience as a single
undifferentiated intuition of all reality. A helpful analogy to this
understanding of divine cognition is the visual field which we take

33
in as an undifferentiated whole even though it may
be atomised into infinite points.
The third objection to omniscience concerns incompleteness
theorems. 8 These are theorems in mathematical logic which
demonstrate that no consistent system of axioms is capable of
proving all arithmetical truths. In essence, the claim here is that if
there exist unknowable truths then the sum of all truths is
incompletable and omniscience impossible. However, this
objection is based on a slight mischaracterisation of the problem.
What these incompleteness theorems actually demonstrate is not
the unknowability of some mathematical truth p but rather
its underivability from the axioms of the relevant theory. We
can therefore reframe the problem by saying that according to
these theorems p does have a truth valuebut one that is
inaccessible by inference. And this is an important point because
the theist is not claiming that God progressed from a state of
nescience to a state of omniscience by inference but that
omniscience belongs to him as an essential attribute.
The fourth and final objection to the coherence of omniscience
claims that it is incompatible with human free will which the theist
also wishes to uphold. That is, if God foreknows all human
actions, free will is illusory: We must (it would seem) act exactly as
it was foreknown by God that we would act. It is now
agreed this objection commits a modal fallacy and is invalid;
moreover, many theologians are happy to constrain omniscience
to Knowing all truths it is logically possible to
know and exclude from this category freely willed actionsa
move that simply removes the apparent tension. I will now
briefly discuss both of these points.
Modal logic is concerned with the ways in which propositions
are either necessarily or contingently true or false; and a modal
fallacy involves imputing necessary truth to a proposition that
is only contingently true. Take the following example,

A) Bachelors are necessarily unmarried.

B) John is a bachelor.

8 See Godels Incompleteness Theorems.

34
 C) Therefore, John is necessarily unmarried; i.e., cannot
possibly marry.

The first statement is necessarily true in virtue of its logical form;

the second is contingently true because, while John is unmarried,
it is logically possible for him to marry. The fallacy therefore lies
in mistakenly extending the scope of necessary truth in the first
statement to include the second which is only contingently true.
And the same fallacy is committed in the objection under
discussion.
A) God foreknows that John will marry Jane.
B) John marries Jane.
C) Therefore, necessarily, John married Jane; i.e., had no
choice.

In this case, the necessary truth of God's foreknowledge of John's

future choice, given John's future choice, is mistakenly
extended to include the choice itself when this is actually
contingent on John's free will. To express the key point very
simply: God's foreknowledge does not determine our choices; our
choices determine God's foreknowledge. What follows from God's
infallible foreknowledge of p is just that p will happen but not
that p will happen necessarily. It is possible that p, being
contingent, could not have happenedbut in that case, God's
foreknowledge would have been different. In this sense divine
foreknowledge may be likened to an infallible barometer which,
while it will tell you with infallible correctness what the weather
will be, does not itself cause the weather.
The misstep made here is tricky but, as I said,
uncontroversially recognized as a misstep. However, some theists
avoid the apparent tension altogether by adopting a position
called Open Theism. This is the view that it is impossible even for
God to know what free agents will do and therefore omniscience
needs to be understood in a similarly careful way to omnipotence
with respect to logical possibility. That is, just as God cannot be
required to do what it is logically impossible to do, so God cannot
be required to know what it is logically impossible to know.
Swinburne, who affirms Open Theism, adds, "Since God is
omnipotent, it will only be because God allows there to be free
persons that there will be any free persons. So this limit to divine

35
omniscience arises from the consequences of his own choice to
create free agents." Unlike the logical constraints on omnipotence
with respect to actualising impossible states of affairs, God could
abolish the logical constraints upon omniscience with respect to
the choices of agents with free will by abolishing the free will or
the agents. It is a contingent, rather than a necessary, limitation.
It is important to remember that, if God exists, it does not
matter which if any of these ways of understanding his
omniscience is true. The fact that even one of them is logically
possible suffices to discharge the objection that the concept of
omniscience is logically impossible.

3. Omnipresence
The claim that God is omnipresent is often misunderstood. For
this reason it will be helpful to begin by specifying what the claim
is not. When the theist says that God is omnipresent he wishes to
refute the idea that God is localised at any particular place either
in the universe or in any other realm such as "heaven." 9 Looking
for God in the universe, notes Peter van Inwagen, is as absurd as
looking for Rembrandt in The Night Watch. However, the theist
does not propose as an alternative the view that God is spread
throughout space like an invisible gas. This would have an
unwanted consequence for it would mean that God is never fully
present anywhere: There would be a certain cubic volume of God
in your room, a larger cubic volume of God in St Paul's
Cathedral, and the greater portion of God suffused throughout
the observable universe. A more satisfactory description of
omnipresence would be to say that it is a way of understanding
the claim that God is a disembodied mind who is able to move
any part of the universe as a basic action and who does not look
out on the universe from any particular location but knows
without inference every state of affairs within it. We could further

9 And, a fortiori, the comical depiction of God in pop culture as a giant bearded
humanoid in a toga and sandals. William Lane Craig suggests that this unfortunate meme
has its origin in Michelangelo's fresco The Creation of Adam and then adds, perhaps
correctly, that the famous image has done more damage to the proper understanding of
God than any other. However, God is said to be a disembodied spirit in the very first
verses of Genesis and no biblically-literate Christian should ever have understood the
word God to mean anything else.

36
simplify this by saying with William Lane Craig that, "God is
cognisant of, and causally active at, every point in space."
There is no strict logical incoherence entailed by this
description of divine omnipresence. However, it has been
suggested that it is incompatible with a further claim which the
theist wishes to make; the claim that God has personhood. The
proponent of this objection begins by insisting that having wants
and fears is essential to persons. He then claims that only a person
who sometimes takes steps towards things can rightly be said to
want them; and only a person who sometimes runs away from
things can rightly be said to fear them. A person who is
simultaneously present everywhere can do neither.
However, this objection shows a failure of imagination with
respect to the many ways in which an omnipresent person who
can affect the world through basic actions could give expression to
his desires and fears. If he wants a man on a journey to change
direction, for example, he may cause a landslide blocking his path;
if he fears a man will die of thirst, he may intervene in natural
processes to make it rainand so on. "It is important in this
connection," writes Swinburne, "not to overemphasize the extent
of God's non-embodiment in the view of traditional theism. The
view of traditional theism is that in many ways God is not related
to a material object as a person is to his body but in other ways he
is so related." The key differences are that the world plays no role
in mediating God's perceptions; there is no material object in
which disturbances cause God pain; and God could annihilate the
universe by a basic action and continue to exist without it.

4. Necessity and Eternality

In making the claim that God is necessary, theologians have
wanted to say two things. Firstly, that while the universe could not
exist without God, God existed before the universe and could, if
he chose to, annihilate the universe and continue to exist without
it. And secondly, that God's existence with or without the universe
is not an accidental feature of ultimate reality;
rather, God's nonexistence is impossible. This second claim
has traditionally been understood in one of two ways, both of
which further entail God's eternality: In the weak sense of factual
necessity and in the strong sense of logical necessity.

37
 The claim that God's existence is a factual necessity is the
claim that while it is logically possible that there is no God the
impossibility of his nonexistence is implied by his attributes if he
in fact exists. We can easily understand what is meant by this
understanding of God's necessity by postulating the existence of a
single absolutely indestructible elementary particle. It is logically
possible that no such particle exists; but if it did come into
existence then, by definition, it could not thereafter cease to exist.
In a like case, it is logically possible that there exists no being like
God but if a being like God does in fact exist, there is nothing
that could possibly bring about his nonexistence and so his
existence is factually necessary. So described, the factual necessity
of God if God exists is not incoherent in either the strict or the
broad sense. It is simply a tautology of logic, such as, If it is
raining, then it is raining, which it would be incoherent to
deny. This assumes, of course, that in view of God's other
attributes it would be incoherent to suppose that God could
destroy himself.
The stronger claim that God's existence is a logical
necessity is the claim that it is logically impossible for God not to
exist. Strictly speaking, a proposition is logically necessary if its
negation is a logical contradiction. The proposition God does not
exist is not a logical contradiction. It follows that if
it is incoherent to deny the existence of God, it will be incoherent
in the broad sense; that is, to see why it is incoherent we will need
to follow out the entailments of the nonexistence of God. The
Ontological Argument, which I will discuss later, argues for the
logical necessity of God from first principles; and in Part II, I will
be presenting arguments which show that in the absence of God
we cannot make sense of mental and moral
experience. The Modal Cosmological Argument, as we shall see,
is reducible to the proposition, If a contingent being exists,
then a Necessary Being exists. Copleston argued that this is a
logically necessary proposition but not, strictly speaking, an
analytic proposition. And this is because it is logically necessary
only given that there exists a contingent being, which has to be
discovered by experience, and the proposition, A contingent
being exists is not analytic. Though once you know that there is
a contingent being, he emphasised, it follows of necessity that
there is a Necessary Being.

38
 However, in this chapter I am not concerned with whether
God actually exists but only with whether it is coherent to
suppose that God exists; and presently, with whether it is coherent
to suppose that his existence is necessitated. I will therefore
conclude as follows: It is not incoherent to suppose that if God
exists his existence is factually necessitated in the way I have
defined. The stronger claim that it is logically necessitated, and
which entails that God actually exists, needs to be made at
greater length.

5. Perfect Goodness
Here I will find Swinburne's definition of perfect goodness helpful:
A good person is one who performs good actions of many kinds
and few bad ones; a perfectly good person is one who performs
only morally best actions of many kinds and no bad ones.
However, this understanding of perfect goodness needs to be
qualified slightly.
Swinburne reminds us that sometimes there are situations in
which there is no morally best action. Suppose, for instance, that
you are faced with two people who will die without your help and
you are only able to help one. In this situation (all other things
being equal) helping Person A and helping Person B are what
Swinburne calls "equal best" actions. Faced with a choice of equal
best actions, a perfectly good person is free to choose arbitrarily
between them. A perfectly good person can also choose
arbitrarily, Swinburne suggests, when faced with situations in
which there is an infinite spectrum of increasingly good actions
and so, again, no best action. For example: Suppose, what is
reasonable, that creating people, planets and stars is a good
action. The universe contains finite quantities of all of them.
Wouldn't a better world be one with more of each? Yes but there
is no limit to how many there could be and so no best action.
Even if there were infinitely many people, planets and stars there
could always be a few more. So here too there is no morally best
action.
The concept of equal best actions and the concept of infinite
spectrums of increasingly good actions help us to make sense of
moral perfection and divine freedom. Consider: If creating the
universe and not creating it were equal best actions (perhaps
because one action affords finite creatures the opportunity to

39
know God and the other avoids moral and natural evil) then
either action would be consistent with the moral perfection of
God and God could create or not create the universe by an act of
free will. The properties of the objects it contains would likewise
be open to infinitely many equal best variations and, as we have
just seen, there is no morally best number of objects and so the
size and population of the universe is also a matter of free will.
It would seem, then, that there is no strict incoherence in the
claim that God is perfectly good because the proposition, There
exists a being who in every situation always performs
either a morally best or an equal best action or else chooses
arbitrarily from an infinite spectrum of increasingly good
actions contains no contradiction and is further compatible with
divine freedom of the will in an infinitely large number of
situations. But are there any a priori grounds for thinking that
God is perfectly good?
The German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried
Leibniz offered one intriguing argument for the mutual
inclusiveness of omniscience and moral perfection. The argument
unfolds from the observation that all freely willed action strives
towards some goal and that all goals are the pursuit of an
apparent good entertained by the agent. Importantly, this also
holds for morally bad actions. A thief, for instance, seeks the
good of an increase in his personal fortune and his action is to
be understood as bad insofar as it pursues this small selfish good at
the cost of a significant decrease in the total goodthe
unhappiness he brings to his victim; the mistrust and unease he
inspires; his subversion of laws that conduce to social harmony
and so on. However, since the apparent good of any action is
also dependent on our knowledge, increases in knowledge will
refine our judgment of good and evil and, with that refinement,
improve our morality. This is not to imply that a wrongdoer is
entirely unaware of the wrongfulness of his actions; but it is to say
that he fails to or refuses to recognise the importance of a greater
good beyond the limited good he arrogates to himself. By
contrast, an enlightened mind is not subject to the selfish impulse
to seek some small good at the cost of a decrease in the total
goodand in a divine mind this principle is developed to its
ultimate logical consequence. Being disembodied, a divine mind is
free from carnality; being omniscient, it is free from irrationality;

40
being omnipotent, it is free from want. Its greatest pleasure,
according to Leibniz, is found, "in recognising that it perform
virtuous deeds and in pursuing goals which promote universal
perfection." Perfect knowledge, in short, produces a perfect
awareness of and pursuit of the good. And since God's knowledge
is perfect, his goodness is perfect too.
As already noted, the most famous objection to the existence of
God is that the joint claims that God is morally perfect and
omnipotent are incompatible with the existence of evil and
suffering. In the next chapter, this claim will be carefully
evaluated and found to be fully resolved by the so-called "Higher
Order Goods Defence."

6. Conclusion
I have now discussed all the key attributes of God in classical
theism. Omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, necessity and
eternity were all shown to be coherent in both the broad and the
strict sense I defined. And while the problem of evil has yet to be
discussed, nevertheless, the concept of God is emerging as a
logically coherent one. As a final point it is worth adding that
several more of the attributes of God discussed above cohere
logically in the way that omniscience and moral perfection were
shown to do. For instance: If God is omnipotent, there is no point
in space that he could not affect by a basic actionwhich is
consistent with his omnipresence; and if he is omnipresent, there
is no point in space which he could not directly perceivewhich
is consistent with his omniscience. A lack of knowledge, moreover,
would impose constraints on omnipotence and so omniscience
and omnipotence also cohere by logical necessity.
Having established that God is coherent in abstracto let us
now consider whether it is coherent to suppose God exists in view
of the fact of human suffering.

41
 42
 5
The Problem Of Evil

One of the most famous objections to the existence of God is that

the joint claims that God is morally perfect and omnipotent are
incompatible with the existence of evil and sufferingfor if God
were all good, he would want to prevent evil and suffering, and if
he were all powerful, he would be able to do so. Therefore, the
argument goes, evil and suffering prove one of three things: That
God does not exist, or that he is not all good, or that he is not all
powerful. The moral perfection of God is, on this view, broadly
incoherent.
Before responding, I need to briefly define a few terms that
will be of use in what follows. "Free will" is the power of an agent
to perform actions that are influenced but never fully determined
by forces external to himself but of itself free will does not
necessarily entail the capacity to do evil. God could, for instance,
give us free will but constrain its exercise to the choice
between different but equally good actions. I will therefore use the
term "moral liberty" for the power of an agent to exercise his free
will in making choices between good and bad actions; and "moral
evil" for the use of moral liberty to perform bad actions. Finally, I
will use the term "natural evil" for suffering having causes
unrelated to moral evilthe suffering caused by natural disasters,
accidents, diseases, and so on.

1. Moral Evil
I suggested earlier that we need to understand omnipotence in a
way that allows for the constraints of logical possibility.
The relevance of this point to moral evil should be immediately
obvious. It is logically impossible for God to create agents with
moral liberty and ensure that they do not sin. The potential for
moral evil is therefore an unavoidable consequence of moral
liberty.10 The question that needs to be asked is whether moral

10 To create agents with moral liberty and constrain them from moral evil is simply to
deny them moral liberty. It is logically possible, though hugely improbable, that a planet

43
liberty confers any significant benefits upon mankind; and if it
does, whether those benefits outweigh the suffering that it
entails. In the following paragraphs I will be arguing that it
confers upon mankind very significant benefits indeed; namely,
that it makes possible the attainment of virtue, the formation of
moral character and the capacity for genuine love.

1.1 The Attainment of Virtue

To understand the importance of moral liberty to virtue, imagine
a world from which moral liberty has been removed; in other
words, a world in which the only possible exercise of free will is in
the choice between different kinds of equally good actions. The
result would be a toy universe or pleasure park in which we exist
like animals or small childrenexperiencing comfort and sensory
pleasure but without the opportunity to show empathy, courage,
patience, self-sacrifice, forgiveness or heroism. Such thought
experiments help to bring out an important moral distinction
between innocence and virtue. Innocence is a mere ignorance of
evil; virtue requires that one face a significant choice between
good and evil and freely choose the good. And since it is logically
impossible for God to force us to freely choose the good, any
world in which virtue is attainable is a world in which moral evil is
a distinct possibility.

1.2 The Formation of Moral Character

Because we have moral liberty we are continuously faced with the
choice between performing good and bad actions. And, as
Swinburne notes, humans are so made that when we choose to do
good, it becomes slightly easier to choose to do good again at the
next opportunity; and when we choose to do evil, it becomes
slightly easier to choose to do evil again at the next opportunity.
In this way, over time, we are able to change the desires
that influence us and form either a very good or a very bad
character. Without moral liberty our characters would
be uniformly good and uniformly devoid of moral significance.

of agents with moral liberty will by chance alone do no evil. But, needless to say,
this state of affairs does not obtain on our planet

44
1.3 The Capacity for Genuine Love
Love that is induced through the use of potions, hypnotism or
spells is not considered genuine. For love between humans to be
genuine, it must be freely given. It follows from this simple truth
that any world in which genuine human love is a possibility is a
world in which moral evil is a possibility. And this is because if
you are truly free to give love you must be truly free to withhold
iteven in situations where withholding it would be wrong. For a
mother's love for her young children to be genuine, for example, it
cannot be forced upon her from above by God; it must be freely
given and in that case it must be logically possible for her to
withhold itand so, perhaps, to neglect and abuse her children.
All this holds equally for our love of God. To be genuine a love of
God cannot be built into us by God. It must be freely given and
this entails the freedom to withhold it.11
Moral liberty therefore confers the profoundest imaginable
benefits upon mankind. It provides us with the opportunity to
attain virtue, form a moral character, and experience genuine love
for each other and for God. It is not at all incoherent to suppose
that a perfectly good person would choose to create a world in
which these supreme goods were possibleeven at the cost of
moral evil.

2. Natural Evil
In discussing natural evil, it is important to recognise that the
suffering it entails is often bound up with moral evil. Cheaply built
and poorly planned towns, for instance, can significantly raise the
death toll during earthquakes and floods; the misuse of certain
chemicals can significantly increase the incidence of cancer; the
failure of wealthy countries to provide aid to poor countries can
result in preventable faminesand so forth. Nevertheless, there is

11 The question arises whether God can freely withhold his love and if not then how,
given my argument, it can be genuine. However, the difficulty only arises in the case of
finite persons created by God for the purpose of knowing and loving him and each other.
For if God created us with an immutable and irresistible love for himself and each other,
that love would have its origin in something external to ourselvesnamely, Godand
would not therefore be freely given and genuine. But since God's love is past eternal and
has no cause external to himself, it is genuine even though by a necessity of his divine
nature he is incapable of withholding it.

45
a great deal of suffering on Earth for which no human agent is
responsible. And in what follows I will be arguing that such
natural evil fulfils three additional and important purposes which
moral evil alone could not fulfil: It ensures that opportunities to
obtain virtue are universal; it broadens the scope and significance
of our moral choices; and, most importantly, it conduces to the
religious life.

2.1 It Makes Opportunities to Obtain Virtue Universal

In the section discussing moral liberty, we saw that empathy,
courage, patience, self-sacrifice, forgiveness and heroism are all
states contributive to virtue. But it needs to be noted that it is not
moral liberty alone, but moral liberty and moral evil together,
that provide an opportunity to manifest these virtues. In other
words, only if someone eventually exercises their moral liberty
to assault or abuse you can I exercise mine to show you empathy;
only if you are robbed can I make personal sacrifices to provide
for you. The question arises whether moral evil alone would
afford adequate opportunities for everyone to form a virtuous
moral character. In this connection Swinburne writes,

You can show courage when threatened by a gunman as well as

when threatened by cancer; and show sympathy to those likely to
be killed by gunmen as well as to those likely to die of cancer. But
just imagine all the suffering of mind and body caused by disease,
earthquake, and accident unpreventable by humans removed at a
stroke from our societyno sickness, no senility, no bereavement
in consequence of the untimely death of the young. Many of us
would then have such an easy life that we simply would not have
much opportunity to show courage or, indeed, manifest much in
the way of great goodness at all.

Consider a world without disaster, disease and decrepitude; a

world in which the only cause of injury and death is, respectively,
assault and murder. It is a mathematical certainty that such a
world would provide far, far fewer opportunities for virtue and
highly probable that some people would have no such
opportunities at all.

46
2.2 It Broadens The Scope of Moral Liberty
Moreover, with careful reflection it is apparent that the removal of
natural evil would also considerably constrain the scope and
significance of moral liberty. For instance: The knowledge that
poison causes death is unobtainable unless someone is first
observed to have accidentally died by poisoning. And knowledge
of poisonous toadstools and berries thereafter affords us an
opportunity to exercise significant moral liberty: We can use that
knowledge to kill off a neighbouring village by poisoning its well
or to warn the neighbouring village not to eat toadstools.
Earthquake belts, to give another example, give us a choice
between building upon them cities that may be destroyed long
after we are dead or avoiding doing so. Pathogens give us a choice
between making biological weapons that kill thousands or
developing antibiotics that save thousands. These examples show
that natural evil broadens the scope and significance of our
choices so that they are able to benefit or harm others far from us
in both time and space. This confers on us a solemn moral
responsibility and significance and so plausibly conduces to the
aims of a morally perfect creator for his creatures.

2.3 It Conduces to the Religious Life

If God exists he is the consummation and source of all power,
knowledge, wisdom, beauty, rationality and love lying at the very
heart of reality. A genuine and eternal love relationship with God
is therefore the greatest conceivable good available to us. The
question arises: Does a world that contains moral and natural evil
conduce to the greatest number of creatures freely seeking the
greatest conceivable good available to them? Reason and
experience suggest that the answer may be yes. Pleasure and
comfort are good and our world, of course, provides both. But a
life that offered nothing else would make us complacent,
hedonistic, idle and shallow. Suffering and death, on the other
hand, force us all to confront questions about the ultimate
meaning of life and so, for very many, plays a causal role in
developing a relationship with God and living a religious life.

47
 3. Conclusion
The objection from evil seems ultimately to rest on the naive
assumption that God created the universe to serve as a
comfortable habitat for his human pets. However, we have seen
that moral and natural evil are an unpreventable feature of any
world in which the supreme goods of virtue, moral self-
determination, genuine love and knowledge of God are
significantly and universally attainable. It is probable that the
creation of a pleasure park inhabited by creatures who know
endless pleasure and comfort but are devoid of moral and spiritual
significance would be a morally good act. But it is not at all
incoherent to suppose that, viewed under the aspect of his infinite
intelligence and moral perfection, God would know that the
creation of a world precisely like ours is a morally better act. This
is the so-called "Higher-Order Goods" solution to the problem of
evil. Pleasure, innocence and comfort are good; but virtue,
significance and love are better. And God, being perfectly good,
gives us the very best things He has to give.

48
 6
The Hiddenness Of God

The vast majority of people in the vast majority of times and

places have believed in God; 12 nevertheless, most believers
struggle with doubt at some point in their life and some people,
of course, do not believe in God at all. In the previous chapter,
God was described as the supreme and tremendous fact about
ultimate reality and the source of all power, knowledge, wisdom,
beauty, and love. A skeptic might reasonably object that, if such
an entity really existed, its existence would be as overwhelming
and undeniable as the noonday sun in full blaze; or, at the very
least, not open to dispute. The objection seems especially
troubling in view of the claim that God, in addition to being our
creator and sustainer, wishes to have a relationship with us. A
father who hid himself from his children to the point that some of
them came to doubt his existence would rightly be called
neglectful. This is the problem of divine hiddenness.
It is helpful to note that there are two aspects to
divine hiddenness correlating with two ways of knowing God.
Moses at Mount Sinai and Paul on the road to Damascus both
obtained direct knowledge of God and many mystics and some
ordinary believers claim to experience God in a similarly
immediate way. The believer who is persuaded by arguments for
the existence of God, on the other hand, or who claims that God
has answered one of his prayers, believes he
has indirect knowledge of God. The complaint from divine
hiddenness can now be slightly refined: "God does not directly
reveal himself often enough, and he does not indirectly reveal
himself compellingly enough."
In the following paragraphs I will be arguing, firstly, that if
God exists he is the sort of being whose salience would be

12 Examples of primitive atheism are almost unheard of in anthropology. The Story
of Civilisation by Will Durant includes reports that certain Pygmy tribes found in Africa
were observed to have no identifiable cults or ritesbut the evidence is rather thin and, in
any case, I think the paltriness of such exceptions suffices to prove the rule.

49
observer-relative in two specific and important ways; secondly,
that divine hiddenness in general confers significant benefits upon
mankind; and finally, that the assumption that we should be able
to identify God by normal observational criteria may be at
variance with his radical alterity or "otherness." However, before
coming to these points I need to set a critical implication of theism
in the foreground of the discussion. And I will do this now.

1. The Opposite Problem of Certain Knowledge

In most forms of theism and in all Abrahamic ones the belief in
God is conjoined with a belief in an afterlife. Our present life of
pain and suffering, the theist claims, is merely a preparation for a
perfect and eternal life to come. Some may wish to know why
God did not simply create the perfect world and bypass the
imperfect one. And the answer given by theologians in reply to
this question will help us to frame the problem of divine
hiddenness in the right way.
In the previous chapter we saw that moral liberty requires the
freedom to do good as well as evil, that genuine love requires the
freedom to give and to withhold love, and that a morally perfect
God has reason to create agents capable of both kinds of freedom.
However, a problem arises if the naked countenance of God is, as
most theologians suppose, overwhelming. In that case, finite
agents created and held ab ovo in the presence of God would
mass around him in involuntary ecstatic adoration like metal
filings massed around a powerful magnet. Given the definitions of
genuine love and virtue already outlined, agents who came into
existence in this way would have neither. Moreover, a God who
respects the free will of his creatures would need to let them
choose whether or not they want to spend eternity with him.
One solution would be for God to create an antecedent world
from which his countenance is hidden and then populate it with
agents who begin life in a state of moral and
spiritual ignorance.13 In such a world, knowledge of God would
no longer be overwhelming, immediate and incessant like the
noonday sun in full blaze; but a further problem arises if the
discovery of certain knowledge of God (through, say, empirical

13 See 1 Corinthians 13:12.

50
poofs and unambiguous and universal religious experiences) is a
threat to genuine love and moral libertyas I will shortly be
arguing it is. What is the solution to this problem? One possibility
would be for God to calibrate the minds of his creatures and the
obtainable knowledge of his existence in such a way that belief is
produced in ratio to each creature's desire for him; religious
experiences, likewise, could be mostly restricted to those either
open to God or already living a religious life. In this way any
creature who freely committed itself to the good and to God could
enter the presence of God after death; moral liberty, having
served its purpose, would be lost and as in the first scenario the
creature would exist in ecstatic adoration of the Godheadbut
with the difference that, this time, the creature's moral goodness
has been self-determined, its love for God is genuine, and its
eternal state has been freely entered into.
If the scenario I have sketched out above is at all plausible, it
follows that any antecedent world capable of producing creatures
of the desired kind is by necessity a world that produces theists,
agnostics and atheistsa world, that is, precisely like ours. The
rest of his chapter assumes that we live in such an antecedent
world (in which the countenance of God is hidden but in which
limited direct and indirect knowledge of God is widely available)
and presents arguments to show that the benefits this confers upon
us significantly outweigh the costs.

2. Observer-Relative Salience
The failure to observe some object may be due to a property of
that object which makes it difficult to observe or else it may be
due to some limit or deficiency in the observer. I may fail to see a
hare, for example, because it is camouflaged or I may fail to see it
because I have poor vision. This simple truth helps to introduce
the two ways in which the salience of God may be observer-
relative.
In order to understand the first, it needs to be remembered
that if God exists he is not just another being among many. He is
the creator and ruler of the universe and the source of all moral
authority. It follows that coming to a knowledge of God's
existence imposes profound moral obligations upon the creature
in a way that no other discovery could. The choice thrust upon
him is between submitting to the will of God (which, in view of the

51
definition of God just given, is the only rational response
available) or else refusing to do so and thereby pitting his finite
selfhood against the infinite power and maximal authority of God.
It is possible that being confronted with certain knowledge of the
existence of God when you are not yet willing to respond
appropriately would be psychologically devastating. God, being
omniscient, knows whether you are ready; and being morally
perfect, wishes to avoid harming you if you are not. The obvious
way he could do this is by hiding himself.14 The hiddenness of
God, in this scenario, is God's compassionate response to a
deficiency in the creature.
In the second scenario, however, the hiddenness may be due
entirely to the deficiency. Michael Rea has noted, correctly, I
think, that, "Most sensible people would recoil in horror upon
hearing that a person of great power and influence had taken a
special interest in them and had very definite, detailed and not-
easily-implemented views about how they ought to live their
lives." In many cases this horror is unconcealed. The
eminent philosopher Thomas Nagel, for instance, has written
that, "I want atheism to be true. I hope there is no God. I do not
want there to be a God. I do not want the universe to be like
that." It is certainly possible that, for some, feelings of this sort
could operate below the threshold of conscious awareness and
both prejudice their mind against the evidence for God's
existence and blunt their receptivity to religious experience. 15
This hypothesis will be offensive to atheists. But atheists, of course,
must recognise its tenability because they press similar objections
against believers. On the supposition that God exists, it is not at
all improbable that the paradigm pressures and cognitive biases

14 Here an obvious point of difference emerges between the hare in my example and the
first sense in which the salience of God may be observer-relative. The hare's being
camouflaged may be indirectly due to my status as a potential predator but it has nothing
to do with my particular personality and nor is the hare aware of my poor vision. With
God it is different: Aware of my deficiencies, God hides himself and it is in this sense that
the salience of the object of perception is observer-relative even though it is under the
control of the object.
15 Alvin Plantinga has argued that humans can sense God by means of an innate faculty,
a sensus divinitatis, that is damaged by moral evil in the way that our vision is damaged
by reading in low light or our hearing by loud music. On this view, atheism may be due to
the, " noetic effects of sin."

52
they familiarly impute to believers could exert force in the
opposite direction to produce unreasonable unbelief; nor is it
improbable that God would allow spiritually unprepared
creatures to seek temporary refuge from him in this way.

3. The Benefits of Divine Hiddenness Generally

The argument just given is of limited use. It does not tell us why
some believers struggle with doubt nor why there should be what
Schellenberg calls, "nonresistant nonbelievers"that is, people
who seem open to believing in God but do not come to believe in
him.16 To state the problem precisely: If God exists, is perfectly

16 The weakness in Schellenberg's argument is the forever uncertain status of the
"nonresistant nonbeliever." Theism, to borrow a phrase from N. T. Wright, is the most
"self-involving" hypothesis imaginable because affirming it entails a complete change in
one's way of life. Powerful paradigm pressures therefore apply to everyone, everywhere,
forever. An unconscious resistance to God is certainly possible and if present then, by
definition, the "nonresistant" nonbeliever would not be conscious of it and would not
report it. It follows that it is possible that there is no lifelong nonresistant nonbelief. In
fact, there is an intriguing philosophical doctrine that appears to support this view.
Doxastic voluntarism is the theory that we have indirect voluntary control over some
of our beliefs in the same way that we have indirect voluntary control over our actions. On
this view, a man who is indisposed to belief in God can choose to read books by atheists
which justify his indisposition; to read books by theists which challenge his indisposition;
or to read evenly from both sides of the debate. Which of these choices he makes will
determine both the kinds of beliefs he holds and the confidence with which he holds
them. And of course all of this applies, mutatis mutandis, to the man who is disposed to
belief in God and to the man who has no preexisting disposition.
The doctrine applies most plausibly to propositions which are on superficial inspection
inconclusive and between which we are caught somewhat like Buridans Ass. Suppose
now that the evidence for the existence of God is like this and consider Mr Green.
Because of his isolated background, he is ignorant both of the standard arguments for and
of the standard arguments against the existence of God. Nonetheless, he understands the
proposition God exists and on some level desires to believe it. He therefore takes the
voluntary intermediary steps productive of beliefreading books on natural theology with
a formative desire to give their arguments his assent. During this time, he also goes for late
night walks gazing at the heavens wondering if there really is a God, hoping that there is,
and seeking numinous experiences; he buys Bachs Mass in B minor and listens to the
Agnus Dei aria while leafing through a book of religious artand so on. God begins to
manifest his presence in the life of Mr Green who is moved by these corroborating
experiences and becomes a theist.
What is interesting is that whatever rational grounds Mr Green arrives at, his belief in
God may have its ultimate cause in an act of volition prior to but continuing throughout
his investigation and religious experiences and perhaps prior even to his conscious desire
to seek to believe in God. And something like this could hold in reverse for the atheist.
Indeed, one of the troubling implications of doxastic voluntarism for atheism is that,
whatever rational grounds the atheist acquires, he may ultimately have repudiated God by
an act of prior volition.

53
good, and wishes to have a relationship with us, the theist owes an
explanation for divine hiddenness in general that is consistent
with this conjunct of claims. The question we must ask is whether
divine hiddenness confers any significant benefits upon us and
upon our relationship with God; and if it does, whether those
benefits outweigh the unbelief and doubt that divine hiddenness
allows and which (on the supposition that God exists) are a source
of confusion and error about the nature of ultimate reality. I will
now be arguing that there are in fact many benefits to divine
hiddenness which are of supreme value.

3.1 Moral Liberty

By now the claim that the attainment of virtue and the formation
of a moral character depend on moral liberty will be familiar.
However, any world in which the superintendence of God is an
obvious fact is a world in which significant moral liberty is almost
impossible. Imagine, by way of illustration, a young child who
senses his mother's watchful presence at the nursery door. The
desire to please his mother and the lack of a feasible prospect of
misbehaving with impunity will in that moment completely
extinguish all temptation and so leave him without significant
choice. Living under the gaze of God would have analogous
results.17 One way in which God could vouchsafe us significant
moral choice is by temporarily situating himself at an, "epistemic
distance." It is this that we experience as divine hiddenness.

3.2 A Total Commitment to the Good

As Swinburne notes, divine hiddenness also provides us
with opportunities to demonstrate, "a total commitment to the
good." To return to the example just given: A child who shares
food with his younger sister when he believes they are alone shows
a greater commitment to the good than a child who shares food

17 Here it is important to distinguish between what I have called the "bare
countenance
of God," and permanent undeniable sensory evidence of his existence. In the first case,
the holy presence of God is completely disclosed and completely overwhelming; in the
second case, the countenance is veiled but God is imagined to provide some permanent
sign of his existence and moral surveillancea luminous apparition that follows and
watches every human being, for example, or a single, vast abyssal eye looming over the
Earth.

54
with his sister under his mother's approving gaze. And what is said
here of children and mothers can be said of man and God. Giving
to the poor in the certain knowledge that a perfectly good and
infinitely powerful being is watching is of a different moral quality
to giving to the poor despite entertainable doubts about the
existence of God. Divine hiddenness therefore makes it possible
for us to perform potentially selfless and unrewarded good actions
and so form a very good moral character. It is therefore a
plausible feature of an antecedent world created by God with a
view to producing creatures who are morally fit for an eternal
one.

3.3 Discerning the Ultimate Truths

A further benefit of divine hiddenness relates to the life of the
mind. When a child asks its parent a question about the world it is
good for the parent to answer it directly; but it may be better for
the parent to help the child to discover the answer for themselves.
In a like case, while it may have been good for God to frontload
knowledge of his existence into our brains, it may have
been better for him to have given us the responsibility of
discovering for ourselves the ultimate truth about reality. The
problem of hiddenness arises because, like a human parent, God
is a loving person who wishes to have a relationship with us but,
unlike a human parent, he is himself the ultimate truth about
reality he wishes for us to discover. However, as we have seen,
divine hiddenness is already a necessary feature of any
antecedent world capable of producing truly free and virtuous
creatures fit for a meaningful relationship with God. The benefit
just described does not therefore entail a cost but is naturally
compatible with those conditions which are already in place
because they conduce to a greater good.18

18 The "discoverability" of the truth about ultimate reality also has a moral dimension that
should not be overlooked. For example: A mother who provides her son with the means
of finding the answer to his question about plants (such as by giving him a book on botany
and directions to a botanical garden) also gives him a choice between making an effort to
discover the answer or not bothering. The hiddenness of God provides a similar choice.
Doubters can study the relevant issues in science and philosophy to discover whether or
not it is likely that God exists or they can choose not to bother. In this way, divine
hiddenness further extends the scope of our moral and intellectual freedom.

55
3.4 The Regularity of Natural Law
The ability of an agent to exercise moral liberty depends on his
ability to perform basic and nonbasic actions. These, in turn,
depend on natural laws. In order to strike you or save you from
drowning, for instance, my mind must be reliably mapped to my
muscular reflexes. And what is true here of individual agents is
true for societies at large: The ability to build structures and do
science (to moral or immoral ends) depend on the regularity of the
laws which govern our world. In this obvious truth Swinburne
sees another reason for divine hiddenness: If God intervened too
frequently in the antecedent world (such as by answering almost
every prayer, intervening to prevent almost every wrongdoing,
and working miracles everywhere) it would lack this crucial
regularity and the feasibility of societies of morally free agents
would be compromised. Constraining indirect knowledge of his
existence by means of divine intervention is, on this view,
pragmatic.

3.5 Personal Relationships

A strong natural desire for the love and approval of other persons
is an essential element of our capacity to form and sustain
relationships with each other and with God. And
such relationships and the desire that facilitates them are very
obviously supreme goods of a sort that a morally perfect God
would wish to vouchsafe us. In this Swinburne identifies yet
another reason for divine hiddenness: If I have a strong and
constant awareness of the presence of the supreme person of
God, my temptation to do evil will be reduced in proportion to
my natural desire for the love and approval of other persons; and
this, in turn, will cripple my moral liberty. Swinburne concludes
that, "The possibility of a free choice between right and wrong
will exist only given a certain ratio of strength between the desire
to please God and the desire to do wrong." In other words, to
make moral liberty possible God would need to eliminate our
strong desire for the love and approval of other persons and this
would make love and friendship universally unfeasible.19

19 Schellenberg suggests that God could solve this problem by endowing us with a strong
natural proclivity for self-deception. To his way of thinking this would allow a strong and
constant sense of the presence of God to coexist with moral liberty: If I wish to sin, I

56
3.6 Appropriate Religious Attitudes
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, divine hiddenness may be,
"good for the soul." Theologians sometimes make the point that
God does not care about your belief in his existence per se. The
Bible tells us that even the demons believe, "and shudder." What
God cares about is your response to the belief that he exists; your
relationship with him. This helps us to make further sense of the
problem of divine hiddenness, for while it is true that it is
responsible for unbelief, it also ensures that those who do
believe develop a number of appropriate religious attitudes. I will
mention just three. Firstly, it ensures that those who seek God are
sincere and selfless. The concern is not simply that there might
be something coercive in confronting undoubtable knowledge of
God. Some of his properties (overwhelming beauty, unlimited
resources) also make a certain kind of genuineness in our response
to him very difficult. God might therefore need to hide himself to
allow us to develop the right sort of selfless desire for him
somewhat analogous to a billionaire who, seeking genuine love,
conceals his fantastic wealth until he has found it. Secondly,
divine hiddenness calls on those who do develop a selfless desire
for God to make a deliberate and continuous effort to pursue him
as the summum bonumthe highest good. Scripture
everywhere enjoins us to thirst and hunger after God in this way;
to seek, to ask and to knock. If the existence of God were an
obvious feature of our world, this religious virtue would be
unattainable. Knowledge of the highest good at the heart of

simply deceive myself into thinking that I can do so with impunityperhaps by persuading
myself that God wants me to sin, or that he is not actually omniscient, or even that he
does not, after all, exist. There are several problems with Schellenberg's suggestion.
Firstly, if a strong proclivity for self-deception is to replace divine hiddenness as the
facilitator of moral liberty, it would need to be as universal as the doubt which hiddenness
produces and this would render our cognitive faculties completely unreliable. Secondly, in
order to entertain the idea of sinning I would need to have already deceived myself. But
if self-deception must precede temptation, there can be no possible temptation to deceive
myself in the first place. And finally, the suggestion that we could deceive ourselves about
the existence of God only serves to bring out the necessity of hiddenness. In an effort to
make the higher order goods under discussion attainable without hiddenness,
Schellenberg ends up describing a divine-hiddenness-like world which reinforces the
point he wishes to refute. An objection which aids the case it wishes to oppose is literally,
"worse than useless."

57
reality could then be got on the cheap and the freedom to pursue
it and to ignore it would both be removed. Finally, divine
hiddenness might simply teach us something important about the
nature of God. He does not appear on command to settle debates
about his existence or obey skeptics' demands to levitate objects
on pain of their continued unbelief. Even a man who begins to
live a religious life is quickly given to understand that he cannot
summon the presence of God by prayer and incantation. "God,"
Michael Rea reminds us, "is maximally free, maximally
authoritative, and will be manipulated by no one." This might be
a lesson that it is good for us to learn.20

4. Conclusion
The objection from divine hiddenness arises from a confident
assumption about how God, if he exists, ought to act. A final point
that needs to be considered is whether our finite minds can
formulate reliable observational criteria for an entity of abyssal
intelligence, unlimited power and perfect love. The argument
insists that a loving being of unlimited powers would surely reveal
itself to each of us in whatever form or fashion produces our belief
in it. The implication, clearly, is that God must conform himself
to our expectations concerning him and the failure to do so
exposes a deficiency in his nature. But what if the unbeliever's
expectations about God are fundamentally dysfunctional,
unreasonable and wrong? In that case, God would want the
unbeliever to overcome them and conforming to them would
mislead and harm him. And even the further objection that God,
being all powerful and all knowing, would be able to
find some appropriate way to make his existence obvious to each
of his creatures, whatever their expectations, does not escape the
problem. For just the same God either conforms to the

20 The list of higher-order goods just given is by no means exhaustive. For example,
Swinburne argues that agnosticism also, "makes possible a great good for the religious
believer. It allows the believer to have the awesome choice of helping or not helping the
agnostic to understand the source of his existence and his ultimate well-being," both
by evangelising and by living an exemplary religious life. This further introduces a
dimension of moral evil since, "agnosticism may, if there is a God, be due to the failures
of believers to help agnostics in these ways."

58
unbeliever's expectations or he does not.21 And so our confidence
in the objection from divine hiddenness is only as strong as our
confidence in the tenability of the unbeliever's expectations about
God.
And here no confidence is justified. It is logical: A being who
can control every atom in the universe by a basic action and who
views us under the aspect of eternity and infinite intelligence may
very well have ways of fulfilling his loving purposes for us that do
not meet our expectationspurposes in which, perhaps, even our
doubt and unbelief have their preordained place. In discussing
this problem under the name of "divine silence," Michael Rea
asks us to imagine,

A wise and virtuous person who is utterly beyond you

intellectually and silently leads you on a journey that might teach
you a lot more about herself and about other things on your
journey than she would if she tried to tell you all of the things
that she wants to teach you. In such a case, objecting to the
silence, interpreting it as an offence, or wishing that the person
would just talk to you rather than make you figure things out for
yourself might just be childish.

The silence of the mysterious psychopomp in Rea's example is not

inconsistent with her benevolence if her silence (and her
silence about her silence) is in your best interests. And while in the
case of divine hiddenness we must subtract the visible form of
the woman before us and keep the silencewe must also add the

21 Holding certain kinds of inflexible expectations about God could itself amount to a
form of resistance. On the supposition that God exists, consider the case of Jane. She
implores God on her knees to save her from her own unbelief but in answer to her prayer
receives only silence. Reasoning that if there were a God he would surely want her to
believe in him, Jane lapses into permanent unbelief. Jane may be taken to be the
paradigmatic example of the Schellenbergian "nonresistant nonbeliever." After all, she
clearly wanted to believe in God when she prayed and now does not. But suppose that
we press Jane and learn that she will not believe in God unless and until God appears
visibly before her, or obediently performs a miracle to disabuse her of her doubts, or
speaks to her in an audible voice. And suppose, moreover, that manifesting himself in the
way Jane expects is contrary to God's purpose for Jane. (Perhaps because God wishes to
vouchsafe Jane the higher order goods discussed above, or else he wishes to encounter
her at a more propitious time, or in a way that instructively transcends her expectations,
or because his silence is spiritually ameliorative for Jane, etc.) In this scenario
Jane is resisting God by narrowly defining the conditions under which God, a
transcendent being, is permitted to act in order to have a relationship with her.

59
circumstance that, if God exists, the whole material world in
which our journey takes place is amenable to his intelligible
manipulation.
Ultimately, the objection from divine hiddenness seems to rest
on a gross failure of imagination concerning the one subject about
which limitations are unjustified. God, as Copleston famously
admonished, is not the sort of thing the human mind, "can pin
down like a butterfly in a showcase."

60
 7
The Ontological Argument

We have looked at every significant objection to the concept of

God and seen that each one is defeasible: There are no good a
priori grounds for thinking that God does not exist. In showing
this the discussion has been defensive but in this final chapter on
the coherence of theism it will take a more offensive stance. I will
now be discussing a priori grounds for thinking that
God does exist; namely, the famous and intriguing Ontological
Argument which attempts to prove the existence of God from first
principles.

1. The Classical Version

The first ontological argument was put forward by Saint Anselm
in the twelfth century. Anslem said that the statement, "It is
possible to conceive of a being than which none greater can be
conceived," is incoherent if that being does not exist for in that
case a still-greater being can be conceived: one that does exist. To
his way of thinking, imputing nonexistence to the "greatest
conceivable being" was like imputing finitude to "the greatest
possible number" and so implying that that number is both finite
and infinite. And since postulating the nonexistence of God seems
to entail an analogously illogical state of affairs, and since illogical
states of affairs cannot obtain in the real world, God must exist.
Rene Descartes and Gottfried Leibniz both independently
formulated similar arguments.
Kant, though himself a theist, famously objected to all this by
insisting that existence is not a property. To say that something
exists or does not exist is just to say that its properties are or are
not exemplified in the world. When one says that an apple
is red, sweet and round, for instance, one is describing its
properties. But if they add that the apple "exists" they are not
describing a further property possessed by the apple but merely
telling you that the apple and its properties are exemplified.
Anslem, Kant concluded, was inferring the existence of God out
of an illicit conception of existence and nonexistence as

61
properties that can be imputed to God. This objection remained
influential until the twentieth century when the American analytic
philosopher Alvin Plantinga reformulated the argument in a way
which escapes it.

2. The Modal Logic Version

Plantinga's version of the argument is much less confusing than
Anselm's but understanding it requires a familiarity with a few
simple concepts of modal logic. I will briefly explain these now.
Modal logic, as you may recall from my discussion of
omniscience and free will, is concerned with the ways in which
propositions are either possibly or necessarily true or false.22 In
analysing propositions in this way modal theorists make use of the
concept of possible worlds. Bachelors are unmarried is
necessarily true if there is no possible world in which it is
false; Bachelors are married is necessarily false if there is no
possible world in which it is true; and John is a bachelor is
possibly true if there are some possible worlds in which it is true
and some possible worlds in which it is false. But what exactly is
meant by "possible world"?
It is important to understand that a possible world is not
another planet or a parallel universe. For the purposes of modal
logic it is a comprehensive description of a possible reality
where possible reality is analogous to "hypothetical state of
affairs" with the added condition that it entails no logical
contradictions. For example: A world precisely like this one except
that Sandro Botticelli was a famous sonneteer is a possible world.

22 It may be helpful to what follows for me to briefly explicate the three modal
categories: If a proposition is metaphysically necessary its negation contains or entails a
contradiction. For example: 2+2=4 and There is a number between 4 and 6. If a
proposition is metaphysically impossible, on the other hand, its affirmation contains or
entails a contradiction. For example: 2+2=3 The Prime Minister of England is a prime
number. And finally, if a proposition is metaphysically possible neither its affirmation
nor its negation contains or entails a contradiction. For example: There is a cat in
Buckingham Palace. One day there will be cities on the moon. It is also important not
to confuse metaphysical possibility with epistemic possibility: The latter simply refers to
our knowledge or lack of knowledge regarding the truth of some proposition with no
bearing on its modal status. For example: John is absent; it is possible he is unwell. It is
possible that 9/11 was an inside jobwho knows? With these distinctions in place, it is
possible to reduce Plantinga's argument to a single proposition: If it is metaphysically
possible that it is metaphysically necessary that God exists, God exists.

62
It entails no logical contradiction and so exists in modal logic
just as the set of all prime numbers "exists" in set theory. On the
other hand, a world precisely like this one except that Botticelli
was a "married bachelor" is not a possible world. It contains a
logical contradiction and so does not exist. Just there are infinitely
many sets in set theory, so there are infinitely many possible
worlds in modal logic. And critically: our world, the actual world,
is also a possible world in modal theory because it contains no
logical contradictions (married bachelors, square circles, integers
which are both odd and even, etc.) and of course because it exists
and could not exist if it were not possible.

3. The Argument
Using the concept of possible worlds just described, Plantinga first
asks us to consider the proposition, It is possible that a
Maximally Excellent Being exists where "a Maximally
Excellent Being" is one that possesses every excellence to the
maximal degree; i.e., is unlimited in power, intelligence, virtue,
knowledge, freedom, and so on. So defined, does the concept of a
Maximally Excellent Being contain a logical contradiction? We
have seen in Part I that it does not and so, together with Botticelli
the Sonneteer, a maximally excellent being exists in some possible
world. Plantinga then asks us to consider the proposition, It is
possible that a Maximally Great Being exists where "a
Maximally Great Being" is one that possesses maximal excellence
in every possible world. Unless it can be shown that this
proposition contains a logical contradiction (and it is not obvious
that it can) we must conclude that God exists,
P1. It is possible that a Maximally Great Being
exists. (It contains no logical contradiction of the sort,
married bachelor," or "square circle.")

P2. If it is possible that a Maximally Great Being

exists, then a Maximally Great Being exists in some
possible world. (This follows trivially from P1 in modal
logic.)

P3. If a Maximally Great Being exists in some

possible world, then it exists in every possible
world. (This is entailed by the definition of maximal
greatness.)

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 P4. If a Maximally Great Being exists in every
possible world, then it exists in the actual
world. (Because the actual world is also a possible world.)

P5. If a Maximally Great Being exists in the actual

world, then a maximally great being exists.

C. Therefore, a Maximally Great Being exists.

We can see that Plantinga's argument is Kant-proof because it

does not presuppose the existence of the Maximally Great Being;
i.e., Plantinga does not take existence to be a property that is or is
not imputed to God. Recall: When we say that Botticelli the
Sonneteer "exists" in some possible world we are not committing
ourselves to saying that he existed in the actual world. We merely
acknowledge that it is logically possible that the man Botticelli
might have chosen to write sonnets instead of paint; therefore,
Botticelli the Sonneteer is a logical possibility. Plantinga, likewise,
does not commit himself to saying that a Maximally Great Being
exists in the actual world when he suggests that it exists in some
possible world. The intrusion of the Maximally Great Being into
the actual world is not an entailment of his modal conjecture in
the first premise but an entailment of the subsequent fact
that one of the sum of all possible worlds which the maximally
great being exhaustively occupies happens to be exemplified.

4. Parodies of the Argument

Bertrand Russell, who was at one point convinced by Anslem's
version of the argument, opined that, "It is easier to feel convinced
that the argument must be fallacious than it is to find out precisely
where the fallacy lies."23 In response to this difficulty skeptics have
tended to construct a parody whose conclusion is absurd. Thus
Gaunilo, a contemporary of Anselm, invited his readers to
conceive of an island more excellent than any other and suggested
that, by Anselm's reasoning, it must exist. Others have suggested
that the argument can be used to prove the existence of virtually

23 In his autobiography, Russell relates that he was returning from the tobacconist when
the realisation struck and inspired a rather dusty oath. "Great God in Boots," he reports
himself as exclaiming, "the ontological argument is sound!"

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anything: a maximally great but evil being, a Flying Spaghetti
Monster, an Invisible Unicorn, and so on. And quite recently the
Australian philosopher Douglas Gasking developed an argument
which attempts to prove God's nonexistence,

The merit of an achievement is the product of its quality and

the creator's disability: the greater the disability of the creator,
the more impressive the achievement. Nonexistence would be
the greatest handicap. Therefore, if the universe is the product
of an existent creator, we could conceive of a greater being
one which does not exist. A nonexistent creator is greater than
one which exists, so God does not exist.

In order to understand why all such parodies fail, we need to set

out the concept of "maximal excellence" more carefully.

4.1 A Perfect Island

In reflecting on this parody we realise that the excellence of
the Maximally Excellent Being is "maximisable" in a way that the
excellence of an island is not. The knowledge of the Being is
maximal if there are no limits to what it knows; its power
is maximal if there are no limits on what it can do; its intelligence
is maximal if there are no limits on what it can think. But the
maximisation of excellence with respect to islands cannot be
objectively formulated in this way. One can always add more
palm trees, for example; more beaches; more coves. Moreover,
the features which are conducive to the perfection of islands are
relative to the tastes of the individual contemplator. A
maximally excellent island is therefore an incoherent notion.

4.2 A Maximally Great but Evil Being

At the end of the previous chapter, I summarised an argument
from Leibniz to show that omniscience and moral perfection are
mutually inclusive: all freely willed action strives towards some
goal; all goals are the pursuit of some good entertained by the
agent; the scope and quality of entertainable goods is dependent
on knowledge; the maximisation of knowledge perfects an agent's
judgment of the good. An evil being therefore lacks perfect
knowledge; and lacking perfect knowledge, is not omniscient; and
lacking omniscience, cannot be omnipotent since there will be
some actions it lacks the knowledge to perform. The

65
proposition, It is possible that a maximally great but evil
being exists is therefore broadly incoherent. A being cannot be
both evil and maximally great.

4.3 A Flying Spaghetti Monster

All parodies of this sort fail for the same reason. To be maximally
great, an entity must be perfectly free and a being that is
permanently confined to a particular material body or even to a
particular immaterial form is not perfectly free. In response to this
the skeptic may wish to amend his claim by adding that his Flying
Spaghetti Monster can change bodies and forms at will but this is
no solution: It requires him to postulate an immaterial being who
is free to assume whatever form it chooses and in so doing returns
him to the Maximally Great Being of the original
argument. Ultimately, such parodies simply give Plantinga's
Maximally Great Being an arbitrarily ridiculous name without
avoiding the conclusion of his argument.

4.4 A Nonexistent Creator

The definition of merit on which this argument depends is highly
questionable. But there is a far more obvious problem. We have
seen that the contents of a possible world are by definition
conditional on logical coherence. Gasking's nonexistent creator is
paradigmatically incoherent: A creator, very obviously, must exist
in the real world in order to have causal agency in the real
world. It is possible that a nonexistent creator exists is
strictly incoherent in the way that Square circle and Married
bachelor are.

4.5 Other Parodies

What has been demonstrated here for perfect islands, maximally
great but evil beings and nonexistent creators can
be demonstrated for every possible parody: However far and wide
one casts about for candidate entities, proper attention to the logic
of the argument produces a list of one. And this is because
whatever entity is fed into the argument and adjusted to met the
conditions of maximal excellence and logical coherence becomes
indistinguishable from the God of classical theism.

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 5. Conclusion
An argument is valid if its conclusion follows logically from its
premises and sound if it is valid and its premises are all true.
There is broad agreement that Plantinga's modal logic version of
the ontological argument is valid. 24 But is it sound?
Schopenhauer, himself a resolved atheist, was content to dismiss
the argument as a, "charming joke." But Anselm, Descartes and
Leibniz were not its only proponents. In recent times, Kurt Gdel,
Charles Hartshorne and Norman Malcolm have all formulated
and presented ontological arguments while Plantinga's modal
logic version enjoys the continued support of many contemporary
philosophers.25 The eminent metaphysician Peter van Inwagen
probably summarises the current state of the debate fairly when
he writes that, "anyone who wants to claim either that
this argument is sound or that it is unsound is faced with grave
difficulties." However, this is surely an interesting and significant
conclusion to our survey of the coherence of theism: Not only is
there no indefeasible a priori argument against the existence of
God, there seems to be one indefeasible a
priori argument for the existence of God.

24 A computerised theorem prover has also shown this to be the case. See
the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Volume 89, 2011.
25 The Ontological Argument shows that if it is possible that God exists, it is necessary
that God exists. William Lane Craig rightly points out that this increases the atheist's
burden of proof considerably. To discharge this argument it will not suffice for him to
argue that God does not exists in fact; he needs to show that God cannot exist in
principle. And we have already seen that this is not something that can be shown.

67
 68
 8
Conclusion

My concern has been to show that theism is coherent, where

theism is understood to be the proposition, There exists an
immaterial spirit who is omnipotent, omniscient,
omnipresent, necessary, eternal and perfectly good and
coherent is understood to mean, Containing or entailing no
contradictions. In practical terms, this has involved discharging
objections to the concept of an immaterial person in general; an
immaterial person with divine attributes in particular; and the
existence of such a being given certain basic features of human
experiencenamely, the problem of evil and divine hiddenness.
So long as all the objections to theism are defeasible in the way I
have suggested, the existence of God is a logical possibility. Have
we therefore gained rational permission to look at evidence for his
existence? Not quite. For even allowing that it is not
logically impossible that God exists, there are three final
objections that a skeptic can make against entertaining evidence
for the existence of God. I will address these now.

1. The Intrinsic Probability of Theism

Before moving to consider the positive arguments for the existence
of God, a preliminary question needs to be asked: How likely is it
that God exists?
Consider the case of John and Jane. John assumes that the
existence of God is profoundly unlikely. He therefore views
theistic proofs with deep suspicion and finds them unpersuasive.
Jane, on the other hand, assumes that the existence and
nonexistence of God are about equiprobable. She therefore views
those same proofs with an open mind and finds them persuasive.
The point is that our presuppositions about
the intrinsic probabilityof theism (where the "intrinsic
probability" of a hypothesis is a measure of its simplicity prior to
the evidence) are crucial to the outcome of any discussion of

69
evidence for the existence of God and need to be taken into
account.26
On superficial inspection is tempting to think that John is
correct. The existence of God is about as improbable as anything
could be. God, if he exists, is unlimited: infinite in power,
knowledge and love. The principle of parsimony, which
recommends the simpler of any two competing explanations,
would seem to recommend an atheistic explanation in every
possible case: whenever there are two possible explanations for the
evidence, one which appeals to the existence of God and one
which does not, the explanation which does not appeal to the
existence of God is simpler and therefore has greater intrinsic
probability. Prejudice against theistic claims is, it seems, justified.
However, in The Existence of God, Swinburne presents a
strong counterargument to this view. He first notes that to
postulate a limited force is to postulate two things: The force and
whatever constrains it; while to postulate an unlimited force is to
postulate one thing: The force, which, being unlimited, is not
constrained by anything. "For this reason," he continues,
"scientists have always favoured a hypothesis ascribing zero or
infinite value to some entity over a hypothesis ascribing a finite
value when both hypotheses are compatible with the data." Thus,
"the hypothesis that some particle has zero or infinite mass is
simpler than the hypothesis that it has a mass of 0.3412 or a
velocity of 301,000 kilometres per second."
Theism is the proposition that the ultimate explanation of the
universe is a single immaterial entity which is of the simplest kind
imaginable because it is unlimited. Since a person is, "a conscious
entity that has rational thoughts, memories, moral awareness,
intentions, continuity of identity and who is able to perform
various basic and nonbasic actions," a person having zero powers
would not be a person at all. It follows that in postulating a person
with infinite powers the theist is postulating the simplest person

26 Some philosophers do not recognise the concept of "intrinsic probability." Plantinga,
for example, thinks it is doubtful that there is such thing as intrinsic logical probability but
concedes that, "we certainly do favour simplicity and we are inclined to think that simple
explanations and hypotheses are more likely to be true than complicated epicyclic ones."
The reader who shares this view can simply equate "intrinsic probability" with the notion
that, all things being equal, the simpler a hypothesis the more likely it is to be true.

70
logically possible. 27 The intrinsic probability of theism is,
therefore, high.

2. Who Created God?

Allowing, then, that the existence of God is logically
possible and entertainably parsimonious, a further objection is
sometimes raised. It can be summarised as follows: "God, if he
exists, is the most complex conceivable being; therefore, to
postulate God to explain p is by definition to postulate an
explanation more complex than whatever it is you are trying to
explain. This leaves us with the more difficult question of
explaining the explanation." This objection, which is reducible to
the schoolyard teaser, Who created God? is the "central
argument" of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.
Three things need to be said in response to this.

2.1 Divine Simplicity

The first is that the key premise is false and hangs on the
assumption that mental states are reducible to physical states and
that the existence of an infinite mind therefore implies the
existence of an infinitely complex physical substrateanalogous
to an infinite computer or human brain. Thus the objection does
not even apply to God: Whether God exists or not, he is
postulated to be an immaterial being and not an infinite
physical brain. And moreover, as we saw in Chapter 2, mental
states are not reducible to physical brain states: What is essential
to minds is intractably nonphysical and so lacks the "heterogeneity
of parts" which Dawkins himself recommends as the indicator of
complexity.
The error consists in conflating the mind itself with the
mind's ideas. A divine mind may certainly have complex ideas. It
may be thinking, for instance, of the infinitesimal calculus while
monitoring and controlling the status of every elementary particle
in the universe. But being unembodied it lacks physical parts and

27 In common usage a "person" is, of course, a human being. The reader should recall
that the word is being used in its philosophical sense; that is, "a conscious entity that has
rational thoughts, memories, moral awareness, intentions, continuity of identity and who
is able to perform various basic and nonbasic actions."

71
so is reducible to a single supremely simple entity whose
properties (consciousness, rationality, volition, and so on) are all
essential to it.

2.2 Explanatory Termini

The second point that needs to be made in response to the
demand for an "explanation of the explanation" is that the same
demand can be made of any final theory of the universe. In
scaling up the ladder of metaphysical explanation, atheist and
theist alike arrive at a final rung. There will be, for both, a final
brute fact or explanatory terminus for which there can be no
further explanation. Physicalism, for instance, is the claim that
only the physical universe exists. "The universe," Bertrand Russell
asserted, "just is." But this is every bit as much a metaphysical
claim as theism. The atheist cannot, therefore, simply dismiss
theistic proofs and rest his case; he needs to make his case in the
court of philosophical analysis. There, our task will be to
determine which of several competing explanatory termini
(including theism and atheism) is on balance the most coherent.
But demanding an "explanation of the explanation" is not
a legitimate response to any final metaphysic under consideration
because it entails an infinite regress: we can then demand an
explanation of the explanation-of-the-explanation; and then an
explanation of thatand so on ad infinitum. In order to
recognise that some explanatory terminus it is the best, it is not
necessary explain it.28

2.3 Uncaused Entities

The third, final and most important point is that the
question, Who created God? makes a category mistake. In
postulating the existence of God the theist is postulating an
uncaused and eternal being. Asking, "What caused the

28 To illustrate this elementary precept of scientific reasoning, William Lane Craig
invites us to imagine a group of archeologists who unearth artifacts resembling jewellery,
pottery shards and arrowheads. They would be justified, he points out, in inferring that
these object were the products of some unknown group of people rather than the results
of the chance processes of sedimentation. And the fact that the archeologists cannot tell
us who these unknown people were or how the artefacts came to be there in no way
invalidates their explanation.

72
uncaused?" is akin to asking, "Who is the bachelor's wife?" Nor
does defining God as uncaused insulate theism against rational
critique. The atheist can object that the concept of God is
incoherent or that there is no evidence to support his existence.
But what the atheist cannot do is dismiss the concept of an
uncaused being a priori because the theist is unable to tell him
what caused it. Uncaused entities are not incoherent in principle;
on the contrary, they are a legitimate concept in both philosophy
and mathematics. 29 And critically, the atheist himself is
postulating an uncaused entity in asserting that the physical is all
that there is. When Bertrand Russell asserts that the universe "just
is" he is asserting that the universe exists as a brute fact without
cause or explanation. The question we must ask is which
explanatory terminus, the universe or God, is an inference to the
best explanation from the philosophical and scientific
evidence. And this is not resolved by pressing an objection against
the theist that applies with equal force to the atheist.

3. The Identification of Unobservable Entities

The final objection that needs to be addressed before moving to
the positive arguments for the existence of God concerns the
possibility of identifying unobservable entities. An entomologist
identifies a new species of moth by collecting a specimen; an
astronomer studies the moons of Jupiter through his telescope; a
neuroscientist uses a microscope to observe the activity of brain
cells. But God, being immaterial, will by definition escape such
direct empirical detection. What possible evidence, then, can be
advanced in support of the claim that God exists? This objection,
which goes back to David Hume and Immanuel Kant, is out of
touch with modern scientific developments. As Swinburne
explains,
Science is often able to locate the cause of phenomena in some
unobservable entity or process. Both Hume and Kant wrote
when science had not had the success that it has had today in
discovering the unobservable causes of observable events; and

29 As John Lennox, Oxford professor of mathematics, expressed it: "The set of the
uncaused in not empty." It very plausibly already includes mathematical and logical truths,
moral values and metaphysical universals.

73
 their philosophy of religion is often vitiated by the implicit or
explicit principle that we could be justified in postulating a
cause of some observable event only if the cause was also
something observable. It is sufficient to reflect on the evident
success of chemistry and physics in providing good grounds to
believe in the existence of atoms, electrons, photons, etc., to
realise that that principle is quite mistaken.

There are valid rules of inference that can be applied to scientific

evidence and which, if the premises are true, will lead to a justified
belief in the existence of an unobservable entity. One of these, a
disjunctive syllogism, was introduced in Chapter 2.

A or B.
Not A.
Therefore, B.

In discussing physicalism, we saw that what is essential to mental

states is either reducible to a physical brain state or it is not; and,
since it is not, what is essential to mental states is nonphysical. In
this and many other cases, there may be only two possible
conclusions: one entailing the existence of an observable and the
other an unobservable. Suppose, for instance, that the following
statement is true: Either space and time has no cause or the
cause of the universe transcends space and time. Ruling out
the first will provide evidence for the second even though, by
definition, it is unobservable.
Another important law of inference in arguments for the
existence of God is the so-called abductive argument, or
"inference to the best explanation."

The surprising fact p is observed

If q were true, p would follow as a matter of course
Therefore, probably, q

Let p here represent, say, the fine tuning of the laws and constants
of the universe and suppose that we assemble a pool of candidate
explanations for q: Chance, A multiverse, and A transcendent
intelligence. Here, again, successfully ruling out the first
alternative will provide evidence for either one of two
unobservable entities.

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 4. Conclusion
I have now completed my defence of theism against the charge
of a priori incoherence: I have shown that objections to
the concept of God are defeasible and that, therefore, the
existence of God logically possible. I have also shown that theism
is a parsimonious hypothesis of high intrinsic probability and that
God is an acceptable explanatory terminus to a final theory of the
universe. And I have shown that unobservable entities, such as
God, are within the scope of scientific epistemology. Moreover, in
accomplishing these tasks, we have seen that mind is essentially
nonphysical (which supports theistic claims about the existence of
immaterial persons) and discussed one entertainable a
priori argument for the existence of God which resists disproof. I
conclude that we have therefore established the coherence of
theism and have earned rational permission to examine the
arguments and evidence for the existence of God. This is the
subject of Part II.

75
 76
 II
The Evidence for Bare Theism

77
 78
 9
Introduction

Before moving to the first argument for the existence of God, it

will be helpful to note a few preliminary points.

1. The Scope of the Arguments

The nine arguments that follow are matched to the occurrence of
the phenomena they discuss. The first set deals with the existence,
origin and structure of the universe; the second, with the origin of
life on Earth; and the third, with human mental and moral
experience. It is significant that the claimed evidence for the
existence of God should range across so many fundamental
aspects of reality. This is just what we would expect to find if
theism were true. God, if he exists, is the ultimate explanation for
the universe, life, consciousness and morality and an isolated
cluster of arguments around mental experience alone, say, or
evolutionary biology alone, would not command the same
attention. A prima facie evaluation of the scope of the evidence
suggests that it is consistent with the truth of theism. This is the
first preliminary point to note.

2. A Cumulative Case for Theism

Theism is the claim that, There exists an immaterial spirit
who is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, necessary,
eternal and perfectly good. The second point to note is that
none of the arguments that follow on its own make it more
probable than not this entire proposition is true. Rather, each
argument captures a single feature of the proposition. The Modal
Cosmological Argument, for instance, establishes the necessity of
a transcendent Necessary Being; the Kalam Cosmological
Argument, a transcendent Necessary Being with conscious
volition; the Argument from Cosmic Teleology, a transcendent
Necessary Being with conscious volition that is of
incomprehensible intelligence and powerand so on. The skeptic
is not therefore justified in dismissing an argument by saying,
"Even if it obtains, it does not prove that the entity postulated is

79
God," because this is a point the theist himself is careful to make.
The nine arguments taken together form a cumulative case for
theism.

3. Evaluating the Arguments

The third point to note is that the arguments for the existence of
God are not hard proofs. This, however, does not count against
theism for the excellent reason that, outside of mathematics and
symbolic logic, there are no hard proofs. In natural theology, as
in every other philosophical and scientific enterprise, we will be
dealing with arguments whose premises must be weighed for
their plausibility or probabilityand this goes for arguments
for atheism as well as theism. In each case, an argument will be a
successful argument if and only if it has a valid logical structure
and its premises are more plausible or probable than their
negations: This, in turn, will make its conclusion more plausibly or
probably true than false and we will be then rationally obligated
to give it our assent.30
I think this is an especially important point because the skeptic
often makes the mistake of thinking that he can reject an
argument for the existence of God, or a premise in it,
by suggesting the mere possibility of its negation. This is a valid
strategy in response to certain modal propositions. Thus the logic
of the proposition, If a man is married then, necessarily, he
has a wife is invalidated by the possibility of a case of same sex
marriage: If it is possible that a married man has a husband, then
it is not necessarily the case that he has a wife. But the
proposition, All the available evidence points to a beginning
of the universe is not invalidated by claiming that it is possible
that the evidence is misleading and the universe is past eternal.
"Possibilities," as William Lane Craig reminds us, "come cheap."

30 If p is more probable than not-p it is irrational to deny p and affirm not-p. But if it
is significantly more probable that p than not-p it is irrational to deny
both p and not-p on the basis of a lack of certain knowledge. If you are expecting a
visit from your friend, a policeman, at 3 o'clock and at 2:58 your wife tells you that a man
in a police uniform is walking down the drive it is on balance far more probable than not
that it is your friend: Although you do not have certain knowledge, and could therefore be
wrong, it would be irrational to reason, "I do not have certain knowledge that it is my
friend; therefore, I deny that it is my friend and that it isn't my friend." Rational obligations
apply even in the absence of certain knowledge.

80
To discharge this premise the skeptic needs to demonstrate that it
is on balance more plausible or probable that the universe is past
eternal than finite.

4. Humes Objection from Uniqueness

A final point: The first three of the following arguments for the
existence of God all involve inferences about the nature and origin
of the universe. Such inferences are sometimes met with an
objection that goes back at least to David Hume and which, to
avoid repetition, I will address once here: Hume argued that
inferences are made after an examination of many cases of a
similar kind and are not permissible when we are dealing with a
unique case. Since there is only one universe, his objection goes, it
is impossible to make inferences about it and wrong to apply to it
principles that have been inferred from local cases within the
universe.
Swinburne begins his reply to this by noting that it has a
consequence that is both surprising and unwelcome, even to its
proponents: It entails that physical cosmology cannot reach
justified conclusions about the size, age or density of the universe
(since it is the only one of which we have knowledge) and also that
physical anthropology could not reach justified conclusions about
the origin and development of the human race (since it is the only
one of which we have knowledge). The implausibility of these
consequences, he writes, leads us to doubt the original
objection, which is indeed totally misguided.
It is misguided, Swinburne explains, because uniqueness is
relative to description and every object is unique under some
description. This is true of both spatial descriptions (p occupies
such-and-such a location) and qualitative descriptions (p has such-
and-such a property). In this, then, the universe is no different
from any other object.31 And so it follows that if we rigorously

31 In this connection Swinbune compares the universe with his writing table. The
universe, spatially and qualitatively described, is the only physical object consisting of all
physical objects spatially related to each other and not related to any other object that is
subject to certain laws of nature from specified initial conditions. His writing table,
meanwhile, is the one and only writing table of its kind in such an such an apartment
having such and such a weight and scratches on its surface that is subject to certain laws of
nature from specified initial conditions.

81
apply the principle that inferences cannot be made about unique
objects and events, then since all objects and events are in some
way unique, it becomes impossible to make inferences about
anything at all. Moreover, both the universe and all objects it
contains are characterised by properties which are common to
more than one object. For instance: The universe, in common
with the solar system, is a configuration of material bodies
distributed in empty space; and like other objects, the universe has
a certain density and mass. Swinburne concludes that, the
objection fails to make any crucial distinction between the
universe and other objects; and so it fails in its attempt to prevent
at the outset a rational inquiry into the issue of whether the
universe has some origin outside itself. All this should be borne in
mind while reading the Modal Cosmological Argument, the
Kalam Cosmological Argument and the Argument from Cosmic
Teleology.
Having settled these four preliminary matters, us now move to
the first argument for the existence of God.

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 10
The Modal Cosmological Argument

It is said that all philosophy begins in wonder; and Leibniz was

surely right in insisting that the most fundamental thing to wonder
at is why anything exists at all. "Why," he asked, "is there
something rather than nothing? This is the first question which
should rightly be asked." Even if it turns out to be unanswerable,
the question is certainly reasonable. Everything that exists (from
protozoa and poets to planets and parrots) has an explanation of
its existence. It would be very strange indeed if, meanwhile, there
were no ultimate explanation for the totality of things that
comprise the universe.
However, in seeking ultimate explanations a philosophical
riddle emergeseven if we constrain our focus to the ultimate
explanation for the existence of a single thing. For we observe that
all things owe their existence to some prior thing and we know
that the series of causally interrelated things is either infinite or
finite. But if the series is infinite, then there is no beginning to or
explanation for it; and if the series is finite, then it must come to a
stop at some first thing which, strangely, will not owe its existence
to some prior thing.
A number of different philosophers and thinkers in a number
of different times and places have pondered this riddle and
concluded to the necessity of an originating cause of everything in
God.32 The cluster of arguments which emerge from this way of

32 Ancient Greek philosophers developed the cosmological argument into clear form.
Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions all know it. And it can be found in African,
Buddhist and Hindu thought as well. It is, moreover, studied and defended by
contemporary philosophers and remains influentialin some cases, surprisingly so.
Alasdair MacIntyre, for example, is recognized as one of the most important Anglophone
philosophers of the 20th century. He claims that he converted to Catholicism, as a result
of being convinced of Thomism while attempting to disabuse his students of its
authenticity. (Thomism being the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas of which three
versions of the cosmological argument are an integral feature). The philosopher Edward
Feser tells an almost identical story about his own conversion.

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thinking are together called, cosmological arguments. However,
in this chapter I will be focusing mostly on Leibnizs modal
formulation of the argument which is, I think, the hardest to
refute.33

1. Contingent and Necessary Beings

On superficial inspection, one might be tempted to object to the
above line of reasoning as follows: If everything that exists needs
an explanation, then God needs an explanation; and if
God doesn't need an explanation, then why does the universe
need an explanation? The Cosmological Argument seems to come
to grief on the child's question, "Who created God?" However,
Leibniz attends to this issue by first classifying all existent things
into two broad categories: contingent and necessary.
A "contingent thing" is the most familiar: a thing whose
existence is explained by, or contingent on, something external to
itself and which could therefore have failed to exist. All manmade
objects are like this. They owe their existence to whoever created
them and it is conceivable that whoever created them could have
failed to do so or chosen not to do so. We can easily conceive of a
world in which Rembrandt did not paint The Night Watch or a
world in which a particular teacup in your kitchen cupboard was
not manufactured. Paintings and teacups and umbrellas and
clocks are therefore contingent things. You and I, likewise, are
contingent: Our parents might never have met or might have
chosen not to have children. And things in the natural world, too,
such as starlings, sapphires and stars, seem to fall into the same
category. It is plausible to think that the universe, having
developed differently, could get along without them.
A "necessary thing," by contrast, is a thing which exists by a
necessity of its own nature and which could not possibly have
failed to exist. Things of this sort are few and far between but
many philosophers think abstract objects (such as numbers, sets
and propositions) exist in this way. The number 5, for example, is

33 As I explained previously, modal logic is concerned with the ways in which
propositions are either necessarily or contingently true or false. The Leibnizian
cosmological argument is "modal" because it is predicated on a distinction
between contingent and necessary things.

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not caused to exist by anything external to itself; it just exists
necessarily. In the same way, no matter how the universe turned
out, two plus two would always make four. Unlike poets and
paintings and planets, there is no possible world in which
mathematical and logical truths do not exist, and so each
contains within itself the reason for its own existence: It exists
because its nature is such that its nonexistence is logically
impossible.

2. The Principle of Sufficient Reason

Having set out this distinction between contingent and necessary
things, Leibniz formalised it into his famous Principle of Sufficient
Reason: Everything that exists has a sufficient reason for its
existence, either in an external cause, or in the necessity of
its own nature. This principle is widely recognized as powerful
and intuitive; and is, moreover, the way every rational person
already thinkseven in the most extraordinary of cases. Suppose
that you saw an adult horse materialise out of thin air. You would
first seek a physical cause (It is the work of an illusionist) or,
failing that, a psychological cause, (I am hallucinating) or,
failing that, a supernatural cause (God did it). As a last resort,
you might simply give up and admit that you don't know the
reason, whatever it is, but what you would never do is conclude
that, There is no reason.

3. The Universe Is Contingent

Unless it can be demonstrated that the Principle of Sufficient
Reason is less plausible than its negation (unless it can be
demonstrated that it is more plausible to believe that
things can exist without a sufficient reason for their existence) we
are rationally obligated to postulate a sufficient reason for the
existence of the universe. The question arises whether, like an
abstract object, it exists by a necessity of its own nature or
whether, like a blackbird or a black hole, the reason for its
existence is to be found in an external cause. But very obviously
the nonexistence of the universe is not logically impossible. There
is no incoherence in postulating a universe with one less star; or
half as many stars; or no stars. And one can, likewise, coherently
postulate a universe from which 99 percent of all matter, space
and energy has been removed and there is no known

85
metaphysical precept or rule of inference preventing one from
removing the remaining one percent. The universe is therefore
contingent.

4. The Fallacy of Composition

Skeptics will sometimes object to this line of reasoning by
suggesting that it commits the fallacy of composition. This is the
error of thinking that what is true of the parts of the whole is
necessarily true of the whole. To reason that, One brick weighs
five pounds; the building is made of bricks; therefore, the
building weighs five pounds is clearly fallacious. In a like case,
even if each thing in the universe is contingent, one might ask why
the universe as a whole must be contingent.
There are two things that need to be said in response.
The first is that not every inference from parts to whole
commits the fallacy of composition and whether or not it does
depends on the subject under discussion. If each brick in the
building is red, it does follow that the building as a whole is red.
The fallacy only occurs in certain casesincluding those where
the property belonging to the parts and imputed to the whole is
quantitative. If A and B each weigh five pounds then, obviously, A
and B together will weigh ten pounds. But if A and B are red then,
just as obviously, A and B together will also be red. But which
case applies to the inference from the contingency of parts to the
contingency of the whole? It is clearly the second. Contingency is
not a quantity but a quality. If A and B are contingent
individually they are contingent together and the burden of proof
is on the objector to explain why a contingent collection of
contingent things becomes necessary once it reaches a certain
size.34

34 This issue came up in the famous debate between the Frederick Copleston
and Bertrand Russell. Copleston insisted that, a total has no reality apart from
its members, and that, if each thing in the universe is contingent, the universe
itself is contingent. Russell, in response, accused Copleston of committing the
fallacy of composition. Every man who exists has a mother, Russell said, and
it seems to me your argument is that therefore the human race must have a
mother.
But Russell, as Copleston went on to explain, had misunderstood the
argument. It is not that a series of phenomenal causes must have a phenomenal
causethat would not, ex hypothesi, escape the regress, which is the very point

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 The second thing which needs to be said in response to the
suggestion that the proponent of the Cosmological Argument
commits the fallacy of composition is that the proponent of the
Cosmological Argument does not even need to establish that the
universe as a whole is contingent in order to reach his
conclusionas we shall shortly see. The question can just be
ignored and, so long as there is a single contingent thing (a
typewriter, rock, or jellyfish) the inferential progression to a
necessary being is inescapable.35

5. The Impossibility of an Infinite Regress

Allowing that contingent things stand in need of explanation by
means of something external to themselves and that the universe
is a collection of contingent things, a skeptic might be tempted to
appeal to the eternality of the universe. If the chain of causation
or explanation recedes into the infinite past, then one might argue
with Hume that for each and every state of the universe q there is
a prior state p which caused it, and so on, ad infinitum, with no
state being left without explanation. However, multiplying the
number of contingent things, even to infinity, fails to solve the
problem.
Leibniz himself anticipates this objection and, in response to it,
asks us to imagine a book on geometry that was copied from an
earlier book, which was copied from a still earlier book, and so on,
to eternity past. "It is obvious," he says, "that although we can
explain a present copy of the book from the previous book from
which it was copied, this will never lead us to a complete
explanation, no matter how many books back we go." Even given
an infinite series of copies, we will always be left wondering why

Copleston was pressing. The argument, rather, is that the only sufficient
explanation for series of phenomenal cases is a transcendent cause.

35 The cosmological argument is reducible to the proposition, If a contingent
being exists, then a Necessary Being exists. Copleton argued that this is a
logically necessary proposition but not, strictly speaking, an analytic
proposition. And this is because it is logically necessary only given that there
exists a contingent being, which has to be discovered by experience, and the
proposition, A contingent being exists is not analytic. Though once you know
that there is a contingent being, he emphasised, it follows of necessity that
there is a Necessary Being.

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that particular book with those particular contents exists to be
copied; that is, we will still be left without a sufficient reason for
the existence of the book.
Another analogy has been used in recent discussions and is
helpful here.36 We are asked to imagine a man who has never
seen a train before and arrives at a crossing as a long freight train
is filing slowly past. Intrigued, he asks what is causing the boxcars
to move and is told that the boxcar before him is being pulled by
the boxcar in front of it, which is being pulled by the boxcar in
front of it, and so on, down the line. It is obvious that we have not
given the man a sufficient reason for the movement of the boxcar
and that his question will remain unanswered even if we tell him
that the boxcars are connected together in a circle, or that the
whole universe is cluttered with slow-moving boxcars all
intricately interconnected, or even that there are infinitely many
boxcars. This analogy presents the problem in terms of a causal
series but it can also be framed in terms of a simultaneity of
causes: The rotation of meshing cogwheels in a watch cannot be
explained without reference to a spring, even if there are infinitely
many cogwheels.
In The Coherence of Theism, Swinburne finds and precisely
articulates the problem under discussion: A series of causes and

36 This analogy is used in discussions of the version of the cosmological
argument presented by Thomas Aquinas, which focuses on the necessity of a
first cause, but it is included here because it helps to bring out the problem with
infinite regresses generally.
The version of the cosmological argument presented by Leibniz and the
version presented by Aquinas are similar but it is helpful to remember the
difference between them. Aquinas draws our attention to the fact that causes
and effects cannot coherently recede into the infinite pastas here illustrated by
the boxcar and cogwheel analogies. His argument therefore suggests the
necessity of an Uncaused Cause. Leibniz, by contrast, draws our attention to the
fact that explanations cannot coherently recede into the infinite pasthere
illustrated by the geometry book analogy. His argument therefore suggests the
necessity of a Self-Explanatory Explanation.
The version given by Leibniz is, as I said, more difficult to refute. For even if
one successfully argued against Aquinas that an infinite series of causes and
effects provides a cause for every effect and therefore leaves nothing
unaccounted for, he would not have accounted for why the series of causes and
effects exists in the first place. Leibnizs Principle of Sufficient Reason would
still be violated with respect to the existence of the universe. In this connection,
see also the next footnote, number 37.

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effects sufficiently explains itself if and only if none of the causes is
itself a member of the collection of effects. If the cause of a lamp
lighting up is its being connected to a battery, and the cause of
a second lamp lighting up is its being connected to
a second battery, then the cause of the two lamps lighting up is
accounted fora principle that would hold even given infinite
lamps and batteries.37 However, this principle cannot account for
cases where each event is both the effect of a preceding cause and
the cause of a succeeding effect. For if Event A causes Event
B which causes Event C which causes Event D, then, properly
speaking, the cause of Event D is not Event C but Event A. An
infinite series of causally concatenated events is therefore like an
infinite number of lamps all wired together in a vast network in
which a battery is nowhere to be found.
Peter Kreef calls this the "buck-passing" problem. In seeking
the ultimate explanation for any particular thing, each and every
thing we isolate passes the buck: It refers us to some earlier thing,
which thing, in turn, refers us to some still earlier thing, and so on,
to infinity. Here the sufficient reason we seek is like a Mysterious
Book. When I ask you for it, and you tell me, "My wife has it,"
and when I ask your wife for it, she tells me, "My neighbour has
it," and when I ask her neighbour for it, he tells me, "My teacher
has it," and so on, forever, with the result that no one actually
has the book. And likewise, if each and every particular thing is
explained by some earlier thing, no particular thing contains the
ultimate explanation for its own existence or the existence of any
other thing.
Appealing to an infinite regress of explanations and causes is no
better than suggesting that, when it comes to the universe, there is
no cause or explanation. Both responses violate the Principle of
Sufficient Reason. Schopenhauer aptly dubbed such reasoning
a commission of, "the taxicab fallacy." The Principle of Sufficient

37 It is here that the force of Leibniz's argument comes through clearly. For even
if the scenario described reflected the reality (that is, even if each effect could be
paired up with a unique companion cause in causal isolation) we would still lack
a sufficient reason for the existence of the collection of causes and effects. In
other words, if the cause of a lamp lighting up is its being connected to a battery,
we have explained why the lamp lit upbut we have not explained why the lamp
or battery exist in the first place.

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Reason is a lynchpin of rational thought for atheist and theist alike
and all a proponent of the Cosmological Argument is doing is
inviting us to follow it out to its ultimate logical consequence. The
atheist, seeing where the principle is leading, cannot simply
dismiss it like a hired hack because it has already taken him as far
as he is willing to go.

6. The Argument
The main thrust of the foregoing discussion can now be
compendiated into the following form,

P1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its

existence, either in the necessity of its own nature, or
in an external cause. (The Principle of Sufficient Reason).

P2. The universe exists.

P3. Therefore, the universe has an explanation of its

existence. (This follows from P1 and P2).

P4. The only possible explanation of the existence of

the universe is God, or something like God. (Since, as
we saw, it cannot be found in any individual thing in the
universe; nor in the collection of things that is the universe; nor
in earlier states of the universeeven if these regress infinitely.)

C. Therefore God, or something like God, exists.

7. Conclusion
Premise 2 is self-evident; and Premise 1 and 3 have both been
defended: We have seen that denying an ultimate explanation or
cause of contingent things (either simpliciter, or by appealing to
an infinite regress of causes and explanations) violates the
Principle of Sufficient Reason. It follows that we are obligated, on
pain of irrationality, to postulate a terminus to the series of causes
and explanations. But why should we accept Premise 4 and the
Conclusion; that is, why think that the terminus implicated is
God?
Just as it is possible to make inferences about a writer or
painter from his or her artistic output, so it is possible to make
inferences about a cause from its effect. And what can we infer

90
about the cause of the universe from its effect? We begin to
answer this question by asking another: What is the universe? The
universe is all existing space, time, matter and energy. And it
follows that the cause of the universe is something immaterial and
beyond space and time. Only two entities fit this description: An
abstract object and God. But abstract objects are by definition
lacking in causal powers and so cannot possibly be capable of
creating the universe. The entity implicated by the Cosmological
Argument is therefore God, or something like God: a
transcendent being of unimaginable intelligence and creative
power. "Or," quips William Lane Craig, "if you prefer not to use
the term God, you may simply call it the extremely powerful,
uncaused, necessarily-existing, noncontingent, nonphysical,
immaterial eternal being who created the entire universe and
everything in it."

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 92
 11
The Kalam Cosmological Argument

The Kalam Cosmological Argument is named for its origins in

Islamic scholastic theology but it owes its current form and
notoriety to the American analytic philosopher William Lane
Craig. The argument, as Craig presents it, rests on three premises
which are all striking in their simplicity,
P1 Whatever begins to exist has a cause
P2 The universe began to exist
P3 Therefore, the universe has a cause

Like the Modal Argument just discussed, the Kalam Argument

begins by insisting that a basic feature of the universe stands in
need of explanation and then goes on to argue that the only
possible explanation for it is God. However, there is an obvious
and important difference between them: While the Modal
Argument unfolds from the undeniable postulate that the universe
contains contingent things, the Kalam Argument claims that the
universe began to existand this is somewhat controversial. Until
the development and confirmation of the Big Bang theory about
sixty years ago, most scientists denied the finitude of the universe
and some still do. But the logical structure of the argument is
airtight and it can, moreover, marshal philosophical and scientific
evidence of remarkable force to the defence of its one
controversial premiseas we shall see. Thus philosopher of
religion Michael Martin, though himself an atheist, concedes that
the Kalam Cosmological Argument is, "among the most
sophisticated and well argued in contemporary theological
philosophy."
In the following paragraphs, I will summarise Craig's defence
of each of the above premises and then draw out their theistic
implications. However, I think it will be helpful to first recall a
proviso from my Introduction: Outside of mathematics and

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symbolic logic, there is no certain knowledge.38 Here, as in every
other philosophical and scientific enterprise, we will be dealing
with arguments whose premises cannot be proved but must be
weighed for their plausibility. The question we must ask of each of
the three premises below is not, "Could it possibly be false?" since
almost everything, including the reality of the external world,
could possibly be false. The question we must ask is, "Is it more
plausibly true than its negation?" And if it is (and notwithstanding
a lack of absolute certainty) we are rationally obligated to give it
our assent.

1. Whatever Begins to Exist Has a Cause

Craig gives three reasons why we should accept the first premise:
It is intuitive; its negation entails absurdities we do not observe;
and it is always confirmed and never falsified by scientific
evidence.

1.1 It Is Confirmed by Rational Intuition

Denying the proposition, Whatever begins to exist has a cause
entails a commitment to its negation; namely, it commits us to
saying that something can come into being from nothing
uncaused. It is difficult to disagree with Craig when he suggests
that this is something which no rational mind sincerely believes.
The idea that things could pop into existence out of literal
nothingness and for no reason is paradigmatically
counterintuitive. In fact, the law of causality is arguably the most
important first principle of scientific reasoningone which was
learned at the dawn of scientific thought in ancient Greece and
whose logic is captured by the lapidary statement of Parmenides:
Ex nihilo nihil fit: From nothing, nothing comes.

1.2 Its Negation Entails Absurdities

38 Recall again the problem of induction. In inductive reasoning, one makes a series of
observations and infers a conclusion. For instance, having observed many swans and
found them all to be white, it seems valid to conclude, All swans are white. But no
number of confirming observations, however large, can prove a universal generalisation.
Only analytic arguments can be proved deductively; synthetic arguments, however
reliable, are always in principle falsifiable.

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Moreover, if it were the case that things could pop into being
from nothing uncaused then why dont we observe it? Since
nothing is a principle of universal negation, there is nothing about
nothing that could possibly constrain it from discharging tables,
topaz and tapeworms into existence at every point in space and at
every moment in time. Indeed, it would be more reasonable to
expect the whole universe to be cluttered with such metaphysical
jetsam than for nothing to produce something only once at the
moment of the Big Bang and forever after remain conveniently
quiescent. The first premise of the argument is therefore
confirmed (and its negation disconfirmed) by observation.

1.3 It Is Always Confirmed, Never Falsified

Inductive reasoning (reasoning from particular instances to a
general principle) lies at the very heart of the scientific method.
The scientist makes many observations, discerns a pattern,
formulates a generalisation and infers a theory. The proposition,
Whatever begins to exist has a cause should therefore
commend itself to every scientifically literate mind as more
plausibly true than false. And this because every observation
confirms it and no observation falsifies it: Whenever we observe
something begin to exist, we observe that it has a cause.39 It may
not quite qualify as a logical truism but it is, at the very least, "a
powerful inductive inference," whose negation is ad hoc and
without rational or evidential support of any kind.
In view of the three reasons just given the first premise is on
balance far more plausibly true than the alternative.

39 Skeptics often point to quantum physics as supplying a plausible exception to
this precept since, on some interpretations, subatomic events are described as
being uncaused. There are three points to note. Firstly, quantum physics is an
incomplete field with many competing modelsa number of which are fully
deterministic. Thus quantum physics is not a proven exception. Secondly, even
on the indeterministic interpretation, particles do not come into being out of
nothing uncaused. They arise, notes Craig, as spontaneous fluctuations of the
energy contained in the subatomic vacuum which is the indeterministic cause of
their origination. Popular magazine articles describing models in which the
universe came into being out of nothing are similarly misleading. The
quantum vacuum is not nothing but a sea of roiling energy with a rich
structure subject to physical laws. Neither scenario demonstrates acausality or
ex nihilo origination.

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 2. The Universe Began to Exist
For the second premise, Craig offers scientific support from
thermodynamics and cosmology and philosophical support in the
form of arguments which demonstrate the metaphysical
paradoxicality of an infinite past.

2.1 The Second Law of Thermodynamics

The first piece of evidence is the Second Law of
Thermodynamics. This states that disorder in closed systems
increases irreversibly over time. If a parcel of molecules
introduced into a vacuum flask, for instance, the molecules will
eventually distribute themselves throughout the available space
and thereafter remain in equilibrium. Thermodynamics thus
entails a grim prediction for a physicalistic universe. For if
physicalism is true (that is, if it is true that nothing exists but
matter and its movements and modifications) then the universe
itself is a supermassive closed system that is progressing inexorably
towards a state of final equilibrium or "heat death." Each and
every lightning strike and meal metabolised (together with the
vibration of every atom and the burning of every star) represents
an energy exchange; and each and every energy exchange inches
the universe closer to thermal extinction. As the aeons elapse, the
universe will grow increasingly "cold, dark, dilute and dead,"40
until at last all of physical reality will consist of an inert atomic
soup in which no further energy exchanges are possible.
This cheerless prediction raises an obvious question. If the the
past is infinite and the future heat death of the universe is
unavoidable, why hasn't it already happened? Cosmologists
estimate that the so-called Dark Era just described will occur in
approximately 10100 yearsboth an obscenely vast stretch of time
and an almost nonexistently-tiny fraction of eternity. In fact, so
strange is eternity that, if the past were really infinite, the universe
should have entered the Dark Era an infinite number of years
ago.
The Laws of Thermodynamics therefore disconfirm the
infinitude of the past and support the second premise of the
Kalam Cosmological Argument.

40 William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, p.143.

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2.2 The Big Bang
The second premise is further confirmed by a series of remarkable
scientific discoveries beginning in the early twentieth century. In
the 1920s, Alexander Friedmann and George Lemaitre both
independently inferred from Einstein's equations of General
Relativity that the universe is expandinga theory that was
confirmed empirically when Edwin Hubble observed the red shift
in light from distant galaxies. In 1931, Lemaitre went even
further. He suggested that the observed expansion of the universe,
projected back in time, required us to postulate a smaller and
smaller universe terminating in a "primeval atom" and so an
instant at which all of space and time came into existence.

Representation of the Standard Model of Space-Time

Almost every major cosmologist at the time opposed Lemaitres

theory with many openly resisting its religious implicationsa
rather unscientific complaint that was surely exacerbated by the
fact that Lemaitre was both a physicist and a Roman Catholic
priest. The preferred theory was the Steady State Model of Fred
Hoyle and, ironically, it was Hoyle who coined the phrase Big
Bang in a throwaway remark on the BBC while discussing their
rival views. By the 1950s support was split but the discovery and
confirmation of the cosmic microwave background radiation in
1964 vindicated Lemaitre.
Opposition to a cosmic beginning continued with many
alternative models being presented. However, none of these have

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prevailed and the Big Bang theory remains the accepted
cosmological model of the universe. More recently, something of a
watershed seems to have been reached. In 2003, three leading
cosmologistsArvin Borde, Alan Guth and Alexander Vilenkin
were able to prove a theorem that any universe that has been
expanding throughout its history must have a space-time
boundary. The so-called Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem is also
independent of the various possible descriptions of the universe
prior to Planck time. This is important because our lack of
knowledge about the early universe has invited speculation about
its possible past-eternity. The theorem even applies to the
multiverse hypothesis in which those opposed to a beginning to
our universe have often taken refuge. Vilenkin himself is very
blunt about the implications of all this. He writes,

It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men

and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable
man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer
hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is
no escape. They have to face the problem of a cosmic
beginning.

The first premise of the Kalam Cosmological Argument is

therefore consistent with our current best understanding of the
universe.

2.3 Philosophical Support

The philosophical arguments for the beginning of the universe
draw on the idea that the existence of an actual infinite number of
things entails logical contradictions and is therefore impossible.
However, before going further, it is important to make a
distinction between an actual infinity and a potential infinity.
A potential infinity is simply the lack of a limit on the increase
of some quantity or duration. Consider the plight of the adulteress
Francesca in Dante's Inferno. Francesca died in 1285 and in
Dante's poem was assigned to the Second Circle of hell for her
affair with Paolo. Damnation is eternal in duration. But suppose
that Dante were immortal and visited Francesca an infinite
number of times for all eternity. Whenever Dante visits Francesca
and asks, "How long have you been in hell?" her answer will
always be a period of finite durationspecifically, the year of

98
Dante's visit minus 1285. Or else consider the ancient Chinese
paradox of the staff that is cut in half, then into fourths, then into
eighths, then into sixteenths, and so on, forever. Even given
eternity, the "infinitieth"" division will never be made. In both
examples infinity is potential: It is something that is forever
approached and never reached.
Potential infinities can and do existthe number line being an
obvious example. An actual infinity is different: It consists of an
infinite number of discrete members and this entails logical
absurdities. In this connection, the reader may recall the thought
experiment by David Hilbert that was discussed in Chapter 4.
Hilbert asks us to imagine a fully occupied hotel with infinitely
many rooms. Since the hotel is fully occupied (there is a flesh-and-
blood guest in each and every room) it cannot possibly
accommodate a single new guest. However, by moving the guest
in Room 1 to Room 2, the guest in Room 2 to Room 3, and so
on, to infinity, Room 1 will be made available and a new guest
can be accommodated after all.41 This is paradoxical: It is not
logically possible that a hotel can and cannot accommodate a new
guest.
A similar problem arises if the past is infinite. Consider the
case of two planets orbiting the sun at different speeds; suppose,
that is, that for every orbit which Saturn completes, Jupiter
completes two. It follows that the longer the two planets orbit, the
farther Saturn falls behind: When Jupiter has completed ten
orbits, Saturn will have completed only five; when Jupiter has
completed twenty million orbits, Saturn will have completed ten
million, and so on. The number of times each planet has orbited
the sun and the differential between those two numbers are
objective facts about the world. However, if both planets have
been orbiting from eternity past, then they will already have
completed infinite orbits and this entails absurdities. For example:

41 Recall also that if every guest moves into a room whose room number is
double that of his own (that is, if the guest in Room 1 moves to Room 2, the
guess in Room 2 to Room 4, Room 3 to 6, and so on, to infinity) all of the
infinitely many odd-numbered rooms will be available and the hotel will be able
to accommodate an infinite number of new guestsand since this process can
be repeated indefinitely, the hotel will be able to accommodate infinitely many
new guests infinitely many times.

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We can ask the seemingly redundant question, Which planet has
completed the most orbits? But the answer is that both planets
have orbited the sun an infinite, and therefore equal, number of
times. Such absurdities abound in a past-eternal universe. To
mention just one more: Tristram Shandy, the fictional hero of a
novel by Laurence Sterne, writes his autobiography so slowly and
carefully that it takes him one year to record the events of a single
day. If Tristram is mortal he can, of course, never finish his book.
But if he lives from eternity past and into eternity future, there will
be a one-to-one correspondence of days to years (i.e., an infinite
number) and so Tristram can accomplish the impossible.
Paradoxes of this sort have led many philosophers to the
conclusion that the infinitude of the past is a metaphysical
impossibilitywhich further supports the second premise.

3. Therefore, the Universe Has a Cause

The third premise follows by tautology from the first two: If
everything that begins to exist has a cause, and the universe began
to exist, then the universe has a cause. But why think that the
cause of the universe is God or anything like God? According to
Craig, the divine properties of the cause of the universe follow by
entailment from the initial syllogism of the Kalam Argument.

3.1 The Cause Must be Transcendent and Uncaused

The universe is all of space-time reality and its contents. And since
the cause of the universe must exist outside of the universe, the
required entity must be timeless, spaceless, immaterial and (since
it brought all of material reality into existence) unimaginably
powerful. It must, moreover, be absolutely first and uncaused to
avoid an infinite regress of causes, while the principle of
parsimony further suggests that the unicity of the first cause
should be assumed in the absence of any reason to postulate
multiple causes. So far, the Kalam Argument is leading to the
same conclusion as the Modal Argument of the previous chapter:
A transcendent Uncaused Cause of the universe. However, the
Kalam Argument is able to add a critical refinement.

3.2 The Cause Must Have Conscious Volition

Whatever exists outside of time and space is, by metaphysical
necessity, eternal and changeless. Only two entities fit this

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description: an abstract object and God. And abstract objects
(numbers, sets, propositions) are by definition causally effete. This,
too, was established by the Modal Argument. But in the Kalam
Argument the eternality of the cause and the temporality of the
effect raise a problem whose only possible solution is inescapably
theistic. For as Craig notes, if the cause were simply a
mechanically operating set of necessary and sufficient conditions
existing from eternity, then why would not the effect also exist
from eternity? By way of illustration: The cause of water boiling
is its being at a temperature of 100 degreesand it cannot boil
until, or fail to boil after, it reaches this temperature. A universe
that begins to exist due to a timeless and unchanging cause is
therefore equivalent to water that begins to boil despite having
been at a temperature of 100 degrees from past eternity. The only
way to explain an eternal cause with a temporal effect is to
postulate agent causation: A timeless and unchanging conscious
being that brings about an effect at a chosen point in time through
the exercise of its free will.

4. Conclusion
We have seen that the first premise of the Kalam Argument is
intuitive; consistent with observation; and always confirmed and
never falsified by scientific evidence. And we have seen that the
second premise is supported by the laws of thermodynamics and
our current best understanding of cosmology as well as forceful
philosophical arguments against the infinitude of the past. The
conclusion that the universe began to exist and therefore requires
a transcendent cause of its existence follows by inferential
necessity. But while the modal argument also requires us to
postulate a transcendent cause of the universe, the Kalam
Argument allows us to impute an additional theistic property to it;
namely, voluntary agency. We are led to conclude, the Kalam
Argument suggests, that there is an uncaused, eternal, changeless,
timeless, immaterial and unimaginably powerful agent who freely
elected to bring all of material reality into existence.

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 102
 12
The Argument From Cosmic Teleology

Imagine that you are standing by a garden wall watching a

housefly crawl along its surface. Suddenly, a small dart flits past
your ear and pins the fly to the wall. If a marksman is nowhere in
sight, you may assume that a stray dart has entered your garden
and impaled the fly by chance. However, suppose that as you
stroll along the wall you see a second, third, fourth and fifth fly all
meet the same fate. At some point you will be rationally obligated
to reject your stray dart hypothesis and postulate the existence of a
hidden marksman of extraordinary visual acuity and skill. And
this is because the observed phenomenon is credibly probable on
the hypothesis that there is someone aiming the darts and
incredibly improbable on the hypothesis that there is nota
difference between the two hypotheses that is amplified by each
new fly that is hit.
The reasoning used in this example is analogous to that of the
Teleological Argument for the existence of God. Formed from the
Greek root telos, meaning goal or purpose, teleological
arguments suggest that our universe is characterised by strange
congruences which, like the darts and flies in my example, are so
unlikely to occur by chance that they implicate the activity of an
intelligent agent. And one of the most recent and most powerful
arguments for the existence of God applies such teleological
reasoning to the newly discovered fine tuning of the universe.

1. Cosmological Fine Tuning

Over the last 40 or 50 years, cosmologists studying the initial
conditions of the universe have made a surprising discovery. They
have discovered that the laws and constants of physics all fell
within an astoundingly narrow life-permitting range at the Big
Bang. For ease of understanding, imagine a panel of dials. The
notches on the dials represent the values which the physical
constants and initial conditions could have taken during the
formation of the universe. In order for intelligent life to be
possible, each and every dial needed to be set to a very particular

103
valuea value which it did, in fact, take. It is in this sense that the
universe is said to be, "fine tuned," for life.

2. Requirements for Intelligent Life

Before looking at examples of fine tuning, it will help to clarify the
argument if we first note the minimal requirements for intelligent
life. And this is because the conditions that must be met to
produce them will approximate the flies in my opening
example. The skeptic takes the view that all these hits are to be
explained by chance; while the proponent of the Teleological
Argument insists that they cannot be so explained and therefore
implicate the activity of an intelligent agent.
The minimal requirements for intelligent life are carbon,
planets and stars and the conditions that must be met to produce
them are, as we shall see, manifold. The first, carbon, is uniquely
suited for the formation of intelligent life: Because it can enter into
many different chemical combinations to produce new
compounds that are stable over long periods of time, more
information can be stored in carbon compounds than in those of
any other elements. 42 Moreover, carbon can combine with
hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen to form long and complex chain
molecules called polymers. And when these information-rich
polymers combine with calcium for structural rigidity, they are
able to become a, continuing independent component of the
universe. It is highly doubtful whether there could be any other
kind of intelligent life.43 And if intelligent carbon-based life is to
exist, it will further require a moderate range of temperatures and
pressures and a solid substrate on which to live. Stars and planets
are also therefore indispensable.

42 Barrow and Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, 1986
43 It has been suggested that silicon could replace carbon in this role. It hardly matters
that this seems doubtful (silicon compounds do not have the stability of carbon
compounds) because the conditions necessary for the evolution of silicon-based life are
very similar to those necessary for the evolution of carbon-based life. The fine tuning
argument would not therefore need much alteration to account for this possibility.

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2.1 Forces and Constants
All the forces and constants of physics are fine tuned to produce
the above requirements. The strong nuclear force, for instance,
binds atoms together.
If it were fractionally weaker (000.6 instead of 000.7) the
universe would contain nothing but hydrogen and complex
biochemistry would be impossible; if it were a comparable fraction
stronger, all the hydrogen in the universe would have fused into
heavier elements with the same fatal result. The gravitational
constant is the attractive force braking the expansion of the
universe since the Big Bang; the cosmological constant is the
repulsive force driving it. Both forces must be delicately balanced
to a precision of, respectively, 1 part in 1060 and 1 part in 10120. If
either of them were altered, the universe would either fly apart or
collapse to a singularity. If the electromagnetic constant were
altered beyond a precision of around 4 percent, stable chemical
bonds could not form. If the weak nuclear force were altered by
even 1 part in 10100, stars, which produce carbon and sustain life,
could not form.

2.2 Initial Conditions

The initial conditions present at the beginning of the universe
were similarly ideal for the eventual development of intelligent
life. For example: an initial state of inhomogeneity in the
distribution of matter was required to ensure a universe with
usable energy.44 This is called, low entropy and it has been
calculated that the odds of the initial low entropy state of our
universe are 1 in 1010^123a ludicrous improbability and a subject
to which we shall return. Meanwhile, if the ratio of masses for
protons and electrons were altered, DNA could not have formed.
If the velocity of light were altered, stars would be either too
luminous for life or not luminous enough. If the mass excess of
neutron over proton were greater, there would be too few heavy

44 A point that was discussed in the previous chapter. Energy exchanges increase the
disorder of closed systemsa process which, according to the second law of
thermodynamics, is irreversible. It follows that the initial order of a closed system is a
measure of its usable energy. Thus if physical reality is all that exists, the universe itself is a
supermassive closed system that required an initial state of order to supply usable energy
for the evolution of life.

105
elements for life; if it were smaller, stars would quickly collapse
into black holes with the same fatal result. The density of dark
energy, the ratio of baryons to antibaryons and the number of
spatial dimensions were all similarly felicitous.45
Some popular examples of fine tuning are disputed and there
are tricky philosophical debates about how probabilities are to be
calculated.46 Nevertheless, there is broad agreement in physical
cosmology on the general claim of the last two paragraphs;
namely, that during the Big Bang the physical constants and
initial conditions all fell within an astoundingly narrow range that
ensured both the formation of the building blocks of intelligent life
and the stars and planets needed to provide a suitable
environment for intelligent life should it develop. The words of the
physicist Freeman Dyson reflect the view of many when
contemplating fine tuning. The more I examine the universe and
study the details of its architecture, he said, the more evidence I
find that the universe in some sense knew we were coming.
Our explanandum, or thing to be explained, is this apparent
conspiracy of the early universe to facilitate life.

3. An Attempt to Deny the Explanandum

Given the implications of fine tuning, the temptation among
skeptics to deny it out of hand is understandable. Outside of
cosmology, some have attempted to do so by arguing that,
however the universe turned out, life of one kind or another could
have evolved in it. The suggestion is that arguments from fine
tuning confuse cause and effect: It is not the universe that is fine
tuned for life; it is life that is fine tuned for the universe. The logic
of this objection is nicely captured by Douglas Adams famous

45 Lists of fine tuning parameters vary from 22 to as many as 99. The philosopher John
Leslie finds this fact relevant to the force of the argument. Clues heaped upon clues, he
notes, can constitute weighty evidence despite doubts about each element in the pile.
46 One attempt to hamstring the discussion echoes the Humean uniqueness objection to
the cosmological argument discussed in the Introduction. Its proponent suggests that it is
meaningless to speak of the probability of fine tuning because we only have one observed
case of universe to work with. This objection assumes a frequentist interpretation of
probabilitythe view that probability should be calculated statistically from many observed
cases. However, in the absence of any physical reason to think that the probabilities are
constrained, we are justified in assuming a principle of indifference with respect to
them. The point has been rigorously defended by the philosopher Robin Collins.

106
puddle analogy. Against the claim that the world appears to be
custom-made to accommodate us, he wrote,

This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one

morning and thinking, This is an interesting world I find
myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather
neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have
been made to have me in it!

The analogy helps to bring out the error underlying the

objection. 47 For it incorrectly equates infinite possible puddle-
holes which can all accommodate a volume of water with the idea
that infinite possible initial conditions of the universe could all
accommodate intelligent life. But unlike puddle-water which can
sit in any puddle-hole, intelligent life could not exist in any
universe. In fact, adjusting the physical constants and initial
conditions by even a hairsbreadth would have catastrophic
consequences for even the most exotic forms of life imaginable. By
life, scientists mean that property of organisms to take in food,
extract energy from it, adapt, grow, and reproduce. No form of
life, so defined, can exist in a universe without chemistry; or one
with only heavy elements; or one containing nothing but
hydrogen; or one without stars and planets; or one that has
collapsed to a singularity.

4. Explanatory Options
Fine tuning, then, cannot be credibly denied and so it must be
explained. Much of the debate has centred on three explanatory
options: chance, necessity and some sort of intelligent agency.

47 A similar, and similarly flawed, objection: Every universe is equiprobable; we
cannot observe universes that don't allow for our existence; therefore, we should not be
surprised to observe that the one in which we do exist allows for our existence. Leslie and
Swinburne both offer illustrations to expose the fallacy in this objection. In Leslie's, a
man stands before a firing squad consisting of one hundred trained marksmen. The order
to fire is given, the guns roarand the man observes that he is still alive. Craig draws out
the point of the illustration succinctly: "While it is correct that you should not be
surprised that you don't observe that you are dead, it does not follow that you should not
be surprised that you do observe that you are alive."

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4.1 Chance Operating in a Single Universe
The idea that fine tuning is to be explained by sheer chance
operating in a single universe has not commended itself due to the
crushing improbabilities involved. This is a point the dial analogy
I offered above fails to convey. Consider, then, a few numbers
approaching the dimensions of those with which we are
concerned. The approximate number of cells in your body is 1014;
that is, a 1 followed by 14 zeroes. The number of seconds that
have elapsed since the beginning of the universe is 1017. And the
total number of subatomic particles in the universe is around
1080. With those numbers in mind, recall that the gravitational
constant is fine tuned to 1 part in 1060. To appreciate just how
improbable this is, consider that the dial for the gravitational
constant has three times as many notches as seconds which have
elapsed since the Big Bang. And if it were shifted just one notch in
either direction, the universe would be life-prohibiting. The
cosmological constant, meanwhile, is fine tuned to 1 part in 10120.
This dial has more notches than there are elementary particles in
the entire universe. And yet both numbers are completely dwarfed
by the odds of the initial low-entropy state of our universe
necessary for life. This, recall, was 1 in 10 to the power of 10123. It
is impossible to grasp this number. It is impossible even to write it
down in ordinary decimal notation because it contains more
zeroes than there are elementary particles in the entire
universe. Mathematicians define odds of less than 1:1050 as,
"prohibitively improbable," which is another way of saying, "a
zero probability," which is another way of saying, "impossible." It
is for this reason that, according to Antony Flew, virtually no
scientist today claims that fine tuning was purely a result of chance
factors at work in a single universe.48

48 Antony Flew is the British philosopher who renounced atheismpartly in response to
the discovery of fine tuning, and partly in response to developments in molecular biology
to be discussed in the next chapter. Discussing his conversion, Flew says,
There were two factors in particular that were decisive. One was my
growing empathy with the insight of Einstein and other noted
scientists that there had to be an Intelligence behind the integrated
complexity of the physical Universe. The second was my own insight
that the integrated complexity of life itselfwhich is far more complex
than the physical Universecan only be explained in terms of an
Intelligent Source.

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4.2 Chance Operating in a Multiverse
In an effort to salvage chance as an entertainable explanation for
fine tuning, some scientists have resorted to postulating a
multiverse. If our universe is one of almost infinitely many, each of
which has random laws and constants, then the law of large
numbers would appear to diminish the improbability: It seems
reasonable enough to suppose that at least one of these universes
would be fine tuned for the development of lifeand, of course,
since observable universes are constrained by the necessity of
being conducive to the evolution of intelligent observers, we,
being intelligent observers, happen to find ourselves in a universe
that is so constrained.
The most obvious flaw in the multiverse theory is its amazing
extravagance. Any theory which conjures forth trillions of
unobservable universes to explain the conditions in the one we do
observe can scarcely be thought to satisfy the principle of
parsimony.49 Moreover, a supermassive array of universes raises
the question of the law of laws governing the multiverse: Either
this is configured to exhaust every possible permutation of
parameters until it generates a universe like ours, or else the
parameters of our universe were included in the finite set of
permutations which the multiverse could generate. The problem
is that neither assumption removes the fine tuning. Both imply
that the multiverse was somehow fine tuned to guarantee the
production of a fine tuned universe. The multiverse theory,
nevertheless, is the most tenable hypothesis available to the skeptic
confronted with fine tuning.

4.3 Necessity
The final explanatory option available to the skeptic is surely
something of a last resort. It suggests that the physical constants
and initial conditions of the universe may all cohere in a way that


49 William Lane Craig cautions us not to overlook this curious fact: In response
to the evidence for cosmological fine tuning, hardboiled physicalists are taking
refuge in the metaphysics of multiple universes which are all in principle
undetectable. It surely is, as he suggests, "a backhanded compliment" to the
force of the argument.

109
is physically necessitated. Put slightly differently, the proponent of
this theory suggests that a life-prohibiting universe is impossible.
The physicist Paul Davies calls this, promissory triumphalism,
and states that it is demonstrably false that there can only be
one way that the universe can exist. Certainly, it is a radical view
which requires, but finds, no strong proof. It is simply put forward
as a bare possibility.
A further weakness with this option is that, even if for the sake
of argument it is granted, it cannot explain the initial conditions.
The low entropy state; the density of dark energy, the ratio of
baryons to antibaryonsall these things are simply put in as
initial conditions and are independent of the laws of physics. As
Davies reminds us, there are no laws of initial conditions. Thus,
even conceding the flagrantly ad hoc premise, the conclusion
does not follow. Davies, entertaining it, still concludes that, The
physical universe does not have to be the way it is: It could have
been otherwise.

4.4 Intelligent Agency

We come at last to the Argument from Cosmic Teleology. This
suggests that if there is no God it is unreasonably improbable that
the constants and initial conditions of the universe will be such as
to bring about the evolution of intelligent life; while if there is a
God it is highly probable that they will have this feature. The fine
tuning of the universe, the argument suggests, is powerful
inductive evidence for the activity of an intelligent agent during
the formation of the universe.

5. Evaluating the Explanatory Options

In what follows, I will find it helpful to appeal to the following
criteria for evaluating competing hypotheses,

Explanatory scope The best hypothesis will explain more of

the evidence than any other

Parsimony The best hypothesis will make the

fewest assumptions and therefore be the simplest

Degree of Ad Hoc-ness The best hypothesis will avoid

making unsupported adjustments just to avoid falsification

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 Plausibility The best hypothesis will fit in with more of our
background beliefs than any other

Proceeding now in ascending order of probability: The hypothesis

that the laws and initial conditions somehow cohered by physical
necessity is parsimonious but it fails every other criteria. Since
there is no independent reason to support the hypothesis outside
of a desire to circumvent theism,it is paradigmatically ad hoc and
implausible; and since even if there were such a reason it still
could not possibly explain the initial conditions, it also lacks
explanatory scope. The hypothesis that fine tuning can be
explained by chance operating in a single universe is likewise
parsimonious but comes to utter grief on the first and last
criterion. The improbabilities involved are simply prohibitive on
this assumptiona fact that is reflected by the lack of support for
it among cosmologists.
The debate, as already implied, is therefore between the
multiverse and some sort of intelligent agency. However, we have
already seen that the multiverse theory is unparsimonious in the
extreme. It is the height of irrationality, notes Swinburne, to
postulate an infinite number of universes never causally connected
with each other merely to avoid the hypothesis of theism. And
we have also seen that it requires postulating a metalaw governing
the ensemble of worlds to ensure that it exhausts the sum of
possible initial conditions in order to produce a fine tuned
universean ad hoc feature of the theory which itself assumes a
degree of fine tuning. And a final entailment of the hypothesis
(one which has not yet been mentioned but which surely counts
against its plausibility) is this: The existence of an absurd and
terrifying kaleidoscope world in which every possibility is realised:
Infinite versions of you and me in infinite states of terror and
ecstasy.
So long as one is free of a dispositional resistance to the
supernatural, theism clearly satisfies the criteria better than every
rival hypothesis. It tidily explains the evidence; it is parsimonious
in its postulation of a single cause; and it is not ad hoc since there
are independent grounds for believing that a Creator and
Designer of the universe exists; namely, the Modal Cosmological
Argument and the Kalam Cosmological Argument already
discussed.

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 6. Conclusion
The foregoing discussion can now be formalised into an abductive
syllogism,

The surprising fact p is observed

If r were the case, p would follow as a matter of course
Therefore, probably, r

The surprising fact p is, of course, cosmological fine tuning. And

when the candidate r-explanations were discussed and compared
using the accepted criteria for competing hypotheses, theism
clearly emerged as an inference to the best explanation. On the
basis of the three arguments so far given, we are rationally
obligated to conclude that there exists an uncaused, eternal,
changeless, timeless, immaterial and unimaginably powerful agent
who by an act of free will brought the universe into being with the
goal of creating a substrate for intelligent life.

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 13
The Argument From Biological Teleology

Teleological arguments have explanatory force when two

conditions are met: Our observations are congruent with the telos
or intention of an agent and they are prohibitively improbable on
the hypothesis that no such agent exists. Observing many
houseflies on a wall hit by darts, for example, is congruent with
the intention of a marksman to kill flies but prohibitively
improbable on the hypothesis that the darts are hitting the wall at
random. Therefore, the existence of a marksman is implicated. In
the previous chapter, we applied teleological reasoning to the fine
tuning of the physical constants and initial conditions at the Big
Bang. Since this is congruent with the intention of an intelligent
agent to create life, but prohibitively improbable on the
hypothesis that it occurred by chance, an intelligent agent was
implicated.
However, it is important to note that a fine tuned universe is a
necessary but not a sufficient condition for life. 50 It merely
provides a suitable substrate for life without explaining its origin
and development. And this means that the telos implicated by fine
tuning is not fulfilled until life appears and that the appearance of
life is a second and separate explanandum. In the following
paragraphs, it will be my concern to show that the riddle of
improbability presented by the cosmos at large in the case of fine
tuning is repeated at the molecular level in the case of
abiogenesisa fact which both completes and adds significant
force to the conclusion of the previous argument since we will now
be faced with one prohibitive probability balanced upon another.

50 A necessary condition is one that is required before some state of affairs can obtain; a
sufficient condition is one that ensures that some state of affairs obtains. Thus in the case
of triangles: Being a polygon is a necessary condition; being a three-sided polygon is a
sufficient condition.

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 1. Biological Explananda
Fine tuning, as already noted, does not of itself explain the
enigmatic saltus from dead matter to teleological intelligence.
John Locke was especially struck by this problem. It is as
impossible to conceive that ever incogitative Matter should
produce a thinking intelligent Being, he wrote, as that nothing
should of itself produce Matter. Locke registered his puzzlement
almost two hundred years before the publication of On the
Origin of the Species. However, Darwin would have been of
little help. Since his theory of evolution purported to explain how
life developed and speciated from one or a few simple forms,
the origin of those forms lay, and still lies, outside its explanatory
boundary. 51 I will now be arguing that life instantiates three
properties whose origination is as improbable on naturalism as
fine tuning; namely, reproductivity, semantic information and
teleology.

1.1 The Origin of Genetic Reproductivity

Evolution involves the winnowing of random genetic mutations by
natural selectiona process that may govern the development of
organisms on Earth but which cannot explain the origin of those
organisms any more than a computer program can explain the
origin of electrical circuitry. Another way of expressing this point
is to say that evolution presupposes the existence of self-replicating
genetic material. The specific problem to be solved, therefore, is
the emergence of the first genetic replicators from prebiotic
mattera problem whose difficulty is proportional to the
organisation and complexity of those replicators, and that
organisation and complexity is staggering indeed.52
The simplest conceivable biological cell capable of replication
is a miniaturised factory of extraordinary complexity. A key player

51 In Darwins own time biologists assumed that the essence of life was a chemically
simple substance called protoplasm and the cell an undifferentiated globule containing
it. Theories of abiogenesis accordingly envisioned life arising with relative ease from a
process of chemical autogeny that comprised only one or two steps. Such conjectures,
of course, reflected a gross ignorance of the complexity of the cell.
52 Most of the technical details that follow are taken from DNA and the Origin of Life:
Information, Specification and Explanation by Stephen Meyer.

114
in its maintenance is the protein: an aggregate of amino acids
which meshes with other molecules to build key structures that
together regulate the metabolism of the cell, pass materials back
and forth across its membranes, destroy waste and perform many
other tasks. All this swarming activity is coordinated by the
spiralling ladder of DNA whose sugar-and-phosphate backbone
encodes instructions for the assembly of proteins from amino acids
and also performs the key role in genetic replication: Its ladder is
unzipped, copied, transcribed to RNA, and then conveyed to
the amino acids which are assembled into new proteins. Two
points here are critical and problematic. The first is that the errors
which occur during replication produce the mutations on which
natural selection operates. The second is that DNA replication
cannot occur without the proteins which DNA itself constructs. It
follows that evolution depends on a duality of protein
manufacture and composition within the cell which poses a riddle
of causality evolution cannot solve. As Robert Sharpiro explains,

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? DNA holds the
recipe for protein construction. Yet that information cannot be
retrieved or copied without the assistance of proteins. Which
large molecule appeared first? Proteinsthe chicken; or
DNAthe egg?

It is in light of this paradox that Theodosius Dobzhansky has

declared, "prebiological natural selection is a contradiction in
terms." Whatever theory is advanced for the appearance of the
first living cell, it cannot call to its aid the explanatory power of
evolution.

1.2 Semantic Information

Understanding the second property of living matter which
naturalism cannot account for requires a familiarity with two
concepts used in information theory which I will now briefly
describe.
Information theory equates the amount of information
transmitted by an event with the amount of uncertainty
eliminated. Thus rolling a die conveys more information than
flipping a coin because the former eliminates five out of six
possible outcomes and the latter only one out of two. On this view
a random sequence of letters and a meaningful phrase both

115
convey information and must be individuated into the syntactic
and semantic. Consider the following,

dhcrm l chtdjf odjan rkkjfopbq

Torchlight red on sweaty faces

The first sequence is merely syntactic. It conveys information

insofar as it eliminates every other possible sequence of its length
from a total of 26 characters but it has no meaning. The second
sequence is semantic. In addition to eliminating every other
possible sequence of its length from a total of 26 characters it also
communicates a meaning. Interestingly, and significantly, the
information coded in DNA is closer to the second sequence than
the first.53
We can begin to understand this by first noting that while
both of the above sequences are highly improbable only the
second exhibits specification: It is specified to one of a
proportionally infinitesimal number of intelligible sequences
within the total set of possible permutations of letters. 54 And
because this smaller set distinguishes functional from
nonfunctional English sequences, and because the functionality of
alphabetic sequences depends on the preexisting conventions of
the English language, the smaller set qualifies as a conditionally
independent pattern.
All of this can be tidily transposed to biological organisms. To
maintain viability, the cell must manufacture specific molecular
constituents whose three-dimensional shapes require equally
specific arrangements of nucleotide bases. Like the letters of an
alphabet, the chemical properties of DNA allow a vast number of
possible sequences of nucleotide bases. And within that set of
possible sequences, a proportionally infinitesimal number will
produce functional proteins. Because this smaller set distinguishes
functional from nonfunctional proteins, and because the

53 The word semantic here carries a stronger conception of information than that of
information-theorists and a slightly weaker conception that of linguists and ordinary users:
While both natural languages and DNA base sequences are specified only natural
language conveys subjective meaning.
54 Just how infinitesimal readers of Borges The Library of Babel will appreciate.

116
functionality of nucleotide base sequences depends on the
preexisting requirements of protein function, the smaller set again
qualifies as a conditionally independent pattern. What this
means is that any sequence that meets these requirements is not
only improbable, like a sequence of English gibberish, but
specified to a preexisting pattern, like a meaningful phrase: The
nucleotide sequences in the coding regions of DNA exhibit both
syntactic and semantic information. Paul Davies concludes, The
problem of how meaningful or semantic information can emerge
spontaneously from a collection of mindless molecules subject to
blind and purposeless forces presents a deep conceptual
challenge.

1.3 Teleology
Borges, abridging Schopenhauer, said that there is something in
the universe that wants to live and is manifest in all things. It
lies dead in minerals, dormant in plants, dreams in animals and
reaches consciousness in man. Shaw and Bergson spoke of it,
respectively, as the life force and lan vital. Schopenhauer
himself called it wille. Here, concluded Borges, we have the
explanation of that line of Aquinas: Intellectus naturaliter
desiderat esse semper: The mind naturally desires to exist
forever.
The felicity of Borges phrasing masks an infelicity of
philosophy. If a property is dead in some object can that object
be said to instantiate it? In his discussion of the subject, Antony
Flew draws our attention to the obvious point. Living matter, he
writes, possesses a goal-directed organisation that is nowhere
present in the matter that preceded it. Scientists from Haldane to
Ayala concede that teleological language is ineliminable in
evolutionary biologyat the same time as they bridle at its affinity
to natural theology. Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist,
said Haldane. He cannot live without her but he's unwilling to be
seen with her in public."
The third explanandum, then, is how the prebiotic soup of the
early Earth gave rise to matter so radically different from itself;
matter that resists description in nonteleological terms; that
possesses intrinsic ends, goals, purposespursues a good of its
own. Flew thinks this question poses a deep philosophical
challenge to biology that has been largely overlooked. "Most

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studies on the origin of life," he explains, "are carried out by
scientists who rarely attend to the philosophical dimension of their
findings. Philosophers, on the other hand, have said little on the
nature and origin of life."

2. Explanatory Options
We have seen that the leap from chemistry to biology resists
naturalistic explanation on account of three properties: The
ability of living matter to replicate, convey and process semantic
information and pursue its own ends. In what follows I will briefly
discuss the inviability of the only explanatory options available to
the naturalist (chance, prebiotic evolution and chemical necessity)
before defending the teleological explanation.

2.1 Chance
Almost all serious origin-of-life researchers now consider sheer
chance an inadequate causal explanation for the origin of life. To
understand why, consider the probability of even one short
protein molecule 100 amino acids in length forming at random
under ideal prebiotic conditions.
Amino acids must form a chemical bond known as a peptide
bond in the protein chain. Many other types of chemical bonds
are possible; in fact, peptide and nonpeptide bonds occur with
equal probability. The probability of a chain of 100 amino acids
in which all bonds are peptide bonds forming at random is about
1:1030. Moreover, every amino acid found in proteins, with one
exception, has two distinct mirror images of itself called optical
isomers. Functioning proteins tolerate only left-handed amino
acids but the right-handed and left-handed isomers occur in
chemical reactions with equal frequency. The probability of a
peptide chain of 100 left-handed amino acids forming at random
is about 1:1030. Putting this together: The probability of a 100-
amino-acid-length chain in which all bonds are peptide bonds and
all amino acids are left-handed is about 1:1060. Functional
proteins, finally, must link up in a specific sequential arrangement.
Changing even one amino acid results in loss of function.55 It has
been calculated that the probability of attaining a particular

55 A topoisomerase, notes Meyer, can no more perform the job of a
polymerase than a spoon could perform the function of a corkscrew.

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protein 100 amino acids long is about 1:10130overwhelmingly
and prohibitively improbable through the operation of chance
alone on the chemical soup of the early earth.
And this, recall, is for a single short protein under
hypothetically optimal prebiotic conditions. Calculations for the
chance assembly of an organism with the minimal complexity to
sustain and reproduce itself under more realistic conditions
suggest odds of about 1:10150an event far exceeding even the
probabilistic resources of a concentrated solution of amino acids
the size of the observable universe.

2.2 Prebiotic Natural Selection

Dawkins and Kuppers, conceding all the above, have used
computer models in an attempt to demonstrate how prebiotic
natural selection might bring the probabilities to within feasible
limits. Each chooses a target sequence to represent a desired
functional polymer. After creating a crop of randomly constructed
sequences and generating variations among them at random, the
computer program selects those sequences that match the target
sequence most closely. In this way the target phrase is soon
reached. The problem is that, unlike a human agent designing a
computer program, molecules in situ do not have a target phrase
in mind.
Discussions of this problem have routinely appealed to the
analogy of n number of monkeys hitting typewriter keys at
random over varying periods of timeone often used to illustrate
the emergence of complexity from random processes. In its most
familiar formulation, a monkey with infinite time and paper
produces the complete works of Shakespeare. But the idea, while
it seems apposite to the task of explaining the origin of life,
actually serves to demonstrate the impossibility of even modest
complexity emerging from randomness as soon as any sort of time
constraint is imposed. And this is a problem because time
constraints obviously apply.
John Lennox, an Oxford professor of mathematics, is
comfortably at home as he walks us through the various
calculations. A representative example: To type out Hamlet a
monkey hitting one random key per nano second would need a
length of time next to which the estimated life of the universe
would appear insignificant by comparison. And as Hoyle and

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Wickramasinghe inform us, we cannot bring the probability to
within feasible limits by multiplying the monkeys because the
observable universe is simply not large enough to contain the
number of monkeys required.
Applying the analogy to Dawkins and Kuppers, they have
circumvented the above problem by teaching their monkeys a
rule: For all monkeys there is a target phrase and for each monkey
a target letter. As paraphrased by Lennox,

Each time a monkey hits a letter, the letter it types is compared

with its target lettera highly non-random process. This
comparison, of course, has to be done by some mechanism
such as a computeror a Head Monkey, as mathematician
David Berlinski delightfully suggests. If the monkey has typed
its target letter the comparison mechanism retains that letter
and the monkey stops typinganother highly non-random
process. If not, the monkey is allowed to go on randomly typing
until it gets its target letter.

Consider for a moment both that "target phrase" and "target

letter." This is what has happened: In an attempt to tame the
disqualifying improbabilities involved in genetic self-assembly and
so remove the suggestion of intelligent agency, Dawkins and
Kuppers simply introduce an element of intelligent agency.
Berlinski, in a much discussed article, describes this as "an
achievement in self-deception" since, "the mechanism of
deliberate design, purged by Darwinian theory on the level of the
organism, has reappeared in the description of natural selection
itself."

2.3 Chemical Necessity

Those committed to finding a naturalistic explanation for the
origin of life must turn to physical or chemical necessity. The
proponent of this solution begins by noting that natural forces
regularly produce order. Gravitational energy, for instance, will
produce vortices in a draining bathtub; electrostatic forces will
draw sodium and chloride ions together into ordered patterns
within a crystal of salt. It seems reasonable enough to suppose
that, in a like case, amino acids with special affinities for each
other might arrange themselves to form proteins.
There are two problems to note.

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 The first is that there are no chemical bonds between bases
along the axis of the DNA molecule and yet it is precisely along
this axis that genetic information is coded. This can be seen in the
diagram of bonding relationships below.
Sugars are designated by pentagons and phosphates by circled
Ps. These are linked chemicallyrepresented by solid lines.
Meanwhile, nucleotide bases (As, Ts, Gs and Cs) are bonded to
the sugar-phosphate backbone and linked by hydrogen bonds
the dotted lines.

Note, however, an absence of vertical lines between the squares.

This is because there are no chemical bonds between the
nucleotide bases along the message-bearing spine of the helix. As
magnetic letters on a refrigerator door can be combined and
recombined in any of various ways to produce specific sequences,
so nucleotide bases can attach to any site on the DNA backbone

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with equal facility. Indeed, there are no significant differential
affinities between any of the four bases and the binding sites along
the sugar-phosphate backbone. It follows that physical bonding
affinities cannot explain the sequentially specific arrangement of
nucleotide bases in DNA. Notes Carl Woese,

The coding, mechanistic, and evolutionary facets of the problem

now became separate issues. The idea that gene expression, like
gene replication, was underlain by some fundamental physical
principle is gone.

The second problem with this explanatory option is that if

chemical affinities did determine the arrangement of the bases,
such affinities would dramatically diminish the capacity of DNA
to carry information. Information theory, recall, equates the
reduction of uncertainty with the transmission of information.
The information-bearing capacity of DNA therefore requires
physical and chemical contingency. Consider what would happen
if each nucleotide base interacted by chemical necessity along the
information-bearing axis of DNA; suppose, that is, that every time
adenine occurred in a growing genetic sequence, it attracted
cytosine to it; and every time guanine appeared, thymine
followed. The result would be repetition and redundancy that was
ordered but lacking in both information and complexitymuch
like the arrangement of atoms in crystals. 56
"Whatever may be the origin of a DNA," concludes Meyer, "it
can function as a code only if its order is not due to the forces of
potential energy. It must be as physically indeterminate as the
sequence of words is on a printed page."

2.4 Intelligent Agency

Paul Davies, a physicist and origin of life researcher, thinks that
the failure of science to explain the origin of life may be due to a
category error; that is, he thinks that it is a problem for
information theorists that has been left in the hands of chemists.

56 Imagine, by way of analogy, the difficulty you would have communicating your
thoughts using a word processing program with the following feature. If you type an H,
the only possible letter that may succeed it is an R; and if you type an R, the only possible
letter that may succeed it is an Sand so on, for the remaining 24 letters.

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Chemistry, he explains, is about substances and how they
react, whereas biology appeals to information and organisation.
Davies invites us to think of a computer. Attempts at chemical
synthesis focus on the hardwarethe chemical substrate of life
but ignore the softwarethe informational aspect. He then
suggests a new perspective on the problem: The answer to the
origin of life does not lie in an elusive chemical transformation but
a transformation in the organisation of information flow.
In physical systems the parts determine the operation of the
whole. Davies says this can be understood as, a flow of
information from the bottom up. A meteorologist who wishes to
predict the weather, for example, will begin with local conditions
(temperature, air pressure, and so on) and then calculate how the
system as a whole will behave. In living organisms, bottom-up
information flow mingles with top-down information flow
insofar as what happens at the local level can depend on the
global environment and vice versa. Citing mathematical models
produced with the help of an astrobiologist, Davies concludes,
The key transition on the road to life occurred when top-down
information flow first predominated. We think it may have
happened suddenly, analogously to a heated gas abruptly bursting
into flame.
The image is suggestive.
Is there any known entity with the causal powers to create large
amounts of specified information in this way? There is. The
creation of new information, notes Quastler, is habitually
associated with conscious activity. This is a precept for which
experience provides amble evidence. The information on a
computer screen, for example, originates in the mind of a software
engineer; the information on a page, in the mind of a writer. And
it holds, importantly, for other forms of specified complexity. The
ultimate explanation for the meshing gears of a watch is in the
intelligent agency of a horologist. Insurance-fraud investigators
detect cheating patterns that distinguish intentional
manipulation from accident; cryptographers distinguish between
random signals and those that carry encoded messages. Inferring
agency from specified complexity is a familiar and coherent mode
of reasoning.

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 3. Evaluating the Explanatory Options
We have seen that chance is inviable on grounds of prohibitive
improbability. It cannot account for the origin of a single
proteinlet alone a functioning molecule. Prebiotic evolution,
meanwhile, is explanatorily bankrupt because it smuggles design
into natural selection. And chemical necessity both fails to explain
the genetic code, which is not determined by bonding, and
thwarts the information carrying capacity of DNA. It is notable
that all three explanatory options available to the naturalist fall at
the first stile: Not one of them can account for the origination of
cellular molecules. They all come to grief before semantic
information and teleology even enter the discussion.
The hypothesis of intelligent agency, on the other hand, tidily
explains all three properties of life and life's origin. It suggests that
if there is no God it is unreasonably improbable that teleological
entities capable of replicating themselves and processing semantic
information will emerge from the prebiotic soup of the early Earth
while if there is a God it is highly probable that this will occur.
The origin of life, the argument suggests, is powerful inductive
evidence for the telos of an intelligent agentcomplementing,
completing and adding considerable force to the previous
argument from cosmic teleology. 57
Flew, who famously renounced his atheism on review of the
foregoing arguments, was moved to conclude: "Intelligence,
rather than emerging as a late outgrowth of the evolution of life,
has always existed as the matrix and substrate of physical reality."

4. Conclusion
The foregoing discussion can now be formalised into an abductive
syllogism,

57 The inference to agency from the integrated complexity of the physical world is not a
proof of the existence of Godthese, as already noted, do not exist outside of
mathematics and symbolic logic. But nor is it a fallacious argument from ignoranceor a
God of the Gaps. Arguments from ignorance occur when evidence against a
proposition p is offered as the sole grounds for accepting some alternative proposition r.
The foregoing argument does not commit this fallacy.

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 The surprising fact p is observed
If r were the case, p would follow as a matter of course
Therefore, probably, r

The surprising fact p is the origin of life. And in discussing the

completing hypotheses for r, theism has clearly emerged as an
inference to the best explanation. On the basis of the four
arguments so far given, we are rationally obligated to conclude
that there exists an uncaused, eternal, changeless, timeless,
immaterial and unimaginably powerful agent who by an act of
free will brought the universe into being with the goal of creating
intelligent life on Earth.

125
 126
 14
The Argument From Consciousness

That we have a mental life of thoughts and perceptions is the most

fundamental fact of human experience and the starting point for
every other kind of inquiry. Colours and objects in our field of
vision; intentions and beliefs; pains, memories, thoughtsthe
most radical forms of philosophical skepticism must take all these
as properly basic even when denying everything else.58 At the start
of the previous chapter I mentioned Lockes puzzlement that,
ever incogitative Matter should produce a thinking intelligent
Being. It should be noted that our discussion of the very
considerable difficulties attending the origin of life only
approached but did not reach Lockes principal concern. Life,
after all, no more explains the emergence of consciousness than
fine tuning explains the emergence of life. And indeed, many
philosophers of mind consider the origin of consciousness more
mysterious and problematic than the origin of life itself.

1. Mental Properties
In what follows I will be discussing five properties of consciousness
that are permanently unsusceptible of psychophysical reduction
and unproblematically compatible with theisma circumstance
which, I shall argue, is precisely what we would expect if
physicalism is false and theism is true. It will therefore be my
concern to show that, together with the arguments already given,
consciousness contributes forceful posterior evidence for the
existence of God.59

58 Philosophical idealism takes a skeptical view of the external world and holds that
reality is fundamentally mental; solipsism holds that only ones own mind can really be
said to exist. Descartes famously held that we can coherently doubt everything except the
fact that we doubt: Cogito ergo sum.
59 Intentionality, privileged access and irreducibility were all introduced in Chapter 2.
However, since the concepts are both critical and difficult, I think they can be revisited
with profit.

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1.1 Qualia
The hiss of car tyres on a wet road; the smell of jasmine or the
taste of avocado; a flash of sunlight on a stormy lake. All these
things have a raw qualitative feel that is as immediate and
undeniable as it is indescribable. Philosophers call these subjective
tinctures of sense perception qualia; and in his influential
paper What Is It Like to Be a Bat? the eminent philosopher of
mind Thomas Nagel argues that they present an insurmountable
conceptual challenge to physicalism.
Nagel begins by noting that if an organism is conscious at all
then, there is something it is like to be that organism. To
complete a physicalistic account of mind, this subjective savour of
selfhood must be reducible to an objective brain state. The
problem is that the reductive step by which a physical theory is
arrived at translates what is private and subjective into what is
public and objectivea point to which we shall return. Qualia,
meanwhile, just are the private and subjective experiences of sense
perception. And since quaila are also facts about the world it
follows that there are facts about the world that physicalism
cannot possibly explain.
To help us understand this point and its implications Nagel
invites us to consider what it is like to be a bat. Sonar, though a
form of perception, is wholly unlike any sense that we possess and
there is no reason to suppose that the subjective experience of a
bat is like anything we can experience. Imagining that you have
webbed arms that enable you to fly around at dusk catching
insects in your mouth; or that you perceive the world by means of
high frequency sound signals; or that you spend the day hanging
upside down by your feet in an atticall this only tells you what it
would be like for you to behave as a bat behaves and that is not
the question. I want to know, Nagel writes, what it is like for
a bat to be a bat.
How, then, can this be known? The answer is that it
cannot because the task is impossible by tautology: Bat qualia can
no more be instantiated in nonbat consciousness than
triangularity can be instantiated in a circle. Limited to the
resources of the human mind, the extrapolation to bat experience
is incompleteable. And critically, the problem is not confined to
such exotic cases. In contemplating bats, says Nagel, we are in the
same position of an intelligent bat contemplating us. The

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structure of their minds make it impossible for them to succeed;
and nor could they plausibly deny that there are qualia of human
experience. We know what it is like to be us; know, that is, the
ineffable but highly specific subjective savour of personhood from
moment to moment. Nagel concludes that qualia are trapped
within a particular point of view and can never survive
transference to a physical theory open to multiple points of view.

1.2 Intentionality
A second property of mental states that defies physicalistic
explanation is what philosophers call the "intentionality" or
"aboutness" of thought. By this they simply mean that all thoughts
have the property of being about or of something external to
themselves. When you think about shoes and ships and sealing-
wax, for example, your thoughts are in those moments of or about
shoes and ships and sealing-waxa property, moreover, that is
inescapable since even the thought, "Thoughts do not have
intentionality," if it is to be meaningful, must itself
be about intentionality and therefore have intentionality. The
denial of intentionality would therefore suffer from what Plantinga
calls, "self-referential inconsistency," and cannot be rationally
affirmed.
The intractable problem intentionality raises for physicalism
can be drawn out in the following way. Consider the word moon
penciled on a piece of paper. In the absence of a literate observer
to read the word and associate it with the moon, can the carbon
particles of pencil lead and the wood pulp that composes the sheet
of paper be said to be "about" the moon? Clearly not. And what
can be said of a penciled word on the page can be said equally of
physical brain states. A pattern of firing neurones representing
someone's thought about the moon cannot, in the absence of a
conscious observer to experience that brain event as a thought
about the moon, be said to be "neurones about the moon" in any
meaningful and objective sense. Physical things (whether they be
neurones or particles of pencil lead or teapots or rocks) are not
"about" other physical things in the way that mental states are.
And so an exhaustive physicalistic description of mental states
would leave something essential to them out of account.

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1.3 Free Will
Friends and foes of the intuitive and commonsense view that
humans have libertarian freedom of the will all agree that it is, on
the face of it, incompatible with physicalism. If the mind just is the
brain and the brain just is a physical object subject to the laws of
physics, our thoughts and intentions would seem to be the result
of causal forces which predate us and over which we have no
control. Free will, on this view, is an illusion.
There are three points to note.
The first: John Searle has written that the experience of free
will is so compelling that people cannot act as though it is an
illusion even if it is one. Hoffman and Rosenkrantz, in another
connection, have said something of significance to the dispute.
They take the view that if something belongs to a universal and
commonsense ontology, then there is a prima
facie presumption in favour of its reality. Those who deny its
existence assume the burden of proof. Swinburne has formalised
these ideas into a basic principle of epistemology which he
calls The Principle of Credulity: We should, in the absence of
evidence to the contrary, believe that things are the way they seem
to be.
The second: There is, on present evidence, no good reason to
think that humans do not have libertarian freedom of the will.
The laws of Quantum Theory, notes Swinburne, are probabilistic.
And while, in general, indeterministic behaviour on the small
scale averages out to produce deterministic behaviour on the large
scale, it is possible to have devices that multiply small-scale
indeterminacies so that a small variation in the behaviour of one
atom can have a large scale effect." Consider, for instance, an
atomic bomb designed to detonate if and only if a certain carbon
14 atom decays within an hour. This would qualify as a
"multiplying system," since it relays indeterminacy on the small
scale into the large scale, while a block of radioactive carbon
would be an "averaging system," since it averages out
indeterminacy on the small scale to produce determinacy on the
large scale. The brain, notably, is the most complex physical
system known to science. And because it, "causes conscious events
and its states are caused by conscious events," so, clearly, "laws of
a very different kind govern the brain from those that govern all
other physical states. It is possible that the brain is a multiplying

130
system rather than an averaging system. And for this reason, "it is
widely believed that Quantum Theory rules out physical
determinism."
The third and final point is of great relevance to the first.
There is in principle no possible evidence that could produce a
justified belief in determinism because free will is a prerequisite to
the formation of justified belief of every kindincluding justified
belief in determinism itself. To understand this last point consider
the plight of a neuroscientist who seeks to establish that
determinism is true. To complete his task he must make
observations, discern a pattern, formulate a generalisation and
infer a theory. All this relies on rational adjudication, memory and
intention. But if determinism is true, these mental operations and
their results have no rational content. His belief in determinism
is, ex hypothesi, not caused by the apprehension of reasons but
produced by a brain state that is itself determined by extramental
forces. Justified belief in determinism therefore requires that
determinism is false and so suffers from self-
referential incoherence.
It follows from the combination of all these points (the
compelling experience of free will, the Principle of Credulity, the
lack of evidence and the a priori impossibility of justified belief in
determinism) that we are rationally obligated to affirm free will.

1.4 Nonphysicality
Another crucial problem for physicalism is that mental states are
in every important respect nonphysical. A desire for roast beef has
no length; nostalgia lacks spatial extension; the mental picture of a
tiger is without weight. Beliefs, moreover, are true or false and
right or wrongproperties that have no meaningful application
to physical objects. The flux of brain signals associated with the
impulse to commit murder is not immoral; the axons and
dendrites associated with the false belief that Shelley wrote The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner are not themselves "false." Nor
can the physical structure of the brain (its electrochemical
impulses, say, or its neurones) be lucid or confused or naive or
cynical in the way that thoughts and beliefs undeniably can be.

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1.5 Privileged Access
The fifth and final property of mental states is the most essential
and also the most problematic: their personal immediacy to the
subject who experiences them. A mental property, as
Swinburne puts it, is one to whose instantiation the substance in
which it is instantiated necessarily has privileged access.
Others," he clarifies, "can learn about my pains and thoughts by
studying my behaviour and perhaps also by studying my brain.
Yet I, too, could study my behaviour (I could watch a film of
myself; I could study my brain via a system of mirrors and
microscopes) just as well as anyone else could. But I have a way of
knowing about pains and thoughts other than those available to
the best student of my behaviour or brain: I experience them."
And the problem this raises for physicalism is that what makes a
mental event a mental event is not the public knowledge captured
by physicalism but just this private knowledge that physicalism
cannot possibly capture.
In this connection Swinburnes offers several thought
experiments. I previously considered one; let us now consider
another.60 Suppose, firstly, that Swinburne dies and his family pay
for his body to be cryogenically frozen; suppose, secondly, that
shortly afterwards there is an earthquake and Swinburnes brain is
broken into many partsa few of which are lost; suppose, finally,
that fifty years later medical technology has advanced to the point
where his descendants are able to have him revived using
replacement parts from another brain: His body and most of his
original brain become a living person who behaves somewhat like
Swinburne and seems to remember much of his past experiences.
Reflection on this thought experiment shows that, however
much we know about what has happened to his brain (and we
may know, Swinburne emphasises, exactly what has happened
to every atom in it) we do not know what has happened to him.
And this is important because whether Swinburne has survived
the ordeal or not is an objective truth about the world that cannot
possibly be captured by physicalism. And note, adds
Swinburne, that the extra truth is not about what thoughts and
feelings and purposes the revived person has. Rather, the extra

60 See the "split brain" thought experiment in Chapter 2.

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truth, the truth about whether I have survived, is a truth
about who that is--which substance those properties are
instantiated in.

2. Worldview Compatibility
Physicalism entails that mindless particles organised in various
ways by mindless forces is all that exists. Theism, per
contra, entails that, "Mind, rather than emerging as a late
outgrowth of the evolution of life, has always existed as the matrix
and substrate of physical reality." I will now be arguing that since
the five properties of consciousness just discussed are recalcitrant
on a physicalistic worldview but entirely to be expected on a
theistic one, consciousness provides forceful posterior evidence for
the existence of God.

2.1 Physicalism
How, asks John Searle, can we square the self-conception of
ourselves as mindful, meaning-creating, free, rational agents with
a universe that consists entirely of mindless, meaningless, unfree,
nonrational, brute physical particles? The answer, Moreland
replies, is, Not very well. In the following paragraphs, I will
summarise three reasons for thinking that our conscious life, in
view of the five properties under discussion, is impervious to
physicalistic explanation.

2.1.1 Irreducibility
Reduction in the physical sciences is achieved by distinguishing
mental phenomena from more fundamental physical phenomena
and giving primacy to the latter. Warmth, for instance, is reduced
to molecular energy in thermodynamics. Thereafter, molecular
energy is understood to be what warmth, really is. Because
sensory perception is subjective and can show variation between
individuals and species we therefore move toward a more
objective knowledge of the world when we understand it in this
way; when we understand warmth as the way in which molecular
energy is perceived in consciousness; or understand colour as the
way in which electromagnetic wavelengths are perceived in
consciousnessand so on. What the evidence of the history of
science shows, notes Swinburne, is that the way to achieve
integration of sciences is to ignore the mental. But an intractable

133
problem arises when we come to the mental itself: We
do not move towards a more objective understanding of
consciousness along analogous lines when we attempt to
understand consciousness as the way in which brain activity is
perceived in consciousness: It is simply incoherent to reduce
consciousness to some more fundamental physical phenomenon
and ignore the former because the former, consciousness, is the
very thing we are attempting to explain. Here, again, an
exhaustive physicalistic description of the universe is
incompletable.

2.1.2 The Impossibility of a Physical Law

Physical objects differ from each other in measurable ways. As a
result, we can have general laws that relate quantities in all bodies
by a mathematical formula. Rather than an exhaustive index of
laws (an object of mass n and velocity p colliding with one of
mass q and velocity r results in tand so on for innumerable
different cases) it is possible to formulate a single law that, for
every pair of objects in collision the mass of the first multiplied by
its velocity plus the mass of the second multiplied by its velocity is
always conserved. The problem for any psychophysical theory of
mind is that thoughts do not differ from each other in measurable
ways. One thought does not have exactly twice as much meaning
as another one; nor could one put a figure on the strength of a
remembered odour or weigh the poignancy of a memory. An
infinitely long list of psychophysical laws matching every possible
brain state to a mental state is impossible in practice and useless in
theory. An elegant and simple general law describing the
correlation of brain states and mental states, on the other hand, is
unachievable in principle. Above all, adds Swinburne, there
could not be a formula that had the consequence that this brain
would give rise to my mind and that one to yours rather than vice
versa. We could discover at most that there were these
connections, not why there were these connections.

2.1.3 Limits of Evolution

Natural selection is a theory of elimination. It explains why
variants thrown up by evolution are eliminated. But it does not
explain why they were thrown up in the first place. In the case of
physical variants (the countershading of a moth, say) there can be

134
an adequate explanation in terms of a mutation that causes the
variant to appear in accordance with the basic laws of chemistry.
But our problem is to explain why some physical state produces a
conscious mind with properties so recalcitrant to physicalistic
explanation in the way we have discussed. Natural selection can
perhaps explain how, having appeared in evolutionary history,
conscious animals survived; and it may explain how they
developed a preponderance of true beliefs. But it cannot explain
the origination of the most novel feature of human beings: Their
conscious life. Moreover, so long as an organism generates the
correct behavioural outputs in response to stimuli, it will survive:
Functions that organisms can and do execute unconsciously. For
this reason conscious states are, strictly speaking, superfluous to
evolution and so lie beyond its explanatory limits.
It is important to recognise that all five properties under
discussion are intractable on physicalism and must be taken as
brute facts. It is in the very nature of qualia to be unsusceptible of
objective analysis and we can no more expect physical evidence
to explain the intentionality of thought than we can expect
an exhaustive chemical analysis of the carbon particles of pencil
lead to eventually yield the meaning of the word moon which to a
literate English observer they compose. The denial of libertarian
causation and nonphysical entities is, meanwhile, presupposed by
physicalism and physical evidence is by definition public and so
can never collapse into or capture the privileged access of the
subject to his own mental life which is, moreover, its essential
feature.

2.2 Theism
All five properties of consciousness we have discussed are
unproblematically compatible with theism. Rather than mindless
particles compelled by equally mindless forces, mind is basic to the
theistic ontology. God, the Basic Being, is a nonphysical conscious
self with irreducible teleology, rationality and free will. Moreover,
since the Bible teaches that God created man in his image,
Abrahamic theists have a priori grounds to expect these
properties to be instantiated if God exists. It is no surprise on
theism that our most novel and essential feature, our mental life,
should be recalcitrantly nonphysical. And this is because it is
imparted to us by our nonphysical creator. Free will, too, is

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provocatively suggestive of the imago dei since if man exercises
libertarian causation he instantiates in miniature the principle of
uncaused causation imputed to God in classical theism. The
foregoing can be compendiated into the following syllogism,

P1 If theism is true, human beings should have

properties that resist physicalistic explanation

P2 Human beings do, in fact, have such properties

C Therefore, these properties provide posterior

evidence for theism

3. Conclusion
We have seen that the most essential feature of human
experience, our conscious life, is inexplicable on a physicalistic
ontology while for the theist all such difficulties fall away. The
theist can, moreover, provide a priori reasons for the instantiation
of consciousness in the doctrine of the imago dei. In Is There a
God? Swinburne suggests yet another such reason: If God is
unlimited in power and intelligence, it is certain that he could
create a universe that contained intelligent beings; and if He is
perfectly good, it is reasonably probable that He would. Writes
Swinburne,

We have some understanding of what a good person will do.

Good people will try to make other people happy, happy in
doing and enjoying worthwhile things (but not happy in causing
pain to others). Good people try to help other people for whom
they are responsible (for example, their own children) to be good
people themselves. Good people seek to share what they have
with others and to cooperate with others in all these activities.

God, in other words, might reasonably be expected to create a

universe in order to share with us the good things He hassuch
as a mental life, knowledge, freedom and love. All of these things
require consciousness. And if all humans are to have access to the
greatest good of all, knowledge of God himself, they will need to
be able to develop sophisticated metaphysics which will require

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rational intuition. It is therefore credibly probable that agents with
these abilities will exist if there is a God but incredibly improbable
that they would exist if there is not. The existence of conscious
agents therefore provides evidence that there is a God who
created them.

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 15
The Argument From Adequation

The regularity of the world is something we tend to take for

granted. To recall that ice melts, rocks sink and fire burns is
unlikely to elicit astonishment. However, science has discovered
that the many phenomenal regularities of everyday life arise
from a handful of more fundamental regularities that are rather
more mysterious: A small array of elementary particles subject to
four forces and two laws. The whole matter can be compassed in
a few sentences. Atoms are made of electrons, protons and
neutrons which are in turn made of quarks. These are governed
by gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear
forces. Add to this the constraints of General Relativity and
Quantum Theory and our picture of physical reality is virtually
complete:61 A few simple laws governing the unobservably tiny
building blocks of the world.

1. The Rational Universe

The Argument from Adequation 62 unfolds from four facts
attending this scientific discovery: That such regularities exist at
all; that they are best understood as laws; that the laws are
expressible using elegant mathematical equations; and that these
equations have been discovered by the human mind. In what
follows, I shall argue that each of these four facts is completely
inexplicable and unexpected on physicalism but completely
explicable and expected on theism. It will therefore be my
concern to show that the rational structure of physical reality and

61 Probably, adds Swinburne, the laws of electromagnetism and the weak force derive
from the more general laws of an electroweak theory.
62 As I am calling it. No single name for the argument is used. Swinburne discusses it
under the argument from consciousness; Craig has called it (after Wigner, though
somewhat clumsily) the argument from the unusual efficacy of mathematics and C. S.
Lewis defended a related, argument from reason. My discussion is a summary of
Plantinga. See Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism.

139
the adequation of the human intellect to it is further evidence for
the existence of God.

1.1 Regularity
To observe that objects always fall to the ground is no explanation
of why they do so. This point can be generalised by saying that
inductive knowledge describes but does not explain. The
mathematician David Berlinski relates an instructive anecdote in
this connection: Joel Primack, a cosmologist at the University of
California, once posed an interesting question to the physicist Neil
Turok. "What is it that makes the electrons continue to follow the
laws?" Primack asked. Turok was said to be surprised by the
question and recognized its force. Something, writes Berlinski,
seems to compel physical objects to obey the laws of nature and
what makes this observation odd is that neither compulsion nor
obedience are physical ideas.
Consider the fact that, say, every positron in the universe
attracts every electron with a force inversely proportional to the
square of the distance between them. Just as we would seek to
explain all the coins of the realm having an identical pattern by
means of a common mould, so, suggests Swinburne, we should
seek to explain physical objects having an identical form and
behaviour by means of a common source. On physicalism there
are three explanatory options: The universe is infinitely old and
every substance is caused by a preceding substance with the result
that, there can be substances with exactly the same properties
only because there always has been; or it began in a state of
finite density and consisted of a very large number of substances
of very few kinds; or it began in a state of infinite density and
there was a point endowed with the power to decay into a large
number of substances of very few kinds.
Theories of the universe as a whole have identical scope.
Swinburne therefore notes that, simplicity is the sole indicator of
intrinsic probability. Clearly, the theory that the universe began
with a single substance is more probable on this criterion than the
theory that it began with many substances. But postulating a point
with the power to produce substances of few kinds is far less
parsimonious than a point with no power or only the power to
produce one substance. And so the theory that the
universe developed many substances of few kinds having

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identical powers is just as improbable as the theory that there
always were such substances. Such a coincidence, concludes
Swinburne, cries out for some single common source with the
power to produce it.
On physicalism the undeviating regularity of elementary
particles must be taken as a brute fact. Countless identical coins of
the realm just exist. There was no mould. There is no
explanation. On theism it is precisely to be expected and can,
furthermore, be imputed to a single and supremely simple
explanatory entity:63 God, to create an orderly physical substrate
for life, ensures an arrangement of substances of the right kind
and thereafter sustains them in existence. This is close to the view
of medieval theology. Deus est ubique conservans mumdum:
"God is everywhere conserving the world."

1.2 Laws
Because these regularities are universal, mathematically precise
and tied together they are usually thought of as laws. This poses
a second difficulty for physicalism. The inverse square law of
gravity, for instance, is not a metaphor. We did not invent it and
we did not impose it. These laws, says Paul Davies, really
exist. And an inescapable entailment of this view is that
rationality is among the very stuff of which our world is madean
attribute of the universe as substantive and concrete as its carbon
or its hydrogen. As Einstein was moved to remark, the universe is,
reason incarnate.
However, Davies further notes that the laws of nature are not
observed directly but extrapolated from mathematical theory and
experiment. The question arises: How can rationality be
incarnated in mindless matter? This problem has inspired
theistic intuitions in the greatest scientists who have contemplated

63 Mental substances, being nonphysical, lack the "heterogeneity of parts" which Dawkins
recommends as the indicator of complexity. Recall, further, Swinburnes argument that a
hypothesis ascribing zero or infinite value to some entity is simpler than hypothesis
ascribing a finite value when both hypotheses are compatible with the data: In the second
case, one postulates both a force and a constraint; in the first case, one postulates only the
force. And since a person having zero powers would not be a person at all, it follows that
in postulating a person with infinite powers (that is, God) the theist is postulating the
simplest person logically possible.

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it. Thus Einstein felt that the laws of the universe inspire belief in,
"a spirit vastly superior to that of man." And he was not alone in
feeling this way. As Flew notes, "the progenitors of quantum
physics, Planck, Heisenberg, Schrdinger and Dirac, have all
made similar statements." 64 More recently, and dramatically,
Allan Sandage ("widely regarded," says Lennox, "as the greatest
living cosmologist") converted to Christian theism under the same
conviction.65
A second difficulty for physicalism concerns the modal nature
of the laws. We can begin to appreciate this by first noting that
not every universal truth is a law. Thus, No man on broad the
Titanic had prosopagnosia and No diamond is larger than
the moon may be both true and universal but do not qualify as
laws. The difference between a law and a universal truth, says
Plantinga, is that universal truths are accidental and laws are
thought to be in some way necessary. But in what way is a law of
nature necessary? It is not logically necessary since something is
logically necessary only if its negation entails a contradiction.
Thus 2+3=5 is logically necessary because its negation (say,
2+3=65) is absurd. But it is not logically absurd in this way to
suppose that the sun will not rise or that a pair of particles will on
occasion not attract each other with a force inversely proportional
to the square of the distance between them.66 All were ordinarily

64 Even Darwin can be added to this list. He confessed that in contemplating, "this
immense and wonderful universe" he felt, "compelled to look to a First Cause having an
intelligent mind in some degree analogous to man, concluding that, I deserve to be
called a Theist."
65 The case of Flew himself is equally impressive. After a lifetime of influential
philosophical writings on atheism, he declared himself a theist.
66 G. K. Chesterton noticed this. To say an apple hit Newtons nose, he wrote, is to say
that Newtons nose was hit by an apple. That is an inviolable law because the one cannot
logically occur without the other. But, Chesterton continues, we can quite well
conceive the apple not falling on his nose; we can fancy it flying ardently through the air to
hit some other nose of which it had a more definite dislike. Newtonian equations, like
all scientific laws, provide a description but leave us without an explanation. They are
not laws at all but, "mere facts." And Chesterton completes the thought with these
memorable words,
When we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall in autumn, we
must answer exactly as the fairy godmother would answer if Cinderella
asked her why mice turned into horses or her clothes fell from her at
twelve oclock. We must answer that it is magic. It is not a law for we
do not understand its general formula. It is not a necessity, for though
we can count on it happening, we have no right to say that it must

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told, complains Plantinga, is that this necessity is weaker than
logical necessity but still stronger than mere universal truth.
Here, again, theism can offer important explanatory resources.
The laws are necessary and contingent. They are necessary
because they are decreed by an omnipotent mind and no finite
power can act against and falsify themthey are, as Plantinga
puts it, finitely inviolable;67 and they are contingent because
they could, logically, be otherwise: God could have created a
world in which, say, the speed of light was half c or in which
Newtons laws did not hold for medium sized objects.68
Theism, then, tidily explains how laws of nature are grounded
and what they are like; physicalism stands mute before them.

1.3 Mathematics
The laws of nature are in essence mathematical structures and this
raises further problems for physicalism; namely, the applicability,
ontology and accessibility of mathematics itself.
Eugene Wigner spoke of the, unreasonable efficacy of
mathematics in the natural sciences. The logic of his much-
discussed remark is nicely captured by the following examples:
Consider the fact that Maxwell's equations modelling electrical
and magnetic phenomena also describe radio waves discovered
after his death; or that Einsteins equations inspired by a
daydream of falling elevators led to a description of space and
time that has been confirmed by observation and experiment for
one hundred years; or that Peter Higgs should sit down at his desk
extrapolate from mathematical equations the existence of a
particle which, 30 years later, is empirically detected.

always happen. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. The sun
shines because it is bewitched.
67 Thus Roger Cotes, from the preface he wrote for the second edition of
Newtons Principia Mathematica: "From this fountain it is that those laws, which we call
the laws of Nature, have flowed, in which there appear many traces indeed of the most
wise contrivance but not the least shadow of necessity."
68 It is worth noting the here the similarities and differences between moral law and
natural law. Both are degreed by God. But moral laws arise from the nature of God and
are for free creatures who can obey or disobey them: They are logically necessary but
finitely violable. Natural laws arise from the free will of God and are for the inanimate
world of matter which cannot disobey them: They are logically contingent but finitely
inviolable.

143
 Mathematical concepts have an uncanny applicability to an
unexpectedly large class of phenomena in the natural world. You
may object that, however the universe turned out, it would be
mathematically describable. Correct. But what is unreasonable,
Wigner says, is that the universe should be explanatorily
amenable to general mathematical laws of both deep complexity
and simplicity. Suppose all that exists is an inert and amorphous
goo. A mathematical description of it would be possible but
uninteresting. Suppose events occur in chaotic succession with no
discernible pattern. Here, too, a mathematical description is
possible (Event A lasted 10 seconds; Event B had twice as many
components as event A, and so on) but uninteresting and bereft of
predictive power. Suppose, finally, that surface chaos is underlain
by an inaccessibly deep order or surface order arises from an
underlying chaos. In both cases mathematics would be
inefficacious.69
Wigner concludes his paper by describing the efficacy of
mathematics as a miracle that we should accept with
uncomprehending gratitude. The theist, once again, can bring
explanatory resources to the mystery. God, Paul Dirac opined,
is a mathematician of a very high order and He used advanced
mathematics in constructing the universe. On this view the deep
concord between mathematics and the natural world is entirely to
be expected.
A second problem: Mathematics, naturally enough, uses
numbers and sets. But both available intuitions about the ontology
of numbers and sets are, as we shall see, inexplicable on
physicalism.
The first intuition views numbers and sets as abstract
objects. These strange entities differ from concrete objects in two
important respects: They do not occupy space and do not enter
into causal relations. The number 5, for instance, exists
necessarily, unchangingly, and somehow immaterially, whether or
not there are minds to apprehend it. But this creates a puzzle for

69 It may be necessary here to anticipate an objection: In these alternative universes,
conscious life could not exist and therefore mathematics of any kind would be impossible.
However, the question Plantinga is asking is: What sort of mathematics is in principle
possible in alternative universes. The fact that some of them don't allow for the existence
of actual mathematicians does not affect this. See, also, the sixth footnote to Chapter 12.

144
the physicalist. It is reasonable to think that all the objects we can
know must stand in a causal relationship to us. We know about
lions because we perceive them: Light waves from an approaching
lion form an imagine on the retina that induces electrical activity
in the optic nerve and registers, finally, in the brain. Abstract
objects, if they exist at all, would seem to be things we could not
know about on physicalism.
The second and far more widespread intuition finds it
incredible that numbers should exist independently of the mind.
Abstract objects are thought of as ontologically dependent upon
the mental: They just are thoughts, or else, could not exist if not
thought of. But here, too, is a puzzle for physicalism: Since there
are infinitely many numbers, sets and propositions, it is not
possible for them all to be mentally instantiated in finite minds.
And this entails, absurdly, that most of the theoretical resources of
mathematics and logic do not exist.
Both intuitions are unproblematically compatible with theism.
Numbers and sets exist as divine thoughts which explains their
ontology and also their accessibility. The imago dei, Augustine
said, entails the capax dei. Because we are made in the image of
God we are capable of receiving and partaking of God.

1.4 Adequation
And why, finally, should any of this have been discovered by
human minds? On physicalism our cognitive faculties come to us
through natural selection winnowing random genetic mutations
on the Pleistocene savanna. Boiled down to essentials,
Churchland says, this equips us to accomplish the Four Fs:
Feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproduction. Current physics,
meanwhile, requires powers of cognition in profligate excess of
what is required for survival. Berlinski makes the same point
rather colourfully when he asks,

Why should a limited and finite organ such as the human brain
have the power to see into the heart of the matter of
mathematics? These are subjects that have nothing to do with
the Darwinian business of scrabbling up the greasy pole of life.
It is as if the liver, in addition to producing bile, were to
demonstrate an unexpected ability to play the violin.

145
Here is yet another enigma for the physicalist and yet another
datum to be expected on theism. Rationality is basic to the theistic
ontology. God, the Basic Being, created the world and us in his
image. He further ensured that the two were in accord so that the
heavens might declare his glory to us and the sky proclaim his
handiwork. Medieval theologians understood this as
the adequatio intellectus ad rem: The adequation of the
intellect to reality.

2. Worldview Compatibility: Physicalism

We have seen that both the rational structure of the universe and
human knowledge of it lie beyond the explanatory scope of
physicalism. On physicalism the phenomenal and fundamental
regularities of the universe are an inexplicable coincidence; the
existence and modal properties of the laws of nature extrapolated
from those regularities are a brute fact; and the applicability,
ontology and accessibility of the mathematics underlying those
laws are without explanation.
The physicalist who undertakes to object to the foregoing
point-by-point will have a further difficulty to address: Plantinga
has extended all these ideas to show that physicalism undermines
the rational basis of belief of every kind, including belief in
physicalism. This is his Evolutionary Argument Against
Naturalism and I will briefly summarise it now.

2.1 The Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism

Our cognitive faculties include memory, perception and rational
intuition. In science as in every day life, these work together to
produce beliefs. It is natural to assume that our cognitive faculties
produce beliefs that are mostly true. But Plantinga says that, on
physicalism, this assumption is unsafe.
Consider: The physicalist believes the mind just is the brain
and so takes a belief to be something like a long-standing structure
in the nervous system. The problem is that neurology can produce
behaviours that increase fitness whether or not the beliefs annexed
to that neurology are true. Survival, to be sure, does require
cognitive devices that track crucial features of the environment
and are appropriately connected to intention and muscular
reflexes. That is not disputed. What is disputed is the necessary
annexation between those cognitive devices and true beliefs. In

146
fact, adaptive behaviour does not require true beliefor belief at
all. Think of an organism fleeing from a predator. Undoubtably,
its cognitive devices are tracking the predator and producing a
useful response. But tracking itself is not belief and, so long as
the neurology of the organism causes it to flee, the belief annexed
to its neurology need not even contain a predator and it certainly
need not be true. It could be true, says Plantinga, it could be
false; it doesnt matter.
Darwin himself was troubled by this. With me the horrid
doubt always arises whether the convictions of mans mind, which
has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of
any value or at all trustworthy, he wrote in a private
correspondence. Would any one trust in the convictions of a
monkeys mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind? The
problem was also noticed by C. S. Lewis, the chemist J. B. S.
Haldane 70 and atheist philosopher John Gray. "Modern
humanism," Gray writes, "is the faith that through science
humankind can know the truth. But if Darwin's theory of natural
selection is true, this is impossible. The human mind serves
evolutionary success, not truth."
Plantingas argument applies to all beliefs but with a force that
increases as beliefs become irrelevant to survival. Perception, for
example, is especially relevant to feeding, fleeing, fighting and
reproduction and so beliefs directly informed by perception may
be taken to be more reliable. Beliefs about physics, aesthetics and
philosophy, on the other hand, are irrelevant to survival. These
must be regarded as far less reliable. Metaphysical beliefs,
including both physicalism and theism, fall into this second
category.

70 Haldane complained that if the thoughts in his mind were just the motions of atoms in
his brain (a mechanism that has arisen by a motiveless and unguided mechanism) why
should he believe anything they tell himincluding the fact that his brain is made of
atoms? Lewis, for his part, wrote,

If all that exists is Nature, the great mindless interlocking event, if our own
deepest convictions are merely the by-products of an irrational process,
then clearly there is not the slightest ground for supposing that our sense of
fitness and our consequent faith in uniformity tell us anything about a reality
external to ourselves. Our convictions are simply a fact about uslike the
colour of our hair.

147
 What then is the likelihood, on physicalism, that some belief p
instantiated in an organism is true? Plantinga suggests that, since
the alternatives seem about equiprobable, we should give it a
probability of about a half. And what, in that case, is the
probability that its cognitive faculties are generally reliable?
Plantinga suggests we consider his cognitive faculties reliable if
they generate true beliefs 45 percent of the time. He writes,

If I have one thousand independent beliefs, for example, the

probability that three quarters or more of these beliefs are true
will be less than 1058. And even if I am running a modest
epistemic establishment of only one hundred beliefs, the
probability that three-quarters of them are true is very low
something like .000001

The rest of the argument follows by tautology: If I cannot trust my

cognitive faculties, I cannot trust any belief they produce and
especially not any metaphysical belief; but physicalism itself is a
metaphysical belief produced by my cognitive faculties; therefore,
I cannot trust physicalism. Plantinga concludes by saying that
physicalism is self-referentially incoherent and cannot be
rationally affirmed.
I think it is worth dwelling for a moment on the inescapable
circularity of every possible objection to this argument: Any
theory pwhich purports to prove the reliability of your cognitive
faculties is itself a product of the cognitive faculties whose
reliability it seeks to prove. Thomas Reid memorably analogised
this problem by observing that, "If a man's honesty were called
into question, it would be ridiculous to refer to that man's own
word whether he be honest or not." In a like case, Reid said, it is
absurd to try and, "prove by reasoning that reason is not
fallacious.

3. Worldview Compatibility: Theism

Theism clears with ease every stile at which physicalism falls. It
explains the phenomenal and fundamental regularity of the world
by means of a single parsimonious cause; it accounts for the
existence and modal properties of natural law; and it explains the
efficacy, ontology and accessibility of mathematics. However,
these points were ancillary to the central mystery of this chapter:
The human apprehension of the deepest truths at the heart of

148
physical reality. Here the explanatory superiority of theism was at
its most striking. The adequation of rational minds to the rational
structure of the universe implicates the Rational Being who
created both.

4. Conclusion
The foregoing discussion can now be formalised into an abductive
syllogism,

The surprising fact p is observed

If r were the case, p would follow as a matter of course
Therefore, probably, r

The surprising fact p is the adequation of the human intellect to a

rationally structured universe. My discussion compared and
contrasted the probability of p under two worldviews: physicalism
and theism. Physicalism was shown to be in conflict with four key
features of p and generally. Theism was found to be
unproblematically compatible with the same. The Argument from
Adequation therefore provides evidence that there is a God who
created the universe and the beings who contemplate it.

149
 150
 16
The Argument From Moral Experience

"The man who says that it is morally acceptable to rape little

children, writes atheist philosopher Michael Ruse, is just as
mistaken as the man who says 2+2=5." Few would wish to object.
Dostoyevsky, meanwhile, has a character in The Brothers
Karamazov describe this scene from the Slavic uprising: Soldiers
snatching a baby from its mother, throwing it into the air and
catching it on a bayonet. That also, I would assume, could never
be anything but wrong.
In what follows, I will be arguing, firstly, that our moral
perception is normatively productive of belief in objective moral
truth; secondly, that this raises insoluble difficulties for
physicalism; and thirdly, that the same is unproblematically
compatible with theism. It will therefore be my concern to show
that moral experience offers further evidence for the existence of
God.

1. Explanandum
The difference between subjective and objective is critical to what
follows. I will therefore find it helpful to begin by setting out the
difference with care.
Firstly, I will understand some proposition p to be subjective if
its truth is dependent on facts about the subject in whom it is
instantiated as a belief. Thus Drinking whiskey is pleasant will
be true for a subject S only if S enjoys drinking whiskey. So
defined, subjective propositions do not really refer to an object of
perception at all; rather, they refer to a relation between the
subject and the object.71 One entailment of this is that opposite

71 Sometimes objective propositions can masquerade as subjective propositions and visa
versa. Thus whether Smith is the worst president is subjective or objective will depend
on the unstated criterion. If that criterion is "I hate him" a subjective truth has being
expressed; if the criterion is, say, "Unemployment reached a record high during his
presidency," then the statement was motivated by an objective truth that could be stated us
such; i.e., Unemployed reached a record high during the Smith presidency.

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subjective truths can coexist without contradiction. Suppose, for
instance, that a man sees an empty nocturnal street down which a
single sheet of newspaper is blowing. He says, What a sad and
lonely sight! However, a second man who is lost arrives on the
same street which he recognises as the one on which he lives. He
says, What a joyful sight! The two men have made opposite
claims about the same perceptum without contradiction. And this
is because neither claim imputes sadness or joy to the street
itself. They describe two different relations between subject and
object.
Secondly, I will understand some proposition p to be objective
if its truth or falsity is independent of every possible fact about the
subject in whom it is instantiated as a belief. Thus Whiskey is a
liquid is true whether the subject who apprehends it believes it or
not and irrespective of any other fact about him. In contrast to
subjective propositions, then, objective propositions refer to
objects of perception and ignore the relations between subject and
object. They are, in this way, mind-independent.
The Argument from Moral Experience begins with the
intuitive and commonsense view that moral truths are objective in
the way I have just defined. If I read that Anne Frank died of
typhus in a Nazi death camp and say, That is morally wrong,
my claim is not onlythat her death makes me feel moral
wrongness. I am also claiming that moral wrongness is a
property of her death. Thus if a second man claims that her death
was good he is simply mistaken, no matter what his intelligence,
learning and authority; indeed, if the whole planet thought this
way then the whole planet would be mistaken. Moral truths, as
Ruse suggests, are like mathematical truths. They are true
independently of the minds which apprehend them.
This, then, is the explanandum from which the argument will
unfold: Rightly or wrongly, moral perception is normatively
productive of the belief in objective moral truth in the same way
that sensory perception is normatively productive of belief in an
autonomous external world.

2. Preliminary Matters
However, before going further there are two common but
misconceived responses to the Moral Argument that need to be
set aside. The first is the objection from moral disagreement and

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the second is the complaint that religion is irrelevant to moral
awareness.

2.1 Moral Disagreement

Against belief in objective moral truth the skeptic may wish to
appeal to puzzle cases that produce moral disagreement. One
example is the Trolley Problem in which one faces a hypothetical
choice between throwing a lever to redirect a trolley or letting the
trolley take its course. If you take action, a man stuck on the tracks
will be run over; if you do nothing, the trolley will crash and
everyone will die. These and other thought experiments are much
discussed in moral philosophy. In many of them there seems to be
no correct answer. This, a skeptic might claim, proves that
morality is not objective.
Moreland draws out the fallacy in such objections by reference
to the Sorites Problem posed by the ancient Greeks. Given a small
heap of wheat, can I produce a large heap by adding a single
grain? Clearly not. From this an absurdity follows: One can never
produce a large heap of wheat by adding grains one at a time to a
small heap. Or consider another puzzle: If a piece of fruit changes
gradually from orange to red, can I pinpoint the moment at which
the change in colour occurs? Perhaps not. Therefore, just as
absurdly, I cannot know when I am looking at red and not at
orange.
The problem with both puzzles is this: They falsely assume
that in the absence of independent criteria for borderline cases
one cannot have knowledge of clear cases. But in fact it is the clear
cases that supply the criteria by which the borderline cases are
judged. I do not need independent criteria for my belief in the
external world before claiming that there is a lake before me.
Only in a borderline case are criteria required. If I am in a desert
and may be seeing a mirage, for instance, I may need to refer to a
map or the independent testimony of a local to justify my claim
there is a lake before me. But both of these proofs assume the
clear casethe reality of the external world.
Generally, moral realists argue that the deliverances of moral
experience are analogous to the deliverances of sensory
perception, memory and rational intuition. Each of these have
what is called, proper basicality. They are the foundation from
which all beliefs are derived but are themselves nonderivative or

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basic. This is a point to which we will return. For the moment it
will suffice to note that the Trolley Problem no more proves the
moral inscrutability of infanticide than a mirage proves the
unreality of the external world or the Sorites Problem the
impossibility of producing a large heap of wheat grain by
grain. Psychopaths and moral nihilists, for their part, stand in the
same relation to moral truths as the colour blind to the colour
spectrum. The fact that a few people do not perceive something
does not call into question the deliverances of normative
perception.

2.2 Moral Epistemology and Moral Ontology

Atheists sometimes complain that moral awareness does not
require religious belief.72 This is true but irrelevant. To be clear: It
will nowhere be claimed in what follows that one must believe in
God in order to know right from wrong, live a morally good life or
formulate a coherent ethical system. The theist readily grants that
the atheist can do all three and, indeed, the Bible itself affirms
this.73 But believing something is one thing and having a coherent
metaphysical foundation for that belief is another. Several
philosophers party to the dispute have qualified this point in terms
of a distinction between moral epistemology and moral ontology.
Consider the example of John who claims to believe in time
travel and note that there are two theories about time. On the
Dynamic Theory of time only the present exists. On the Static
Theory of time, the past, present and future all exist concretely in
a spacetime block and the flow of time is an illusion. Time travel,
relevantly, is only possible on the second theory since, on the first,
there is no past to travel to. Let us allow that John has some
epistemic grounds for his belief in time travelperhaps the
testimony of a visitor from the future who has already made many
accurate predictions. But if John also holds to a Dynamic Theory

72 The following comment by Christopher Hitchens is representative,
I think our knowledge of right and wrong is innate in us. Religion gets its
morality from humans. We know that we can't get along if we permit
perjury, theft, murder, rape, all societies at all times, well before the
advent of monarchies and certainly, have forbidden it. Why don't we just
assume that we do have some internal compass?
73 Romans, 2.14-15

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of time then his belief in time travel is in conflict with his
metaphysics.
The claim of the Moral Argument is that a moral realist who is
also an atheist is in a similar position to John. Like the theist, his
belief in moral truths has epistemic justification in moral
experience; but unlike the theist, this belief is without a
metaphysical foundation.

3. Explanatory Options: Physicalism

On physicalism, morality shares its origin with cognition: It is a
result of natural selection winnowing random genetic mutations
on the Pleistocene Savanna. The Darwinian account is familiar
enough. Protecting your children from predators is better than
feeding your children to predators insofar as one helps to
perpetuate your genes and the other does not. And what goes for
paternal care goes for sharing, cooperation, reciprocal altruism,
honesty, love and so forth.
The essential point to note here is that what is morally good is
determined by and tracked to reproductive fitness and what
conduces to reproductive fitness is open to a range of possibilities
so wide that morality loses all meaning. Thus Darwin writes,

If men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive

bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females
would, like the worker bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their
brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters
and no one would think of interfering.

More recently, Francisco Ayala has noted that even genocide

could be regarded as morally good to the not inconceivable
extent that it helps to preserve the genes of those committing
it. Clearly, on such an account a given moral proposition fails our
criterion for objectivity: Its truth is dependent on facts about the
subject in whom it is instantiated as a belief; namely, that
the behaviour entailed conduces to his reproductive fitness.
Wilson and Ruse are among those who have faced the
implications of this. The belief in moral objectivity, they write,
is a useful fiction and its utility is in the name of reproductive
fitness. It is an unpalatable but unavoidable consequence of
physicalism that there are altogether no moral facts.

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3.1 Unliveability
Moral skepticism is unliveable. It is therefore ironic but
unsurprising that those who affirm a worldview that entails moral
skepticism are often found promoting moral causes. Nietzsche, for
example, declares himself beyond Good and Evil but then
renounces Wagner for an anti-Semite; atheists Sartre and Russell
each raise a moral indictment against the Second World War;
Dennett the physicalist enjoins us to presuppose truth and
justice and the irrepressible Dawkins directs moral contempt at
the Ten Commandments while offering his own Secular Mans
guide to ethicsand so on though countless examples. William
Lane Craig has rightly lampooned all this as the "shopping
trolley" approach to the moral quandary of atheism. Realising
that his worldview is unliveable, the atheist simply barges through
its philosophical constraints and shamelessly helps himself to the
moral values he needs to make it liveable. They castrate,
quipped Lewis thinking of the same, and bid the geldings to be
fruitful. This may have some philosophical relevance. Moreland
has suggested that one test for the truth of a worldview is whether
it can be consistently lived out. Reid, meanwhile, compared the
course of modern philosophy from Descartes to Hume to a
traveler who, upon finding himself in a coal pit, realizes that he
has taken a wrong turn.74
It might still be claimed, perhaps not unreasonably, that this
first objection is of uncertain force. After all, the truth is under no
obligation to be liveable and the physicalist might still choose to
bite the bullet and embrace moral skepticism. But in doing so he
faces two further obstacles.

3.2 Selective Basicality Skepticism

The atheist philosopher Louise Antony once conceded during a
debate that, Any argument for moral skepticism is going to be
based upon premises which are less obvious than the reality of

74 Reid argued that we should include moral principles among the first principles of
philosophy and concluded that by denying them the moral skeptic simply disqualifies
himself from reasonable debate. Just as there is no reasoning with the man who, despite
apparent evidence to the contrary, is convinced that his head is a gourd, Linville
summarises him, neither is there advantage in engaging in moral argument with a man
who fails to recognise self-evident principles of morality.

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moral values and duties themselves. This is a point that I will
now briefly develop by reference to the idea of proper basicality
introduced above.
To better understand what is meant by this note first that there
is no noncircular way of proving the general reliability of sensory
perception. This is because any evidence p which purports to do
so will itself rely on the sensory perception whose reliability it
sought to prove. A belief in the existence of the external world is
therefore a properly basic belief: It is not and cannot be reached
by inference but must be assumed if beliefs of any sort are to be
possible. Likewise, there is no noncircular way of proving the
general reliability of rational intuition. This point is nicely
captured by Reid's analogy. "If a man's honesty were called into
question," he writes, "it would be ridiculous to refer to that man's
own word whether he be honest or not. And so it is absurd to try
and, "prove by reasoning that reason is not fallacious. Thus the
deliverances of rational intuition are also properly basic. They
cannot be proved trustworthy by inference but must be assumed
trustworthy if beliefs of any sort are possible. And this goes for
memory and, arguably, moral perception. That bayoneting babies
is wrong is something we must, on pain of irrationality, include in
the fund of first principles with which we begin moral reflection.
Remembering Antonys remark that arguments for moral
skepticism are less obvious than the deliverances of moral
perception itself, let us consider another decidedly clear case
again from Dovstoyevsky. Ivan Karamazov is relating newspaper
stories from the Slavic uprising. He says,

Imagine a trembling mother with her baby in her arms, a circle

of invading Turks around her. They've planned a diversion:
they pet the baby, laugh to make it laugh. They succeed, the
baby laughs. At that moment a Turk points a pistol four inches
from the baby's face. The baby laughs with glee, holds out its
little hands to the pistol, and he pulls the trigger in the baby's
face.

Confronted with such scenes, moral perception may have all the
force of sensory perception; that is, it may be as difficult to deny
that what Ivan relates is morally wrong as it would be to deny that
there are physical objects before our gazeand certainly more
difficult than denying the unproved premises of an argument for

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moral skepticism. But this invites the question: If both faculties are
properly basic, why trust the weak force of rational intuition upon
contemplating moral skepticism over the intense force of moral
perception upon contemplating evil and depravity? Because our
basic beliefs are all equally noninferential, "selective basicality
skepticism" just implicitly begs the question against moral realism.
Consistently applying our skepticism to all properly basic beliefs,
on the other hand, undermines belief of every kindincluding the
belief in skepticism itself.

3.3 Self-Referential Incoherence

This leads neatly into the last and most potent objection to moral
skepticism. In pressing the evolutionary argument against moral
realism, Sommers and Rosenberg write that, If our best theory of
why people believe pdoes not require that p is true, then there are
no grounds to believe pis true. The problem with this rubric is
that it applies with as much force to our cognitive faculties as it
does to our moral faculties and this has an unwelcome
consequence for physicalism and moral skepticism alike.
The point is one which Plantinga has developed into his
Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism already discussed.
Again, briefly: Animal neurology can produce behaviours that
increase fitness whether or not the beliefs annexed to that
neurology are true. Think of an organism fleeing from a predator.
Undoubtably, its cognitive devices are tracking the predator and
producing a useful response. But tracking itself is not belief and,
so long as the neurology of the organism causes it to flee, the belief
annexed to its neurology need not even contain a predator and it
certainly need not be true.
What then is the likelihood, on physicalism, that some belief p
instantiated in an organism is true? Plantinga suggests that the
alternatives are equiprobable and so should be assigned a
probability of about a half. And what, in that case, is the
probability that its cognitive faculties are generally reliable?
Plantinga suggests we consider his cognitive faculties reliable if
they generate true beliefs 45 percent of the time and concludes,
If I have one thousand independent beliefs, the probability that
three quarters or more of these beliefs are true will be less than
1058.

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 The argument applies to all beliefs but with a force that
increases as beliefs become irrelevant to survival. Perception is
especially relevant to feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproduction
and so beliefs directly informed by perception may be taken to be
more reliable. Metaphysical beliefs, on the other hand, are
irrelevant to survival and these must be regarded as far less
reliable. Physicalism, of course, falls into this second category.
The rest of the argument follows by tautology: If I cannot trust
my cognitive faculties, I cannot trust any belief they produce and
especially not any metaphysical belief; but physicalism itself is a
metaphysical belief produced by my cognitive faculties; therefore,
I cannot trust physicalism. What Plantinga concludes of
physicalism can be concluded of the moral skepticism that it
entails: It is self-referentially incoherent and cannot be rationally
affirmed.

4. Explanatory Options: Atheistic Moral Platonism

The only recourse available to a moral realist who wishes to avoid
the hypothesis of theism has been dubbed, Atheistic Moral
Platonism. This is a view that jettisons physicalism and affirms
that moral properties exist in abstracto and supervene upon
those natural properties that approximate to them. Moral
awareness, the moral platonist claims, is not an illusion tracked to
reproductive fitness; rather, our moral awareness has somehow
become coextensive with these abstract moral objects through
evolutionary processes. Atheistic Moral Platonism thus allows its
proponent to avoid moral skepticism. But we shall see that faces a
number of serious philosophical obstacles.

4.1 The Problem of Knowledge

Firstly, abstract objects differ from concrete objects in two
important respects: They do not occupy space and they do not
enter into causal relations. The reader may recall our discussion of
this point from the previous chapter. On mathematical platonism
the number 5 exists necessarily, unchangingly, and somehow
immaterially, whether or not there are minds to apprehend it. But
mathematical and moral platonism alike pose a riddle for the
erstwhile physicalist. It is reasonable to think that all the objects
we can know must stand in a causal relationship to us. We know
about lions and rocks and trees because we perceive them. But

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abstract objects do not occupy space or stand in causal
relationships and so seem to be things we could not possibly know
about on physicalism. Swinburne, though he spends little time on
the Moral Argument, further notes that a moral belief is not
necessary for a moral action. Thus even if a moral property
supervened on a natural one our awareness of the fact would
remain unexplained.

4.2 The Problem of Free Will

Secondly: On physicalism the mind just is the brain and the brain
just is a physical object subject to the laws of physics. It follows
that our thoughts and intentions are the result of causal forces
which predate us and over which we have no control. Free will,
therefore, is an illusion. This is problematic for the atheistic moral
platonist because moral responsibility requires free will and
determinism is not resolved by simply annexing moral platonism
to a physicalistic worldview. Its proponent is therefore forced to
either deny free will and with it all possibility of a coherent moral
philosophythe very thing he was attempting to salvageor else
postulate substance dualism as a further unexplained fact in
conflict with his already diluted physicalism.

4.3 Worldview Incompatibility

Physicalism, thirdly, entails that mindless particles organised in
various ways by mindless forces is all that exists. To annex
abstract moral objects to this metaphysic as brute facts is
paradigmatically ad hoc. What does it mean to say that Justice
and Kindness exist eternally and immaterially in the absence of
persons to instantiate them? Moral values are intrinsically
personal properties that can have no coherent ontology as mere
abstractions. Craig also notes that, curiously, the abstract object
Love is not itself loving. From this it follows that in the absence of
persons Love is not instantiated and so does not existand so on
for the remaining objects.

4.4 The Problem of Moral Duties

The fourth and final objection to Atheistic Moral Platonism arises
from a distinction between moral values and moral duties; that is,
between what is good and what is obligatory. To grasp the
distinction consider that becoming a doctor to aid the sick and

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feeding your children are both morally good but only the second
is morally obligatory. But who or what on atheism lays such
obligations upon us?
The problem, to be clear, is not the removal of reward and
punishment but the removal of an ultimate frame of reference for,
and authoritative superintendence of, our moral choices. The
ethicist Richard Taylor, though himself an atheist, concedes that
in a Godless universe man is in the same position as the lower
animals. A magpie takes but does not steal; a tiger kills but do
not murder. Human moral behaviour is simply evolutionary
adaptation elevated into a social custom. And on this view, rape
and murder are merely heterodox, unfashionableno worse than
producing a cubist painting in 1907 or waltzing in 1770. The
concept of moral obligation, Taylor concludes, is unintelligible
apart from the idea of God.
Introducing abstract moral objects into ones metaphysic does
not resolve this problem. For, as Craig notes, Moral vices such as
Greed, Hatred, and Selfishness also presumably exist as abstract
objects. Why am I obligated to align my life with one set of
abstract objects rather than any other?

5. Explanatory Options: Theism

The six previous arguments have discussed the existence of
contingent entities, the beginning of the universe,
cosmological fine tuning, the origin of life, the nature of
consciousness and its adequation to a rationally structured
universe. In each case, I showed that the phenomenon in question
is credibly probable if there is a God and incredibly improbable if
there is not. As more and more phenomena accumulate, the
probability that all of them would occur in a Godless universe
grows smaller and smaller. In this chapter I have discussed moral
experience and shown that neither available atheistic explanation
can account for it. It only remains to consider theism. What, if
any, explanatory resources can theism offer?
Once again we find that a fundamental feature of human
experience is unproblematically compatible with theism. Firstly,
morality is already basic to the theistic ontology: God, the Basic
Being, is the morally perfect creator and ruler of the universe
whose moral authority lays our moral duties upon us and whose
eternal and unchanging nature provides the paradigm to which

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our moral conduct approximates. The doctrine of the imago dei,
moreover, grounds our intrinsic moral worth in the Godhead as
well as our moral rights and obligations; this doctrine, in turn,
entails the capax dei on which our moral awareness is entirely to
be expected: Because we are made in the divine image we are
capable of receiving and partaking in the divine. The voice of
conscience, theists have always held, is the voice of God.
The foregoing can now be compendiated into the following
syllogism,

P1 If theism is true, human beings should have

properties and experiences that resist physicalistic
explanation

P2 Human beings do, in fact, have such properties

and experiences

C Therefore, these properties and experiences

provide posterior evidence for theism

6. Conclusion
Moral experience is inexplicable on both a physicalistic and
platonic worldview. Physicalism entails, unpalatably, that there
are no moral facts but is undermined by a basicality bias and
suffers from self-referential incoherence. Moral platonism, on the
other hand, is paradigmatically ad hoc and fails to provide an
intelligible account of moral awareness, free will and moral
obligation.
On theism all such difficulties fall away. 75 The theist can,

75 Platos Euthyphro Dilemma is often pressed against theistic accounts of morality. It
asks, Is something good because God wills it or does God will something because it is
good? In the first case, the objection goes, what is good seems arbitrary because God
could have commanded anything; in the second case, the good seems to be something
God recognises outside of himself and conforms to.
Before giving the orthodox response from philosophical theology it is worth noting
that both horns of the dilemma are compatible with theism and still allow a moral
philosophy that is explanatorily superior to atheism. Swinburne, for instance, takes the
first horn and affirms that moral truths are logically necessary; William of Ockham takes
the second horn and affirms any command of God is ipso facto good. Both theologies
nevertheless explain moral awareness, moral duties and the intrinsic worth of persons
which are either inexplicable or unaffirmable on atheism.

162
moreover, appeal to a priori grounds for the instantiation of
moral awareness in the doctrine of the capax dei. Further such
grounds, drawn from Swinburne, were noted at the end of the
argument from consciousness and apply here with only slight
adjustment: If God is unlimited in power and intelligence, it is
certain that he could create a universe that contained moral
agents; and if He is perfectly good, it is reasonably probable that
He would. We have some understanding of what a good person
will do, writes Swinburne, and includes among a list of
representative actions that, Good people seek to share what they
have with others.
God, in other words, might reasonably be expected to create a
world and populate it with agents in order to share with us the
good things He hasincluding virtue. But for finite beings, the
attainment of virtue requires both free will and moral
awareness. 76 It is therefore credibly probable that intelligent
agents with moral awareness will exist if there is a God but
incredibly improbable that they would exist if there is not. The
existence of moral agents therefore provides evidence that there is
a God who created them.

However, a far more common response is to note that the dilemma is a false one
because there is a third option. God wills something because he is good. Gods own
nature is the standard of moral goodness just as a live performance is the standard of a hi-
fidelity recording. The more accurately a recording approximates a live performance, the
better it is; and likewise, the more closely a moral action conforms to Gods nature, the
better it is.
76 For a discussion of this point, see the chapter on The Problem of Evil.

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 164
 17
The Argument From Desire

I have now given seven arguments. These have discussed

the existence of contingent things; the beginning and fine
tuning of the universe; the origin of life; the nature of
consciousness; the adequation of the human mind to a rationally
structured physical reality and, lastly, moral awareness. In each
case, the phenomenon under discussion was shown to be credibly
probable on the hypothesis that there is a God and incredibly
improbable on the hypothesis that there is not. And, as already
noted, with each new phenomenon introduced the probability
that they would all occur in a Godless universe grows smaller and
smaller.
The arguments taken together therefore make it highly
probable that there is a God who created us in his image. And
from that certain things follow.
One of the things that follow is that human beings should
manifest a widespread desire for spiritual transcendence: It is not
plausible that God would create beings for a relationship with
himself and fail to endow them with the faculties and motivation
to seek it; nor is it plausible that physically embodied beings said
to be made in the image of an Eternal Spirit should manifest no
awareness of or propensity for eternal and spiritual things. That
the vast majority of people in the vast majority of times and places
have had such desires is therefore precisely what we would expect
to find if theism were true.

1. Explanandum
However, matters are a little complicated by the fact that the
explanandum of the Argument from Desire is best understood as
the corollary of two key theistic claims: That God has created
man in his image and that God is hidden. After discussing the two
main features of desire (a vague and unsatisfiable longing for
transcendence and an abhorrence of futility and finitude) I will
therefore need to revisit the problem of divine hiddenness and
explain why, in combination with the imago dei, it has

165
explanatory relevance to the argument. I will, finally, judge there
to be no particular reason to expect widespread and primordial
spiritual desire on physicalism and very particular reason to
expect it on theism. My general concern in this chapter will be to
show that the Argument from Desire adds moderate force to a
cumulative case for the existence of God.

1.1 Vague, Unsatisfiable Longing

The Argument from Desire begins with the observation that
natural needs always exist in relation to a real object which can
meet those needs. Hunger, for example, exists because there is a
real possibility of obtaining food; thirst, of obtaining water; sexual
desire, of obtaining a mate. The theistic explanation for this is
divine providence: God provides for our needs. The atheistic
explanation is evolutionary: instincts are adaptive only insofar as
they lead us to something that benefits us. Either way, we have
natural desires only for things that exist. Thus, with Leucippus, a
proponent of the Argument from Desire claims, Natura nihil
frustra facit: Nature does nothing in vain. This is the first
premise.
Human beings, meanwhile, have a haunting desire for
ultimate, transcendent joy that nothing on Earth can satisfy. The
centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain, wrote
Bertrand Russell; a curious wild paina searching for something
beyond what the world contains. Such feelings seem to be
widespread in every culture. In Germany the word sehnsucht
describes, an ardent longing for something which one cannot
readily identify. The Welsh word hiraeth describes, a
mysterious longing for something indeterminate or unknown that
is attended by a feeling comparable to homesickness. There is
also the word saudade in Portuguese; dor in Romanian;
tizita in Ethiopian; morria in Galician and clivota in
Slovak. And whether or not one has a word for it, the recurring
but elusive pang for some tremendous transcendent thing at the
boundary of reality is surely common to us all. Normatively, such
feelings resolve themselves into religious belief in a higher power:
A longing for immortality and for God. This is the second
premise.
C. S. Lewis, to whom the argument owes its fame, argued that
these desires were natural to man and so must also exist in

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relation to and in consequence of a real object which can satisfy
them. Lewis thought this implicated a transcendent reality and so,
perhaps, the existence of God. A century before Lewis the
German philosopher Gustav Fechner thought of the embryo
before it leaves the womb equipped with arms, legs, and hands
that do nothing and, before birth, have no meaning. We ought to
believe, he concluded, that the same happens with us; that our
spiritual aspirations are to us what arms, legs and hands are to the
foetus in the womb.
The easy response from the skeptic is to offer a reductio ad
absurdum: If my desire for p entails that p exists, then absolutely
anything I desire exits. On this view the explanation for religious
belief is the Freudian one. The premise is a wish and the
conclusion wish-fulfilment. However, proponents of the argument
insist on a distinction between natural and artificial desires.
Examples of the first kind include the desire for food,
companionship, sex and knowledge; examples of the second kind
include the desire for new patio furniture, a house on Park Lane
or the ability to fly.77 Precisely because desires of the second kind
are idiosyncratic and acquired they do not tell us anything about
the existence of their objectssome of them exist and some of
them dont. Natural desires are different. A thirsty mans whole
organism participates in the reality of water; a rutting stag in the
reality of copulation. The one is unthinkable without the other.78
The argument therefore hangs on whether spiritual desire is
artificial or natural; that is, on whether the human desire for
spiritual transcendence is contrived and acquired, like the desire

77 The human desire for flight is the most promising objection to the argument.
However, if it is natural in the sense I have defined (unacquired, primordial, universal) I
think it is best understood as part of a general desire to expand ones range of basic
actions by means of technology. It belongs to the desire to run, grasp, hit, throw and
climb. Clearly, basic actions and the objects of the desire to expand them exist (tools,
technology and so on) even though we can imagine ways of satisfying them (such as magic
carpets and time machines) that probably cannot exist.
78 It is sometimes suggested that identifying the part of the brain responsible for
religiosity would prove that religious belief was a product of the brain with no basis in
reality. This, just in passing, is a commission of the genetic fallacy because the origin of a
belief does not settle its truth-status. The argument from desire further suggests that if a
physical basis of religious desire in the brain were found it would implicate the reality of
its object as surely as the stomach implicates the reality of alimentation.

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for a silk kimono or the ability to breathe fire, or primordial and
universal, like the desire for love, food and companionship. On
this point cultural anthropology clearly weighs in favour of Lewis.
Religion, whatever else it does, presupposes and pursues the
objects of spiritual desire and that religion is primordial and
universal cannot reasonably be denied. Even on a cursory study of
the history of human civilisation it is obvious, perhaps more
obvious than anything else, that man is a religious animal who
desires transcendence and immortality.

1.2 Abhorrence of Finitude and Futility

Because they can go unfulfilled, desires of all kinds entail the
possibility of frustration for the agent who has them. This is true
of both natural and artificial desires but there is an important
difference. Life without patio furniture is not intolerable and nor
does the inability to breathe fire prevent human happiness. Trying
to live without the possibility of food, companionship or mental
stimulation, on the other hand, will result in either death or in
deep existential discontent. And spiritual desire, significantly,
appears to fit to the natural model.
Physicalism flatly denies the objects of spiritual desire and so
leaves spiritual desires unfulfilled. If spiritual desires are natural
we would therefore expect physicalism, when honestly
confronted,79 to be met with deep existential discontent. And so
we do.
Few recall that Nietzsches madman first cried, God is
dead! not in triumph but with dismay and metaphysical vertigo.
Sartre and Camus, taking up the theme, followed their atheism

79 This claim is consistent with the existence of atheists who claim no existential dismay
at physicalism if we allow that on religious questions men are disposed to irrationality and
inconsistency. Some may simply fail face the existential implications of their worldview
(The philistine, noted Kierkegaard, tranquillises himself with the trivial); others may
adopt the axiological equivalent of the "shopping trolley approach discussed in
connection with the moral quandary of atheism. But even the most staid of physicalists
cannot reasonably deny that his worldview thwarts every enduring human hope. The
more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless, confesses
Steven Wineberg. He then allows that making, a little island of warmth and love and
science and art for ourselves, is, not an entirely despicable role for us to play. I have
already noted that atheists will, with Camus and Russell, suggest solutions to the
depressing existential implications of physicalism. My claim is that these solutions,
honestly evaluated, will be met with deep discontent by anyone who has experienced the
normative human desire for spiritual transcendence.

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through to its ultimate logical consequence and arrived,
respectively, at la nauseand l'absurdeat the conviction that
nausea and absurdity were the essence of the human experience.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus sets out his thesis and its
hidden entailment that the existence of God and a transcendent
purpose for human life stand or fall together. Man, Camus tells
us, thirsts for a meaning in life and finds none; he is a being with
an intrinsic need for meaning in a universe that is intrinsically
meaninglessan animal at odds with its world. And this
conundrum leads him to ask in all seriousness if everyone should
just commit suicide. The same problem was phrased in a tidy
syllogism by one of Tolstoy's characters when he said, ''Without
knowing what I am and why I'm here, it is impossible for me to
live; and I cannot know that, therefore I cannot live.''
To this depressing problem every available atheistic solution
is just as depressing. Camus, for example, suggests man must try
to find a defiant enjoyment in, or in spite of, his absurd existence:
If Sisyphus can smirk to himself as he descends for the billionth
time after his bolder, that ineradicable smirk is sufficient to
undermine the gods that are punishing him and the universe in
which that punishment is his fate. Bertrand Russell, realising that,
the whole temple of Mans achievement must inevitably be
buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins, suggests that our
soul must build its habitation upon, the firm foundation of
unyielding despair. This, he said, was our only hopethough
the word "hope," if it is to be applied here, no longer has any
meaning. The universe of Camus and Russell is the same one
portrayed by Kafka: An incomprehensible and hostile place in
which the human individual is lonely, perplexed and threatened.
Against the crushing opposition of an irrational cosmos we are
enjoined to pursue a hope that has receded to infinity. But the
man who both denies and urges the pursuit of an ultimate purpose
is no different from the man who both denies morality and urges
moral living. They castrate, quipped Lewis, and bid the
geldings to be fruitful.

2. Worldview Compatibility: Physicalism

There is no very particular reason to expect any of this on
physicalism. The idea under consideration is that of a universe
that contemplates itself through human consciousness with our

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own fear and astonishment; a universe that experiences a
frightened astonishment at itself. But why should the universe
develop a capacity for self-inspection only to recoil in dismay at its
own reflection? One partial reason for the dismay is that
physicalism disabuses mankind of its spiritual aspirations. But this
just raises another equally pressing question. Why do these
aspirations exist in the first place? To say with Freud that belief in
God serves as some sort of existential crutch does not answer the
point. And it does not answer the point because there is nothing in
an atheistic universe constraining the development of minds free
of both spiritual aspirations and the resulting abhorrence of futility
and finitude. In other words, it is not just the crutch that needs an
explanation but also the wound that necessitates that crutch.
The vast majority of human beings throughout history have
resolved the tension by presupposing and pursuing the objects of
spiritual desire; in other words, by means of religion. There is,
moreover, emerging evidence of a correlation between religiosity
and psychohygiene.80 France, to give just one example, has both
the lowest rate of mass attendance and the highest rate of
antidepressant consumption in Europe. It seems religion is good
for us. To account for these facts the physicalist offers an
evolutionary story that runs roughly as follows: "All human
properties come down to us by means of natural selection
winnowing random genetic mutations on the Pleistocene savanna.
Spiritual beliefs exist because they served reproductive fitness.
That their denial produces existential dismay is an accident of
evolutionary history with which we will just have to come to
terms."
But how credible is this? Note first that the beliefs in question
are instantiated in minds whose properties and moral experience
physicalism cannot, in principle, account for; that these minds
arise from life whose origination lies beyond the explanatory scope
of evolution; that this life inhabits a universe whose existence and
beginning and fine tuning and intelligibility are all without
explanation. And recall, with Plantinga, that the belief that we

80 According to the Mayo Clinic, Most studies have shown that religious involvement
and spirituality are associated with better health, greater longevity, coping skills and quality
of life (even during terminal illness) and less anxiety, depression, and suicide.

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cannot trust beliefs that arise from evolutionary processes
is itself a belief that arose from evolutionary processes. The
argument forphysicalism is therefore self-referentially incoherent
and cannot be rationally affirmed. To this jeopardized metaphysic
we are now asked to annex an eighth brute fact: The universe
developed the capacity to find spiritual meaning only to
despair that there is no spiritual meaning to be found. And
since spiritual desire, finally, is primordial and universal the denial
that it exists in relation to any real object is also inconsistent with
the paradigm for beliefs of this type. I suggest that, on balance,
this explanation for spiritual desire is not very credible at all.

3. Worldview Compatibility: Theism

Theism, once again, brings important explanatory resources to a
key feature of human experience. Both our vague and
unsatisfiable longing for transcendence and our abhorrence of
futility and finitude are precisely to be expected on theism. The
reason was identified by St. Augustine about fifteen centuries ago.
Thou hast made us for Thyself, he wrote in his Confessions,
and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in Thee. The
wound, in other words, is our separation from God; and our
spiritual aspirations are not a crutch but an intuition of the source
of our being in which healing and completion may be found.
However, as already noted, to properly understand the theistic
explanation for spiritual desire I need to revisit the problem of
divine hiddenness and explain why, in combination with
the imago dei, it has explanatory relevance to the argument. And
I will do this now.

3.1 Divine Hiddenness and the Imago Dei

Proponents of the objection from divine hiddenness think that if
God really existed his existence would be overwhelming or, at the
very least, not open to dispute. They further note that some
people seek and do not find God and claim that this is inconsistent
with the idea that God is all loving and wishes to have a
relationship with us. In general, they claim that the fact that it is
possible to doubt the existence of God is evidence against the
existence of God.
In reply, the theist first notes that belief in God is always
conjoined with a belief in an afterlife. Our present life containing

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suffering and doubt, he says, is merely a preparation for a perfect
and eternal life to come. And if asked why God did not simply
create the perfect world and bypass the imperfect one, his reply to
this question is also his reply to the problem of divine hiddenness.
Attaining virtue requires facing a significant choice between
good and evil and choosing to do good. A morally perfect God
therefore has reason to create agents capable of moral freedom.
However, a problem arises if the naked countenance of God is
overwhelming. For in that case, finite agents created and held ab
ovo in the presence of God would never experience the
temptation to do evil. One solution would be for God to create an
antecedent world from which his countenance is hidden and then
populate it with agents who begin life in a state of moral and
spiritual ignorance. But a further problem will arise if certain
knowledge of God (if, say, theistic poofs exist and are universally
known and everyone has unambiguous religious experiences)
is also a threat to moral liberty. Theists claim that this is so. God
has therefore temporarily situated himself at an epistemic
distance in order to vouchsafe his creatures the opportunity to
attain various moral goods that would otherwise be
unattainable.81
This antecedent world in which God is hidden is, the theist will
stress, temporary. And any creature in it who freely commits itself
to the good and to God will enter the presence of God after death.
Moral freedom, having served its purpose, will be lost and as in
the first scenario the creature will exist in ecstatic adoration of the
naked countenance of Godbut with the difference that, this
time, his moral goodness has been self-determined, his love for
God is genuine and not compelled, and his eternal state has been
freely entered into. For now we see through a glass darkly,
writes Paul, but then we shall see face to face.
We are now in a position to understand the idea of an aching
human desire for spiritual transcendence as the corollary of two
key theistic claims: The claim that we are made in the image of
God with the purpose of knowing God and the claim that divine
hiddenness is a necessary feature of any antecedent world capable
of producing creatures fit for a relationship with God. It is logical:

81 See Chapter 6: The Hiddenness of God.

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If our essence and ultimate purpose is found in things eternal and
divine, and it is possible to deny the existence of things eternal and
divine, then it is possible to deny our own essence and ultimate
purpose and so become a creature at odds with its world and with
itself. On this view the unbeliever is like a landlocked seal
galumphing across cracked sunbaked earth on its fins. It has never
seen the ocean; in fact, it denies that such things as oceans exist
and so imputes its clumsiness, dehydration and misery to, the
absurdity of life.
Returning to St. Augustines answer, I think it is important to
note that it comprises both a cause and an effect: Thou hast
made us for thyself and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in
thee. Augustine means that because God made us in his image
and for himself we are incomplete until we find completion in
Him. And it is this that explains why the heat death of the
universe should fill Russell with, unyielding despair. Like fish
flapping on an arid sandbank, we abhor finitude and mortality
because they are alien to our essence. Infinitude is the medium in
which we are ultimately intended to live and breathe. Intellectus
naturaliter desiderat esse semper, observed Aquinas: The
mind naturally desires to exist forever. The foregoing can now
be formalised as follows,

P1. Human beings have a natural desire for the

transcendent

P2. Natural desires exist in relation to some real

object that can satisfy them

C. Therefore, probably, something transcendent

exists

4. Conclusion
We have seen that there is no very particular reason to expect
widespread spiritual desire on physicalism and a very particular
reason to expect it on theism.
On physicalism spiritual desire is problematic. Because
spiritual desires are primordial and universal the denial that they
exist in relation to a real object is inconsistent with the paradigm

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for desires of this type. To argue, on the other hand, that the truth
status of belief is irrelevant so long as a belief is adaptive
undermines our rational warrant for belief of every kind
including our belief in physicalism. On physicalism our spiritual
desires are assumed to have no object and the existential
discontent this produces is a brute fact annexed to an explanatory
narrative that already fails to account for the origin and properties
of the agents in whom those desires are instantiated and the origin
and properties of the universe they inhabit.
On theism all of this is precisely to be expected. Human beings
are made in the image of God with the purpose of knowing God
but also inhabit an antecedent world from which God has
temporarily hidden his countenance. There we naturally seek
eternal and spiritual things whose existence it is also possible for us
to doubt and deny. Thus the imago dei and hiddenness of God
together explain both our haunting desire for ultimate,
transcendent joy and the deep existential discontent with which
denying the object of that desire is met.
I conclude that it is on balance more probable that agents a
natural desire for spiritual transcendence will exist if there is a
God than it is that they would exist if there is not. The fact that
human spiritual desire is widespread and primordial therefore
adds moderate force to a cumulative case for theism.

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 18
The Argument From Religious Experience

I have now given eight arguments which together make it highly

probable that there is a God who created us in his image. From
that at least two things follow. The first was the subject of the
previous chapter; namely, that human beings will manifest a
widespread and primordial desire for spiritual transcendence. The
second is the subject of the present chapter: That God might
reasonably be expected to reveal himself directly to at least some
of his creaturesthough not too evidently or too publicly since, as
we have seen, certain and universally available knowledge of God
would curtail moral freedom. 82 The Argument from Religious
Experience claims that this is so: Many people throughout history
have reported encounters with God and can offer testimony in
support of his existence.
The argument is simple but presents unique difficulties. On the
one hand, it consists of a single premise whose conclusion follows
without much argument. If you accept that Saint Teresa of Avila
experienced God, you accept that God exists. On the other hand,
skeptics will strongly resist the truth of the premise, i.e., that Saint
Teresa in fact experienced God. These two features of the
argument account for the structure of what follows. I will first
need to carefully define religious experience in a way that avoids
presupposing the conclusion that God exists and only then justify
its evidential value. For this reason the evidential value of religious
experience will not enter the picture until after my discussion of
religious experience itselfa point it may pay to bear in mind.
In all of this I will be closely following the argument given by
Swinburne in The Existence of God. It will be my concern to
outline his claim that religious experiences, given two principles of
rationality that will be defined and defended, provide further
evidence for theism.

82 See Chapter 6: The Hiddenness of God

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 1. Preliminary Definitions: Kinds of Experience
We begin with some necessary definitions of the kinds of
experience in general before moving to religious experiences in
particular.

1.1 Internal vs External

An experience is a conscious mental event that can be given an
external or an internal description; that is, it can be described in a
way that commits us to the existence of something in the external
world or it can be described in a way that entails no such
commitment. Thus I hear the rattle of a coach outside my
window entails that there is a coach outside my window while I
heard a sound as of a coach outside my window does not. As
already noted, the argument Saint Teresa experienced God;
therefore God exists is philosophically unserviceable because its
premise presupposes the conclusion; i.e., God exists. If they are
to be useful at all, Swinburne notes, arguments from religious
experience must be phrased as arguments from experiences given
internal descriptions. There are various ways of giving internal
descriptions to ones experience. Normally, this is done by
describing how things seem to the subjectincluding experiences
that the subject believes to be of something outside himself. The
ship seemed to be moving away from me and His face
appeared strangely changed are both examples of this.

1.2 Epistemic vs Comparative Appearances

However, there is a crucial distinction that needs to be made
between the way things can seem to the subject. Appearances
(conscious events described by the verbs seems and appears and
looks) can be understood in either an epistemic or a comparative
sense. If I say, epistemically, There appears to be a penny in
my soup I am saying that my sensory experience leads me to
believe that there really is a penny in my soup. However, if I say,
comparatively, From this angle, the penny on the table
appears elliptical I mean only that the penny looks the way
elliptical things look but not that I believe it to be soindeed, I
may well know that it is not. Perception can involve both kinds of
internal description. Viewing a penny from an angle, it looks both
elliptical and copper. Here my experience is of the penny
appearing to me in both a comparative and an epistemic sense.

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1.3 Public vs Private Experiences
A further distinction relevant to the argument is between public
and private experiences. An object x is public if it causes all
attentive persons present and equipped with the right sensory
faculties to have an experience of it appearing to them that x is
present. Almost all of our perceptions (for example, seeing a bird
or hearing a clap of thunder) are public in this way. But there may
be objects y that cause only certain persons to have the experience
of it seeming to them that y is present. Perhaps, speculates
Swinburne, the causal chains that bring about perceptions of y are
nondeterministic: The laws of optics do not guarantee that all
attentive persons present perceive y. Or perhaps y is an exotic
entity that can cause only some to have the experience of it
seeming to them that y is presentsuch as a normally-
imperceptible being that has the power of letting you, but not me,
sense it. If religious experiences are of anything, Swinburne
concludes, they are normally private perceptions. Thus one
person may have a religious experience while his companion
(though present and attentive and equipped with the right sensory
faculties) does not.

1.4 Relations Between Experiences

Swinburne, finally, draws attention to the relation between
experiences; that is, to the fact that one often perceives p in
perceiving q. Thus seeing a man dressed in a certain way and
having a certain face and physique and gait, I see Count Vronsky;
seeing a certain configuration of bright stars in the sky, I see Ursa
Major. In perceiving the second thing I do not notice some
further detail that had first escaped my notice; rather, I see the
first thing as the second thing. Importantly, the same perceptions
of q can entail or not entail the perception of p. Swinburne gives
the example of a bright spot in the visual field which may produce
in one subject but not another the experience of seeming to see a
lighthouse; and, of course, the same sensory perceptions can
produce different experiences of this secondary sort in different
subjects.

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 2. Classification of Religious Experience
With this terminology in place, we are now in a position to define
religious experiences in a constructive way. Broadly, then, a
religious experience is a private experience that to the subject
seems, in the epistemic sense, to be a perception of God or of
some other supernatural thing. Swinburne divides such
experiences into five types.

2.1 Ordinary Public Object

First are private experiences that seem, epistemically, to be
experiences of the supernatural but that arise from a perceptual
relation to ordinary public objects. Just as someone may look at a
stocky, bewhiskered man in uniform and see General Walters, so
someone may gaze into the sky at night and have a sudden lucid
awareness of the whole universe as a contingent object sustained
in existence by God.

2.2 Unusual Public Object

Second are experiences in which one perceives the supernatural in
a very unusual public objectthough the public perceptum q
may or may not entail the religious perceptum p for all observers
present and attentive and equipped with the appropriate sensory
faculties. The post mortem appearances of Jesus belong to this
second type. A man who appeared, in the comparative sense, to
be Jesus showed up three days after his death and ate some fish.
Many had the religious experience that the man appeared, in the
epistemic sense, to be Jesus. A skeptic may have had the same
visual and auditory perceptions without the religious experience.

2.3 Describable Private Perception

Third are entirely private experiences of a sort describable in the
same language used to describe sensory experience. For example:
In Matthew 1:20-1, Joseph dreamed he saw an angel. Here there
is no public perceptum but Joseph is able to describe his visual
and auditory sensations: I saw a figure in white who said certain
things. What made the dream a religious experience is that, upon
waking, it seemed to Joseph, in the epistemic sense, that an angel
of the Lord had appeared to him in a dream.

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 Conversion on the Way to Damascus by Caravaggio. This famous
painting depicts the moment Saul of Tarsus, soon to be the Apostle
Paul, is overcome by the presence of God and falls from his horse. Paul's
experience belongs to type two in Swinburne's taxonomy since at least
some of his companions saw the light and heard the voice. However,
only Paul had a religious experience.

2.4 Indescribable Private Perception

Fourth are religious experiences in which the subject has private
sensations of a kind that are not describable using normal
vocabulary. These may include some elements analogous to
sensory perception but what is essential to the experience remains
ineffable. A man who reports an experience that he says is
impossible to describe, while insisting that there is something to
be described if only he knew the words, has had an experience of
this type.

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2.5 Extrasensory Awareness
In the last type of religious experience the subject does not have
perceptions at all but nevertheless reports having been aware of
God or of ultimate reality, just as it may seem to me, analogises
Swinburne, that my hand behind my back is facing upward
rather than downward. Mystics seem to claim such knowledge of
God (something they may be trying to express when they say that
their encounter with God was mediated by blackness or
nothingness) but more ordinary cases also belong to this type.
Thus someone may feel that God is urging him to do something
(such as follow a particular vocation) in the absence of auditory
and visual sensation of any sort.

3. The Evidential Value of Religious Experience

The question that must now be asked is this: What, if any,
evidential value do such experiences have? Swinburne begins his
reply to this question by introducing and defending two basic
principles of rationality.

3.1 Principle of Credulity

The first principle of rationality states: If to a subject S it seems,
in an epistemic sense, that x is present then, in the absence
of special considerations, probably x is present. Swinburne
calls this the Principle of Credulity and argues that it is very
obviously correct in most cases. If Mr Green has the experience of
it seeming to him, in the epistemic sense, that there is a German
shepherd on his lawn then that is good evidence for his believing
that there is a German shepherd on his lawn. "The principle of
Credulity," Swinburne asserts, "is a fundamental principle of
rationality and unless we allow it to have considerable force, we
quickly find ourselves in a skeptical bog in which we can hardly
know anything." And a provisional entailment of giving this
principle "considerable force," is that, again in the absence of
special considerations, a subject ought to take his own religious
experience to be good evidence for belief in the existence of its
apparent object.
The entailment will be resisted by skeptics while the principle
itself must, on pain of irrationality, be accepted. The force of the
Argument from Religious Experience therefore depends on

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whether the Principle of Credulity can be generally restricted to
rule out its application to religious experience and, failing that, on
whether there are special considerations that invalidate the
evidential value of all religious experiences. Swinburne argues
that neither of these conditions obtain.

3.1.1 Attempts to Restrict the Principle to the

Nonreligious Experiences
The first attempt supposes that the way things seem requires
inductive justification that is available in ordinary cases and
unavailable in religious ones. Specifically, the objector claims: Its
seeming that x is present is good grounds for supposing
that x is present only if we have evidence that, when in the
past it appeared that x was present, x was proved to be
present. In other words, a skeptic might argue that we are
justified in taking what appears to be a table to be a table only
because past experiences prove such appearances to be
trustworthy and we do not have such inductive evidence in the
case of religious experiences.
There are two difficulties with this view.
The first is that, ordinarily, its seeming a table is present
supports justified belief that a table is present even if the subject
does not or cannot at the same time recall his past experiences
with tables. Here it will not do to say that merely having had past
experiences, now forgotten, justifies the present inference. "If a
claim is to be justified inductively," explains Swinburne, "we must
in some sense have the evidence of past performance in order to
be justified in making the inference." And so an inference from
past to present experience is only justified if the subject recalls his
past experiences correctly. And what grounds do we have for
supposing that we do? Because inductive justification of the
reliability of memory would be circular (My memory is reliable
because I recall, reliably, that it is reliable) the objector himself
must finally appeal to the principle that things are they way the
seem. And the same problem arises if it is required that other
people shall have had reliable experience of it seeming to them
that a table is present. Here you must appeal finally to the
Principle of Credulity twice in justification of the testimony of
others; i.e., you must assume that its seeming to be the case that
other people have said p is grounds for believing it to be true that

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they have said p and also that what other people tell you is
probably true.

The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa by Bernini. Saint Teresa was a

Spanish nun who reported many religious experiences in her
autobiography The Life of Saint Teresa of Alvila by
Herself. Berninis famous sculpture depicts an experience that
would seem to match to either type two or type three in Swinburnes
taxonomy: A forceful but private experience that she struggled to
express in words. In 1559, Teresa became firmly convinced that she
was being visited by a physical but invisible Christan experience
perhaps belonging to type five: Extrasensory awareness.

The second problem with the objection from inductive

justification is that it cannot deal with cases in which the subject
has no experience of x but does have experience of its
componential properties. A centaur, for example, is a being with

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the head, trunk and arms of a man and the body and legs of a
horse. Let there be a subject who has seen humans and horses but
not centaurs. Because its seeming to him, epistemically, that a
centaur is now present is good reason for believing that a centaur
is present, the inductive principle will need to be modified as
follows: Its appearing that x is present is good grounds for
supposing that x is present only if we have evidence that
when in the past it has appeared that x or any of its
properties were present they have proved so to be. So
modified the argument, whatever its merits, has no force against
he claims of religious experience. For God, like centaur, is
defined in terms of properties (power, knowledge, freedom, love,
and so on) of which most of us have had mundane experience.
And one who has had sensory experience of recognising persons
with these properties to a limited degree might well be able to
recognise when he was in the presence of an entity with these
properties to an unlimited degree.
The second attempt to restrict the Principle of Credulity
allows that it holds without inductive justification for the
sensible properties of the objects of experience but denies that
it holds for the objects themselves. A proponent of this view
modifies the principle as follows: If to a subject S it seems, in
an epistemic sense, that the properties of x are present then
that is good evidence for the belief that the properties of x
are present. On this view the existence of x itself is inferred. And
so its seeing to you that something brown and solid is present is
grounds for believing that the object of your experience is brown
and solid but not necessarily that it is a table. The implication for
religious experience is clear. In seeing or hearing God the subject
is having an experience that can be understood in a more
mundane way (seeing colours, hearing noises) which
he interprets as God.
Swinburne points out that the argument depends on a tidy
division between experience and interpretation and that no such
division exists. For clearly, writes Swinburne, we are justified
in holding many perceptual beliefs about objects having
nonsensible characteristics that cannot be backed up in terms of
beliefs about objects having sensible characteristics. Thus
Swinburne is justified in believing that a certain woman is his wife
though unable to describe precisely those sensible properties that

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produce this belief. And forcing him to do so would produce a
description to which thousands of women conformnot one of
whom would Swinburne mistake for his wife. That one can
recognize, he notes, does not entail that one can describe or
even that one knows what the features are by which one
recognizes. In a like case, recognising your mothers voice on the
telephone, or that a man sitting across from you on the bus is
vaguely familiar, or that there is a phantom trace of a certain
perfume in an empty elevator are all justified beliefswhether or
not we can say what the essential sensible features of each
experience are.
Subjects vary in the kinds of objects and properties they can
recognise. Sometimes one can describe the sensible characteristics
of experience and sometimes one cannot. And even if one can, the
recognition of an object by means of more sophisticated
properties may be more natural and immediate than a description
of its sensible characteristics. There is no reason of principle,
says Swinburne, why we should not grow so adept at spotting
Russian ships or Victorian tables or elliptical galaxies that we can
recognize them immediately without being able to say what in the
way of sensible characteristics makes us do so.
He concludes that arguments against the Principle of
Credulity fail and the principle stands. If to a subject S it seems,
epistemically, that x is present then, in the absence of special
considerations, that is good reason for S to believe that x is
present.
It is to these "special considerations" that we must now turn.

3.2.1 Special Considerations

Swinburne suggests that there are four special considerations that
defeat perceptual claims. And none of them, as we shall now see,
can be universally applied to religious experience.

3.2.2 The Conditions or Subject Are Unreliable

First one may show that the perception occurred under conditions
or was claimed by a subject proven to be unreliable. Suppose
Professor Brown claims to have seen a tiger during his evening
walk in Hyde Park but Professor Brown is prone to lies and
exaggeration or was known to be on drugs at the time. In that
case, his reported experience is of no evidential worth. Swinburne

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says that this consideration may invalidate some religious
experiences but is not generally available. Most religious
experiences, he says, are reported by subjects who normally
make reliable perceptual claims and have not recently taken
drugs.

3.2.3 The Claimed Perception Can Be Falsified

Second one may be able to falsify a claimed perception
inductively. Suppose I claim to have read the time on a wrist
watch from a distance of 300 meters. If you test me on a number
of occasions and find that I cannot do so again that is good
inductive evidence that my original claim was false.
This second consideration can not be universally applied to
religious experience without a proof of the nonexistence of God
and we have already seen that the existence and properties of the
universe and the existence and properties of the conscious beings
that inhabit it together make the existence of God highly
probable. Here a dual onus falls on the skeptic. He must first
negate the force of the arguments for the existence of God and,
secondly, produce a positive proof of atheism. If he cannot do
that, the claimed religious experience stands.
The question does arise whether the second consideration can
be applied to religious experience in a more limited way in view of
the fact that many religious experiences entail doctrinal
commitments that are in conflict with each other. But Swinburne
says that even here the objection is of very limited force.
Naturally enough, people describe religious experiences in the
religious vocabulary familiar to them. But this does not of itself
entail that their different descriptions are in conflict. God may be
known under different names to different cultures (a point
acknowledged in both the Old and New Testaments83). Thus a
Greek who claims to have talked to Poseidon is not necessarily in
conflict with a Jew who claims to have talked to the angel who
watches over the sea; unless, adds Swinburne, to admit the
existence of Poseidon is to commit one to a whole polytheistic
theology, and there is no need to suppose that it generally is.

83 Exodus 6:2-3 and Acts 17:23

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 It is true that sometimes religious experiences do entail
doctrinal commitments that are in conflict. An apparition of
Christ, for example, commits one to a belief in the Incarnation
which an orthodox Jew, perhaps reporting an apparition of his
own, 84 would not accept. In that case, Swinburne says, the
opponent of the doctrine must produce good grounds for rejecting
itsay, that conflicting claims are more numerous and better
authenticated. But even if he can do so, the subject of the religious
experience need not withdraw his original claim completely but
only describe it in a less committed waysuch as, I was aware of
some supernatural being, though not necessarily Dionysus, as I
originally claimed.
Generally, conflict between various descriptions of religious
experience is a source of skepticism about a particular detailed
claim but not about religious experience in toto. Babylonian
astronomers, notes Swinburne, reported the movement of holes
in the firmament; Greek astronomers the movement of physical
bodies in space. The conflict between them did not mean that
there were no things in the sky of which both groups were giving
further descriptions. And so with religious experience.
A final objection to religious experience under this second
special consideration would be to claim: One cannot identify an
entity x unless one has previously experienced or been given a
detailed description of x. But, Swinburne says, this argument is
clearly mistaken. I can come to recognise people whom I have
never perceived before after being given descriptions of them that
can hardly be regarded as descriptions of their appearance
appropriate to the modality of the sense involved. In this
connection Swinburne invites us to consider the
description, Smelinowski is the only Ruritanian with a
really English sense of humour and General Walters is the
most commanding personality whom I am ever likely to
meet. Both may facilitate the successful identification of their
referents. And so too the description of God as, The one and

84 Swinburne makes the further point that religious experiences in traditions outside of
Christianity are of beings having similar properties to God or of lesser beings but not of
beings whose existence is incompatible with the existence of God. The only evidence of
this sort that could falsify Christianity would be, vastly many experiences apparently of
an omnipotent Devil. There are, of course, not such experiences.

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only Eternal Being unlimited in power, knowledge and
moral goodness may suffice for someone to recognise Godby,
feeling his presence, hearing his voice, or by some sixth sense.
Nor, adds Swinburne, does the ability to recognise something
require that we can clearly conceive in advance what the
experience of recognition would be like. What you tell me about
a colour I have never seen may enable me to recognise that colour
when I see it.

3.2.4 The Claimed Object of Perception Is, On the

Background Evidence, Unlikely to Have Been Present
The third special consideration that can defeat a perceptual claim:
One may be able to demonstrate that the presence of the claimed
object of perception is very improbable on the background
evidence. The emphasis, says Swinburne, is necessary to account
for the considerable evidential force of sensory experience:
Seeming to walk past Mr Ito on Park Lane is strong evidence for
the belief that Mr Ito is the object of the experience even if it is
more probable, a priori, that he is in Osaka where he lives. "We
would indeed be imprisoned within the circle of our existing
beliefs," notes Swinburne, "if experience did not normally have
this force." Thus only if it is very improbable that Mr Ito is on
Park Lane (perhaps because it is very probable that he is dead)
can the background evidence outweigh the force of immediate
experience.
As with the second special consideration, successfully pressing
this objection against all religious experiences requires one to
prove that very probably God does not exist. For clearly, if
God does exist, then God is everywhere: God only fails to be
present at the site of some perceptual experience if he does not
exist. Again, therefore, the onus is upon the skeptic to provide a
positive proof of atheism. Nor can it be objected of some religious
experience that all attentive persons present and equipped with
the right sensory faculties failed to have an experience of it
appearing to them that God was present. And this is because an
omnipotent entity qualifies as an object y that can remain
imperceptible but occasionally cause only some to have the
experience of it seeming to them that it is present.

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3.2.5 The Object Was Unlikely to Have Been the Cause
of the Perception
The fourth and final way to falsify a perceptual claim is to show
that, whether or not x was present, x was probably not the cause
of its seeming to the subject that x was present. One obvious way
of doing this is to show that something else caused the experience.
If you show me an actor dressed up as Mr Ito who spent the day
walking up and down Park Lane, I realise that my experience of
seeming to pass Mr Ito was probably caused by the actor and that
I have no grounds for believing Mr Ito was the object of that
experience.
Swinburne notes that this is a particularly awkward challenge to
apply when we are dealing with a purported experience of
God. Clearly: An apparent perception of x is an experience
of x if x belongs to the causal chain that brings about my
perception of it by its presence where it appears to be.85 But if
there is a God, he is omnipresent and omnipotent: Causal
processes operate only because he sustains them. Hence any
causal processes at all that bring about my experience will have
God among their causes; and any experience of him will be of him
as present at a place where he is. Showing that a perception
apparently of God arose from natural processes does not therefore
show that that perception was not veridical. In order to show this,
you would need to show that God did not cause those natural
processes and this can only be done by showing that God does
not exist.86

85 This consideration may apply to lesser beings who are the objects of religious
perception. For example: Since the Virgin Mary is not omnipresent, she may only be able
to appear in one place; and, since she is not the sustainer of the world, she can only be
responsible for some of the causal processes within it.
86 God may bring about a religious experience, not only by intervening in the operation
of natural laws, but merely by sustaining their normal operations. Such laws would be
ones that produce religious experiences in people with certain beliefs or brain states in
certain circumstancesfor example, when fasting, or in dark churches. Swinburne adds
that while the laws of nature might be such as to lead to people having such experiences
anyway, it is more probable that people will have such experience if there is a God than if
there is not; that is, It is more likely that they will have an experience apparently of x if x
is present than if x is not present.

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3.3 The Principle of Testimony
The Principle of Credulity affirms the rationality of believing that,
in the absence of special considerations, things are probably as
they seem to be. In ordinary experience we also use a wider
principle: Other things being equal, we believe that what others
tell us is probably true. Most of our beliefs about the world,
observes Swinburne, are based on what others claim to have
perceivedbeliefs about geography and history and science and
everything else beyond immediate experience. Swinburne argues
that such beliefs are justified even when (as per usual) we do not
personally vet witnesses for their reliability. For this reason he
affirms a second principe of rationality he calls the Principle of
Testimony: The experiences of others, in the absence of
special considerations, are probably as they report them.
Some of the special considerations already discussed will of
course apply to some reports.87 If Professor Brown is known to lie
or regularly take hallucinogens his experience will have little
evidential worth. But since this is not the norm and since others
probably have the experiences that they report and things are
probably as their experience suggests, so things probably are as
others reportthough the degree of probability is greater for the
subject than for those to whom he reports his experience. As
Swinburne puts it, If p is evidence for q, and q is evidence for r,
then p is normally less evidence for r than it is for q. Thus a
report is not as good a reason for believing in the object of
perception as the perception itself but still is quite a good reason.
Our whole system of beliefs about the world beyond our
immediate experience, Swinburne reminds us, is based on
trusting the reports of others.88

87 One ancient test, Swinburne says, may be used where there is about about the
veracity of a report of some religious experience: To see whether the subjects lifestyle has
undergone a change. If Mr Jones claims to have had an overwhelming experience of
God, we would expect that to make a difference to his way of living.
88 There may be arguments to show that it is very, very improbable that a perfectly good
God said or did what the subject claims. Claims that God told one to lie, rape, or torture,
for instance, will be immensely improbable. Swinburne adds here that we do not need to
hold that God does not exist in order to hold that causal processes that he sustains lead to
people having false beliefs about what he has told them to do.

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 4. Conclusion
We have seen that anyone who has an experience apparently of
God has, on the Principle of Credulity, good reason for believing
that there is a God; and we have seen that one who has not
himself had an experience apparently of God has reason, though
not quite as good a reason, for believing that there is a God on the
testimony of many others who have had such experiences. The
only way to circumvent this conclusion is to provide a proof of
atheismsince no objection or special consideration can be
universally applied to religious experience without it.
As a final point it is worth remembering that the evidential
force of perception can outweigh all but the strongest a
priori improbability that the object of perception is present. This
point was illustrated by a Park Lane encounter with Mr Ita who, a
priori, is more probably in Osaka where he lives. Thus even if the
probability of the existence of God on the evidence of natural
theology is significantly less than half an individual perception of
God only requires support by the testimony of others who have
had similar experiences to overcome the background
improbability. And that testimony is evidently available: Millions
of human beings down the centuries have had religious
experiences of one or more of the kinds discussed. To overcome
the combined weight of all this testimony the probability of
theism must be vanishingly small. And in view of the eight
phenomena already discussed (each of which is credibly probable
on the hypothesis that there is a God and incredibly improbable
on the hypothesis that there is not) this is something than cannot
possibly be affirmed.
I conclude that Swinburnes argument succeeds: Human
religious experience provides forceful evidence for the existence of
the God who is the object of those experiences.

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 19
Conclusion

It has been my concern to show that there is a God who created

and sustains us and the world we inhabit. To this end I presented
nine lines of evidence from philosophy, physical cosmology,
molecular biology and human mental, moral and spiritual
experience. In each case the phenomenon in question was shown
to be credibly probable on the hypothesis that God exists and
incredibly improbable on the hypothesis that he does not. Taken
together, these nine lines of evidence form a powerful cumulative
case for theism.89
Having now established both that the concept of God is
coherent and that there is good evidence for his existence I have
established that theism is rationally permissible: It is not irrational
to believe that there is a God. And this, in turn, gives us rational
permission to discuss Christianity. For if it is not irrational to
believe that there is a God, then it is not irrational to suppose that
God might have revealed himself decisively in human history; and
if it is not irrational to suppose that God might have revealed
himself in decisively in human history, then it is not irrational to
assess a religion which claims to have evidence that he has done
so.
However, before moving to Christian theism it is worth seeing
if the present conclusion can with justification be stated more
strongly; that is, whether on the nine lines of evidence just given
theism is rationally obligatory. A proposition is rationally
obligatory if it is irrational not to affirm it. And I suggest that in
view of the nine previous arguments atheism and agnosticism both
entail absurdities that it would be irrational to knowingly affirm.
Let us begin with atheism.

89 Ten lines of evidence if we include the Modal Ontological Argument.

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 Recall first that to avoid the conclusion of the Modal
Argument an atheist must deny the Principle of Sufficient Reason:
He must hold to the principle that a physical object can exist
without a sufficient reason for its existence. Schopenhauer aptly
dubbed this a commission of, "the taxicab fallacy." The reason is
as follows: Ordinarily, the atheist agrees that things have sufficient
causes and explanations: headaches, global warming, diamonds,
teapots, lightning. Indeed, the Principle of Sufficient Reason is a
lynchpin of rational thought for theist and atheist alike. But when
the atheist is asked to follow the principle through to its ultimate
logical consequence (i.e., the universe) he attempts to dismiss it
like a hired hackand not because it is rational to do so but
because he doesnt like where it is taking him.
As we move through the rest of the arguments the cost of
atheism continues to rise. Faced with the Kalam Argument, an
atheist must deny the precept of Parmenides that ex nihilo nihil
fit; in other words, he must believe that physical objects can pop
into existence uncaused out of metaphysical nothingness. To
avoid the theistic implications of cosmological fine tuning, he must
(in an extravagant defiance of the principle of parsimony)
postulate the existence of infinitely many unobservable universes.
To explain the origin of life, he must believe that it self-assembled
by chance in the prebiotic soup of the early Earth when on every
reasonable calculation this is prohibitively improbable. To
reconcile his atheism with the essential properties of human
mental states, he must deny those propertiesincluding free will
and, with it, the rational content of his own denial. He must,
finally, deny moral objectivity since morality, on his metaphysic,
arises from evolutionary processes in the service of reproductive
fitness. This has the absurd and unpalatable consequence that to
first principles of moral reasoning (say, It is always wrong to
bayonet babies for sport) he cannot give his unqualified assent.
And when it is pointed out to him that his belief that, "Beliefs that
arise from evolutionary processes serve reproductive fitness and
cannot be trusted," is itself a belief that arose from evolutionary
processes and so, ex hypothesi, cannot be trusted, he has no
reply.
The entailments of atheism are counterexperiential and
absurd. Atheism cannot be rationally affirmed.

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 On the face of it agnosticism would seem to be a very
reasonable position to take. What could be more prudent than
suspending judgement in matters about which absolute certainty
is impossible? Note, however, that to be agnostic is to hold that,
possibly, atheism is true. And since to affirm atheism is to affirm
that all its entailments obtain, to hold to agnosticism is to affirm
that, possibly, all the entailments of atheism obtain: It
is possible that physical objects can exist without a sufficient
reason for their existence; it is possible that physical objects can
pop into existence out of nothingness uncausedand so on.
Clearly: If it is absurd to believe that married
bachelors actually exist then it is just as absurd to believe that
married bachelors possibly exist. Atheism and agnosticism
cannot therefore be rationally affirmed and so it follows that
theism is rationally obligatory.
However, this stronger conclusion is not essential to the
argument. So long as you are willing to grant that theism is
rationally permissible we are in a position to proceed to Part III:
The Coherence of Christian Theism.

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 194
 III
The Coherence of Christian Theism

195
 196
 20
Introduction

The last of the nine arguments I presented in Part II was

Swinburne's Argument from Religious Experience. This claims
that many people throughout history have had experiences
apparently of God and defends the evidential value of their
testimony. If God has revealed himself to certain people the
question might reasonably be asked whether he has ever revealed
himself more generally and decisively to the world. And, of
course, Christianity claims to have evidence for an event that
proves he has done just that.
However, before we examine the evidence for the resurrection
of Jesus there is a preliminary question that needs to be asked.
And that is: Is Christianity coherent? As I pointed out in
my Preface, evidence for bare theism is not necessarily evidence
for Christian theism. For it is logically possible that God
exists and that Christianity is falseeither because some other
religion is true or because, for whatever reason, God has not
revealed himself to the world and therefore no religion is true.
And this, presumably, is something that could be known if the
very concept of Christianity were illogical.
Although this point is the justification for Part III of my
argument, it is, I think, somewhat overstated. After all, evidence
for the existence of God and the resurrection of Jesus would still
be evidence for Christianity even if parts of Christian doctrine
were illogical. For suppose three things are true: God exists, Jesus
rose from the dead and the Bible contains absurdities. What
would be the most reasonable response? I suggest that it would be
far more reasonable to try and make sense of the absurdities in
view of the miracle than to ignore the miracle in view of the
absurdities.
Nevertheless, anyone who believes that Christianity is illogical
will believe that he has grounds to dismiss the whole religion out
of hand and this will prejudice him against any historical evidence
purporting to authenticate its founding miracle. I think it is
therefore prudent to first clear the air by showing that, whether

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or not Christianity is actually true, it is possibly true insofar as
it faces no indefeasible a priori objections.
The usual objections fall into three categories. The first arise
from religious pluralism. The objector notes that there are many
world religions all making competing claims about God
and reasons that, since these cannot all be true, they must all be
false. Religion, on this view, is a sort of viral memeplex which one
contracts from the culture into which they happen to be born.
The second category of objections suggest that Christianity is
antiscientific: The Church is and always has been a dead hand on
scientific progress and a Christian is required to believe in
mythological nonsense that has been scientifically falsified. The
third category of objections suggest that Christianity is morally
unconscionable: The violence in the Old Testament and the
doctrine of hell cannot possibly be reconciled with the idea that
God is all loving.
In the following six chapters it will be my concern to show that
these objections are all misconceived. But first I need to say a little
about the structure of the argument.

The Structure of the Argument

The first and most obvious problem that needs to be addressed is
religious pluralism. For as soon as we earnestly ask the
question Has God ever decisively revealed himself to the
world? we are confronted by the fact that there are many
different world religious. Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism
and Christianity each make different claims about God. Which, if
any of them, is true? Two extreme possibilities may at once
suggest themselves. The first is to wonder if they are all false and
the second is to wonder if they are all true.
But both conjectures are unsatisfactory.
The second seems to take a hint from Symmachus who wrote
that, Infinite religions befit an infinite God. The different world
religions, the proponent of this view might reason, are disparate in
aspect and identical in essence: Buddha, Moses, Muhammad,
Brahma and Christ are like different emissaries God has chosen or
different masks which he has wornperhaps each one
appropriate to the cultural and historical context in which he met
us.
But on reflection religious relativism is logically incoherent.

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The great world religions make conflicting claims about God.
God, meanwhile, is holy and this entails that he does not,
indeed cannot, lie.90 And if he cannot lie he cannot reveal two
mutually exclusive doctrines about himselfone of which, by the
law of noncontradiction, must be false. Consider the doctrine of
the Incarnation. Christianity claims God become incarnate in
Christ. Judaism, Islam and Buddhism deny this.91 It is not possible
that God did and did not become incarnate in Christ.
Therefore, Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism cannot all
be true.92
Is, then, the first conjecture correct? Given a set of claims
which cannot all be true it does not necessarily follow that all are
false. Indeed, as William Lane Craig has observed, if it did then
atheism would also be false since it too belongs to the set of claims
about God that cannot all be true. By way of illustration, consider
the following: Mr Ito died in Osaka. Mr Ito died in Tokyo.
Mr Ito died in Nagasaki. Clearly, it is impossible that all three
are trueMr Ito cannot have died three times. Just as clearly, it is
possible that all three are falseMr Ito may have died in Kyoto.
But it is equally possible that one of them is true since Mr Ito may
in fact have died in one of the three cities in which he is claimed
to have died.
Religious pluralism, then, does not entail that all religions are
false but it does present a challenge to the coherence of each
oneincluding Christianity. And the challenge is to explain why,

90 This is sometimes referred to in theology as the "impeccability" of God. Hebrews 6:18
says that, "it is impossible for God to lie." Thus while God is perfectly free his actions are
always consistent with his moral perfection.
91 Hinduism does not reject the Incarnation outright: In Hinduism, there is a vast list of
ishtas, or divine beings, to which the Hindu is quite happy to add Jesus. They will not
therefore raise an objection to Christianityuntil, that is, one insists that Jesus was
the unique revelation of God.
92 Here a mystic may wish to appeal to the idea that logical contradictions can be
resolved at infinity. For example, consider the proposition: x is both a perfect circle and a
perfectly straight line. Clearly, this is impossible. If x is a circle it cannot be a straight
line; if x is a straight line it cannot be a circle. But now consider a circle
of infinite radius. Since the arc of a circle approaches rectilinearity as its radius
increases, an infinite circle is an infinite straight linejust as a polygon with infinite sides
is a perfect circle and a sphere of infinite size is an infinite plane. So, the mystic might
conclude, are religious contradictions resolved in the infinite godhead.

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if there is a God who revealed himself to us, he would
allow potential confusion about that revelation. The way to meet
this challenge is to first understand religious pluralism as a subtype
of divine hiddenness. As we saw in Chapter 6, divine hiddenness is
a necessary feature of any antecedent world capable of producing
creatures fit for a relationship with God. With this in mind
consider the following three premises,

P1 It is not possible that God would specially reveal

himself in two or more mutually exclusive religions.
(Because a morally perfect being cannot lie).

P2 It is not plausible that there should be

unresolvableuncertainty about a special revelation of
God. (Because if God chooses to specially reveal himself he has
both the reason and the means to miraculously authenticate his
special revelation).

P3 It is plausible that God would permit

resolvableuncertainty about his special revelation.
(Because religious pluralism is a subtype of divine hiddenness and
divine hiddenness vouchsafes human moral freedom).

It follows from P3 that prima facie confusion due to religious

pluralism does not prove that God has not revealed
himself specially. It follows from P1 that if he has revealed himself
specially it will be in only one religion. And it follows
from P2 and P3 that whatever religion has, on balance, the best
historical evidence for a miraculous authentication and the
greatest theological coherence is far more probably than not, and
far more probably than any other, the true special revelation of
God.
In short, my claim is that God may have good reason for
allowing us to form a false conception of him while, at the same
time, providing a revelation by means of which we can form a
correct one. But in that case it must be possible for a determined
and conscientious inquirer to distinguish the true conception from
the false. And so the solution to the problem of religious pluralism
is, finally, the intuitive and obvious one: Providing arguments and
evidence to show that Christianity is more plausibly true than any
other religion. This should consist of two steps. The first is to
provide a priori arguments to demonstrate that Christianity is

200
more coherent; the second is to provide a historical argument to
demonstrate that the founding miracle of Christianity is better
authenticated than any other miracle in history. And we shall see
that both are available.
In the first three chapters of Part III, I will give the a
priori argument. This will have two main themes,
both summarising Swinburne. The first: Given both that moral
and natural evil exist and that God is morally perfect, I will argue
that we have good reason to expect an Incarnation. The second:
Given that God is all loving and love is a relational property, I will
argue we have good reason to expect a plurality of divine persons
in the Godhead. This explains the order of the first three chapters:
Discussing the Incarnation in the first chapter and the Trinity in
the second will provide me with the tools needed to address
religious pluralism in the third.
The second argument in reply to religious pluralism will be to
establish that the evidence for the founding miracle of Christianity
is far better in both quality and quantity than that for any other
claimed miracle in history. However, since this is the topic of Part
IV, the first three chapters of Part III are only a partial answer to
religious pluralism that will not be complete until I have
concluded my entire argument.
Once religious pluralism has been addressed the rest of the
discussion will be straightforward. In the forth chapter I will
consider and discharge the claim that Christianity is antiscientific
and in the fifth and sixth show that objections to Christianity
based on the violence in the Old Testament and the doctrine of
hell are ultimately without warrant.

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 202
 21
The Incarnation

1. A Preliminary Distinction
Before presenting Swinburnes argument it may be helpful to
clarify the difference between a posteriori and a priori reasons
for thinking some hypothesis is true. 93 Suppose that a safe is
robbed and our working hypothesis is John stole the money
from the safe. During the investigation we may discover two
kinds of evidence. First, we may find Johns fingerprints at the
crime scene and a sum of money on him matching the sum that
was stolen. This will be a posteriori grounds for the truth of the
hypothesis; that is, consequences to be expected if the hypothesis
is true. Second, we may learn that John has a history of robbing
safes and is also in debt. This will be a priori grounds for the
truth of the hypothesis; that is, evidence that belongs outside the
scope of the hypothesis but nevertheless increases its probable
truth.
The historical case for the resurrection which I will be
presenting later is a posteriori grounds for thinking Jesus was
God Incarnate. Like fingerprints on a safe, it is a consequence to
be expected if the hypothesis that Jesus rose form the dead is true
and not at all to be expected if it is false. The arguments that
follow are a priori grounds for thinking that Jesus was God
Incarnate. Just as reflection on Johns criminal past and present
financial situation may prove him more likely to have committed
a crime, so moral reflection on the nature of God and the
condition of man may suggest that God is likely to act in certain
ways. In what follows, it will be my concern to summarise
Swinburne's argument that, given human sin and suffering, a
loving God is likely to act in the way Christianity claims he has
acted; that is, by becoming incarnate.

93 The phrase a posteriori means posterior to and so, from what comes after and
the phrase a priori means prior to and so, from what comes before.

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 2. The Nature of God and the Condition of Man
Swinburne begins his argument with two preliminary points. The
first is that God is morally perfect. The second is that human
suffering exists in the universe he has created. Such suffering is
something which God has good reason to allow but it is also, as
we shall see, something to which he is also likely to respond.
However, before presenting the argument itself, I will find it
helpful to briefly revisit these two points.

2.1 The Moral Perfection of God

The moral perfection of God is integral to classical theism.
One argument for it unfolds from the observation that voluntary
actions always strive towards an apparent good entertained by the
agent who performs them. And importantly, this also held for
morally bad actions. A thief, for instance, seeks the good of an
increase in his personal fortune and his action is to be understood
as bad insofar as it pursues this small selfish good at the cost of a
decrease in the total goodthe unhappiness he brings to his
victim; the mistrust and unease he inspires; his disruption of social
harmony, and so on. However, since all voluntary action is
already motivated by the good, and since the good of any action
entertained by an agent is dependent on his knowledge and
rationality, so increases in knowledge and rationality will refine his
judgment of the good and, with that refinement, improve his
morality.
In a divine mind this principle is developed to its ultimate
logical consequence. Being disembodied, God is free from
carnality; being omniscient, he is free from irrationality; being
omnipotent, he is free from want. His greatest pleasure is
therefore found in recognising that he performs virtuous deeds
and in pursuing goals which promote universal perfection. Perfect
knowledge and power, in short, will produce a perfect awareness
of and pursuit of the good. Swinburne suggests that we define the
moral perfection of God in this way: God performs only
morally best or equally best actions of many kinds and no
bad ones.

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2.2 The Sin and Suffering of Man
Suffering, meanwhile, is an unpreventable feature of any world in
which virtue and moral self-determination are widely attainable
for finite agents. This was a point discussed in Chapter 5. Again,
briefly: Free will ensures that we have a choice between doing
good and doing evil. Humans are so made that when we do good
it becomes easier to do good again at the next opportunity and
when we do evil it becomes easier to do evil again at the next
opportunity.94 In this way, we gradually strengthen or weaken
desires of different kinds and so form a moral character. Without
free will none of this would be possible. And while God is
omnipotent his omnipotence needs to be understood in a way that
allows for the constraints of logical possibility. And since it is
logically impossible for God to create agents with free will and
ensure that they do no evil, human suffering is a potential feature
of any world in which virtue is attainable.
It is because God wants us to freely become good people that
he permits temporary moral evil and suffering. But it needs to be
noted that it is not free will alone, but free will and moral evil
together, that provide an opportunity to manifest most virtues. In
other words, only if someone eventually exercises their free will to
assault or abuse you can I exercise mine to show you empathy;
only if you are robbed can I make personal sacrifices to provide
for you. The question arises whether moral evil alone would
afford adequate opportunities for everyone to form a virtuous
moral character. Swinburne suggests that it would not. A world in
which opportunities to obtain virtue are universally available must
therefore contain natural evil.
Consider again a world without disaster, disease and
decrepitude; a world in which the only cause of injury and death
is, respectively, assault and murder. It is a mathematical certainty
that such a world would provide far, far fewer opportunities for
compassion, self-sacrifice, courage, forbearance, and so forth, and
highly probable that some of us would have no such opportunities
at all. Pleasure and comfort are good and our world, of course,

94 As Emerson put it, Sew a thought, reap an action; sew an action, reap a habit; sew a
habit, reap a character; sew a character, reap a destiny.

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includes both. But a life that offered nothing else would make us
complacent, hedonistic, idle, selfish and shallow.

3. A Priori Reasons for the Incarnation

The initial conditions of the argument are therefore as follows:
Human beings are misusing their free will to do evil. As a result,
many individuals and societies are developing a bad moral
character. This fact, together with the natural evil necessary to
ensure that opportunities to obtain virtue are universally available,
causes human suffering that is often widespread and profound.
God, meanwhile, is morally perfect. How is he likely to respond?
Swinburne argues that God will likely respond by becoming
incarnate. Let us now consider the three arguments he gives.

3.1 An Obligation to Share in Human Suffering

Parents often subject their children to suffering for the sake of
some greater good. Mrs Bell, for instance, may put her overweight
daughter on a stringent diet. Mr Wild may ask his son to attend a
difficult neighbourhood school for the sake of good community
relations. Under such circumstances, it is good but not obligatory
for the parent to show solidarity with their child by taking a share
in the suffering that has been imposed. Thus Mrs Bell may decide
to join her daughter in eating a green salad for dinner even
though Mrs Bell herself is not overweight. And likewise Mr Wild
may present himself at the difficult neighbourhood school to
enrol in the parent-teacher association or offer to coach the soccer
team.
In both examples the suffering imposed is mild. But
Swinburne suggests that when the suffering imposed reaches a
certain level of intensity the good of sharing in that suffering for
the one who imposes it rises to an obligation. In this connection
he offers the following example. Suppose, firstly, that England has
been unjustly attacked and the government has conscripted all
men between 18 and 30 to defend it; suppose, secondly, that a
parent may veto the conscription of their son if he is under 21;
suppose, thirdly, that older men under 50 may volunteer. Most
parents with teenage sons veto the conscription but Swinburne, in
view of the gravity of the situation, refuses to do so: He insists that
his 19 year old son enlist. Suppose finally that Swinburne is 45
and so himself eligible but under no obligation to serve. Since I

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am forcing my son to endure the hardship and danger of military
service, concludes Swinburne, I have a moral obligation to him
to volunteer myself. And of course in circumstances of this kind
the sharing could not be incognito. The parent needs not merely
to share the childs suffering but to show him that he is doing so.
The relevance of all this to the doctrine of the Incarnation can
be spelled out as follows: Given the amount of pain and suffering
which God, though for a good purpose, permits us to endure it is
very plausible to suppose that he incurs a moral obligation upon
himself to share in that suffering; and given that God, being
perfectly good, always performs the morally best available action,
it is very plausible to suppose that he would discharge that
obligation. This could be achieved by means of an
incarnation; that is, by becoming human and, living a life
containing much suffering and ending with the great crisis which
all humans have to face: the crisis of death. And one way to
ensure that he has shared in the very worst suffering humans
must endure is to live a life that ends in a brutal and unjustly
imposed execution.

One way God Incarnate could ensure that he has shared

in the very worst suffering humans must endure is to
live a life that ends in a burtal and unjustly imposed
execution.

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A moment ago it was noted that the obligation to share in the
suffering one imposes on another can not be discharged in secret.
Thus an incarnation would not fulfil its purpose unless the
knowledge that it had occurred were made widely available to the
future human race. And since the human life of God Incarnate
would be of limited duration he must also found an institution to
proclaim his messagea point to which we shall return.

3.2 To Provide a Means of Making Atonement

The second argument begins with three moral concepts:
obligation, guilt and atonement.
Swinburne divides good actions into two broad types.
Obligations are good actions that we owe to others: It is good in
this first sense for you to feed your children and tell others the
truth. Supererogatory actions are nonobligatory good actions: It is
good in this second sense to volunteer at a soup kitchen. We do
not wrong others when we fail to perform supererogatory actions
but we do wrong others when we fail to meet our obligationsto
respect each other's property and personhood, for example, or to
keep our promises. For wronging others we are blameworthy and
so incur guilt. And in order to remove our guilt we need to make
atonement.
Atonement, Swinburne says, usually has four components:
repentance, apology, reparation and penance. If I have stolen
your watch I must return it to you or give you something of
equivalent value. Such reparation deals with the effects of my
wrongdoing but it does not deal with the fact of my
wrongdoingthat I sought to harm you. I must also therefore
distance myself from my wrongdoing by a sincere apology and
repentance. Often this will suffice to remove my guilt but in cases
of serious wrongdoing something extra may be required: a small
gift or service as a token of my sorrow. Swinburne calls this
making a penance. The process is completed when the victim
agrees to treat me, insofar as he can, as one who has not wronged
him: And this is to forgive me.
It is an obvious general fact, claims Swinburne, that all
humans have wronged God. We have wronged God directly by
failing to show reverence and gratitude to him as the holy source

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of our existence and we have wronged him indirectly by wronging
each other. If I hit my wife I abuse the free will and responsibility
entrusted to me by God and I also hurt a creature he created
just as I wrong you if I hit your child because I hurt someone
upon whom you have lavished your loving care and attention.
In addition to incurring guilt through our wrongdoing we
inherit a general propensity to wrongdoing. This is partly social
(you are more likely to abuse your children if you yourself were
abused) and partly genetic: Evidence has emerged that what a
person does and has done to him at an early age affects the genes
he hands on to his children.95 Swinburne suggests that we also
inherit something analogous to guilt: We are indebted to our
ancestors for our life and for many benefits that come down to us
through them; our ancestors, in turn, are indebted to God for
their own wrongdoing. We therefore incur an obligation to help
atone for their guilt. Even the English law, notes Swinburne,
requires that before you can claim what you inherit from your
dead parents you must pay their debts. Thus while the guilt itself
is not ours, the obligation to atone for it is, and our failure to meet
this obligation can be a further source of guilt.
It would seem, then, that human beings have a serious
obligation to make atonement and are in a poor position to do
soowing to both the size of the moral debt and the propensity to
continued wrongdoing. How might a morally perfect God
respond to this? Swinburne suggests that God would likely
respond by helping us to make a proper atonement.
Earlier I made the obvious point that if I steal your watch I
owe you a watchor something of equal value. The question
arises: What is the proper reparation for a wrongdoer to offer
God? What has gone wrong, says Swinburne, is that we have
failed to live good lives. One proper reparation would therefore be
a perfect human life which we can offer to God in repentance.
And while that one perfect human life may not morally
counterbalance all the wrongdoing of n number of morally bad
human lives, it is up to the injured party to determine when a

95 Swinburne thus understands Adam and Eve to symbolise the first humans with free
will and moral awareness and Original Sin to be the subsequent moment at which
conscious wrongdoing began to emerge.

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sufficient reparation has been made. And one truly perfect human
life would plausibly enable a merciful and morally perfect being to
justifiably make that determination.
Here the skeptic may still object that a third party cannot
make restitution for the offences of another. No one would
consider justice done if a judge were to have an innocent man
seized off the street and thrown in jail for the crimes of the
murderer who himself remained free. Correct. But the problem
lies not with the argument but the analogy. Consider a more
helpful one.
Suppose Mrs Hall hires a man, John, to paint her house. John
is paid in advance but procrastinates providing his services and
finally spends the money on a ski trip during which he breaks his
leg. Ideally, he would either return the money or find someone
else to paint the house on his behalf. But if he is incapable of
doing either of these things (because, say, he is broke and and
doesn't know anyone prepared to paint the house) he finds himself
in the position of having an insoluble debt.
Plausibly, Mrs Hall could dismiss the whole matter with an
airy wave of her hand and hire a new painter. But now suppose
the following: That Mrs Hall is a morally conscientious woman
who thinks it important that John should take his wrongdoing
seriously; that she is very generous; and that she knows someone
who is prepared to paint her house on John's behalf. No one
would consider the matter resolved if she were to call this third
party and engage him to paint her house without John's
knowledge: By every reasonable assessment John would still be in
her debt. But she might consider the matter resolved to her
satisfaction if John himself were involved in the arrangementsif,
for example, he were to express remorse for the situation and
then, having been provided with the contact details, were to call
the third party in order to explain the problem and ask for his
help.
In this analogy, needless to say, Mrs Hall represents God, John
a human wrongdoer, and Jesus the third party whose assistance
we must solicit. As Aquinas noted, confession and contrition must
be shown by the sinner himself but, satisfaction has to do with
the exterior act and here one can make use of friends.
Two final points.

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 The first is that there could by chance appear many prophets
falsely claiming to be a divine offer of atonement for human
wrongdoing. A prophet making the claim truthfully would
therefore need the "signature" of God upon his workan effect
that only God can bring about and which can be taken as a mark
of endorsement. This would show us that God, the injured party,
was willing to accept the reparation. One obvious way God could
do this would be to violate the laws of naturesuch as by raising
the prophet back to life three days after his death.
The second final point is that the means of atonement God
offers makes no difference to us unless we associate ourselves with
it. Just as John, in my analogy, needs to both repent and himself
solicit the assistance of the third party in order to discharge his
debt, so a wrongdoer needs to ask God to accept the life of Jesus
as a reparation for his sins. And this again entails the necessity of a
worldwide institution to announce that God has provided a means
of atonement and to enjoin us to avail ourselves of it.
Swinburne suggests that the Christian claim that Jesus saved
us from our sins is to be understood in the above way. By
becoming incarnate in Jesus and living a perfect life, God
provided a means of atonement. Thus, "God was both the
wronged person and also the one who, thinking it so important
that we should take our wrongdoing seriously, made available the
reparation for us to offer back to him."

3.3 To Help Us Live Morally Good Lives

Making atonement helps us to deal with past wrongdoings. But
God also wants us to live morally good lives in the present;
indeed, God wants us, as Swinburne puts it, to become saints.
This is something most of us obviously fail to do. It is therefore
plausible that God would become incarnate for a third reason: To
reveal knowledge and found an institution to help us become
morally good.
Swinburne suggests that this knowledge is of three kinds.
Firstly, we need knowledge of what God is like and what he has
done in order to properly worship him; for example, that he is a
Trinity and shares in our suffering and wishes to provide us with a
means of making atonement. Even if we learned these things
through a priori arguments, we would still need to know when
and as which human God became incarnate so that we can

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appropriate that atonement to ourselves. And we also need to
know something of his future plans for us so that we can make a
right responsefor example, that there are serious consequences
for those who become incorrigibly bad. All this requires a
propositional revelation from God: a revelation of certain
propositions (such as God became incarnate in Jesus Christ)
by a trustworthy authority.
Secondly, we need moral knowledge about which actions are
obligatory and which are supererogatory. Humans, the Bible
already affirms, have a natural sense of right and wrong.96 But
having moral intuition no more guarantees moral living than
having a sense of direction guarantees that one will never get lost.
It has already been noted that humans have an inherited
propensity to wrongdoing. And this can manifest as a tendency to
conceal moral truths from ourselves or to interpret them in our
preferred way. A parent who sets their child a difficult and risky
task (perhaps thinking it is best for the child to learn some things
for themselves) may decide to intervene at a critical moment.
Seeing that we have failed to live good lives according to what
moral awareness is natural to us, it is likewise probable that God
would intervene to provide us with moral instruction.
Further, because God is our creator and sustainer he has the
right to create obligations for us; that is, to issue commands
which, if they had not been commanded, would be
supererogatory, but, having been commanded, become
obligations; i.e., Keep the Sabbath holy. Why would God
burden us with these further obligations? Swinburne suggests
there are two reasons. The first is to ensure coordination of good
actions. Consider, by way of illustration, that is important that
drivers travelling in opposite directions agree to keep to opposite
sides of the road but unimportant which side they agree toso
long as they do all agree. Likewise, we have a moral obligation to
show gratitude to God as our benefactor through worship though
doing so on a particular day is only obligatory because God
commands itand God commands a particular day to help
ensure that the main obligation is fulfilled. The second reason for
creating obligations is help us form the habit of doing what is

96 Romans 2:15

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supererogatorily good. For this same reason a parent may tell a
child to do the shopping for a sick neighbourmaking a
nonobligatory good action obligatory in the hope that the child
will develop a habit of doing good beyond what is obligated and
so become a morally exemplary person. If anyone forces you to
go one mile, Jesus instructed, go with them two miles. This
command may belong to the kind under discussion.
This brings us to the third and final way in which an
incarnation may help us to live a morally good life. It would be a
lot easier to understand how to live a perfectly good life, notes
Swinburne, if we have an example of someone doing this. Thus
by becoming incarnate and living a perfect life himself (a life of
perfect compassion, pacifism, generosity and love) God provides
valuable knowledge and encouragement to his creatures seeking
do the same: He not only tells us how to live but shows usand
thereby demonstrates that it can be done and inspires us to
emulate him.
And yet again for all these purposes to be realised and continue
into the future God Incarnate would need to establish a
worldwide institution to record, interpret and promulgate his life
story and teachings: the Church.

4. The Christian Doctrine of the Incarnation

God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, eternal. He has
these and other properties essentially and this means he cannot
cease to have one and remain God any more than a square can
cease to have four sides and remain a square. How could God
become human and so limited in all of the above respects? To
be human, explains Swinburne, is to have a human way of
thinking and acting and a human body through which to act. To
become human God would therefore need to acquire a human
way of thinking and acting in addition to his divine way of
thinking and acting.

4.1 The Human Nature of Jesus

Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, showed how a person can
have two independent systems of belief; and how, while all the
beliefs of such a person are accessible to him, he refuses to admit
to his consciousness the beliefs of the one system when he is acting
under the other. The Freudian account is derived from cases of

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self-deception: a pathetic state of which that person needs to be
cured. But it helps us to see the possibility of a
person willingly keeping a lesser belief system separate from his
main belief system and performing different actions under
different systems of beliefsall for some very good reason.
In becoming incarnate God allowed himself to develop a
second and separate system of human-beliefs acquired through
the sensory experience of his human body. The separation of
these two belief systems would be a voluntary actknown to his
divine mind but not to his human mind. Thus we have a picture
of a divine consciousness that includes a human consciousness and
a human consciousness that excludes the divine consciousness.
It is important to emphasise that God would not have limited
his powers by becoming incarnate. He would simply have taken
on an additional limited way of operating. And in so doing he
would remain divine while acting and feeling much like ourselves.

4.2 The Virgin Birth

The doctrine of the Virgin Birth claims that God caused Mary,
the mother of Jesus, to conceive Jesus without that conception
involving any sperm from a male human. It would not have
taken a very large miracle, notes Swinburne, for God to turn
some of the material of Marys egg into a second half-set of
chromosomes, which, together with the normal half-set derived
from Mary, would provide a full set. But is there any a
priori reason for supposing that God would choose to become
incarnate in this way?
Yes. It would mean that Jesus came into existence as a human
on earth partly by the normal process by which all humans come
into existence and partly as a result of a quite abnormal process. It
would thus be a historical event symbolizing the doctrine of the
Incarnation: that Jesus is partly of human origin and so has a
human nature and partly of divine origin and so has a divine
nature. In this way the Virgin Birth would help those who learnt
about it later to understand the doctrine of the Incarnation.

4.3 The Ascension

Christian doctrine claims that at the end of his life on earth Jesus,
ascended into the heavens. Just as, coming down from the
heavens is clearly to be understood as, acquired a limited

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human way of operating, so ascended into the heavens, should
be understood as, abandoned his limited human way of
operating. In the New Testament this event is symbolised by his
body rising upwards into the sky until covered by a cloud
something which readers of the Old Testament (in which God
manifests as a cloud) would understand as a return to God.
Thereafter he remained, seated at the right hand of the
Fathera phrase which must be understood as, honourably
united to his Father, since God has no spatial location. An
ascension, therefore, has a nonneglibible a priori probability.
Like the Virgin Birth, it helps those who learn about it later to
better understand the doctrine of the Incarnation.

5. Conclusion
We have seen that it is highly probable that a loving God will
become incarnate in response to human sin and suffering: in order
to discharge an obligation to share in the suffering which, though
for good reason, he allows; to offer wrongdoers a means of making
atonement; and to help us live morally good lives by example and
instruction. The fulfilment of all three purposes further requires
the establishment of a worldwide Churchboth to tell us what
God Incarnate has done and how we can avail ourselves of it and
also to provide guidance and support in living a morally good life.
Given the obvious general facts of human sin and suffering, it is
highly probable that a loving God will act in the way Christianity
claims he has acted. Against the background evidence for bare
theism discussed in Part II, Christian doctrine has high a
priori probability.

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 22
The Trinity

1. God the Father

The nine arguments presented in Part II concluded to the
existence of God: at least one immaterial being who is
omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, necessary, eternal and
perfectly good. God, of course, is genderless but for the purposes
of this discussion let us follow the tradition of referring to this
being as, God the Father. That he exists is something about
which Judaism, Islam and Christianity are all in agreement. But
Christianity makes the further claim that there are three divine
persons who depend on each other and act together in a Trinity.
Granting on the evidence given that there is a God, one might
reasonably ask: What reason is there for thinking that God is
tripersonal? Swinburne suggests that there are, in fact, good a
priori grounds for this belief and in what follows I will be
summarising his argument.97

2. The Necessity of God the Son

The Judaic and Islamic claim that God is a single person
is sometimes called unitarianism. All Abrahamic theists,
meanwhile, agree that God is morally perfect, that love is a moral
perfection, and that, therefore, God is perfectly loving. The
problem this inserts into the unitarian concept of God is that love
is a relational property. For suppose a perfectly loving God has
existed alone from eternity past. Prior to the creation of the
man, whom has he loved? A being that is essentially and perfectly

97 It may seem unlikely that anyone would develop an a priori argument for the Trinity
unless they had had some contact with the Christian tradition. Swinburne concedes this
point but then adds that, Unless I had been brought up in the tradition of Western
mathematics, I would be unlikely to believe that there is no greatest prime number; for I
would not even have the concept of a prime number. But, once I have derived from
tradition the relevant concepts, I am in a position to assess the proof that there is no
greatest prime number. And likewise, we need first to be taught what a religious system
claims; only then are we in a position to assess whether or not it is true.

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loving needs someone to love, and, moreover, as in a perfect
marriage, a perfect love is a mutual love between equals. It is
logical: If God is omnipotent he could bring about an equal to
love and with whom to share all that he has and if God is all
loving he would.98
Let us again follow the tradition and refer to this second being
as, God the Son. The Father has his attributes, including moral
perfection, essentially: The Father can no more lack one and
remain the Father than a square can lack four sides and remain a
square. This means that Father could not bring the Son into being
at some finite point in the past (say, a quintillion years ago)
because for all eternity before that time he would have lacked
moral perfection. The past-eternal existence of the Son is
therefore an entailment of the moral perfection of the Father: The
Father would not exist unless he caused the Son to exist and so
requires the Son to exist for his own existence. And because both
Father and Son are perfectly good they love each other without
limit.
But how is one to conceptualise this? It would be quite illogical
to suppose that at some point in the past God created a being with
the property of having always existeda being that exists at all
moments prior to its creation despite the fact that it has not yet
been created. Instead, we should try to imagine that, for as long as
the Father has existed, he has sustained the Son in existence, and
since the Father has always existed, the Son has always existed
too: The creation of the Son, in other words, is not a discrete
event locatable in time but a continuous action that recedes with
the Father into the infinite past. With this in mind we can easily
understand what theologians have meant when they said that the
Son is, "eternally begotten.

3. The Necessity of God the Holy Spirit

In creating the Son the Father shares with another all of his
essential properties: The Son enjoys omnipotence, omniscience,

98 Augustine, writing in On Diverse Questions, suggested that if the Father wished to
beget the Son and was unable to do it, he would have been weak; and if he was able to do
it but did not wish to, he would have failed to do it because of envy. Thus unitarianism is
incompatible with the omnipotence and moral perfection of God.

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omnipresence, eternity and moral perfection. But in a divine
duality the moral good of sharing itself is the Fathers alone.
Suppose, by way of illustration, that I provide you with money to
pay off your debts. In doing so I have shared my money with you
but the moral good of sharing itself is mine alone. However, if I
provide you with enough money to pay off your
debts and yourself pay off the debts of a third person I will have
performed a still better action: I will have shared with you both
my money and the moral good of sharing it. The love of the
Father for the Son must therefore include a wish to cooperate
with the Son in further total sharing with an equal: The Father
and the Son must together bring into being a third divine person
whom, again following the tradition, we may call the Holy Spirit.
A godhead in which there is sharing but not cooperation in
further total sharing is less than morally perfect. In the twelfth
century Richard of St Victor made this same point and added a
further argument. Consider: If you love another perfectly you will
naturally seek some third person for them to love and be loved
byjust as a married couple who love each other may naturally
seek to produce a third person, a child, who can share in their
love and whose existence allows each of the three family members
to unjealously enjoy the love between the other two. In a like case
a third divine person means that for each divine person there is
someone besides himself for every other divine person to love and
be loved bya state of affairs that demands no less than three
divine persons. And since neither the sharing of sharing nor the
sharing of love can be instantiated between two, moral perfection
can only be instantiated among three.
The Holy Spirit, then, in common with the Son, could not
enter into existence at some finite point in time before which God
lacked moral perfection. The Holy Spirit must "proceed eternally"
from the Father and the Son. And so Father, Son and Spirit are
all coeternal and divine and, being morally perfect, love each
other without limit. And this means that the Trinity has always
existed: God is a society of divine beings whose essence is love.

4. Spheres of Activity
In my previous chapter I noted that God, being morally perfect,
always performs the morally best action. Faced with a situation in
which there is a morally best action three morally perfect and

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omnipotent persons will naturally coordinate to perform it. But a
problem arises in the case of what Swinburne calls "equal best"
actions; that is, one of two or more actions which are all equally
good. Suppose there are two people who will die without your
help and you are only able to help one. All other things being
equal, helping Person A and helping Person B are equal best
actions. And faced with a choice of equal best actions a morally
perfect person is unobligated in his choice: He can choose
arbitrarily.
It is here that there is need of an argument to explain how a
Trinity of omnipotent and morally perfect persons avoid conflict
over equal best actions.
Consider the direction in which Jupiter rotates and suppose
that making it rotate clockwise and counterclockwise are equal
best actions in the way just described: It is possible that the Father
will try to make Jupiter rotate in one direction and the Son try to
make it rotate in the other. Clearly, they cannot both succeed. It
follows, says Swinburne, that each of the three members of the
Trinity must have different spheres of activity within which they
are morally obligated to operate. In this way, each divine person
would be omnipotent but, because of his perfect goodness, would
never choose to perform an action incompatible with the action of
another divine person.
But what would determine which sphere of activity each being
operated within? Swinburne finds the answer in the causal
dependence of the Son and the Spirit on the Father: Persons
caused to exist by another have an obligation to the person that
causes them to exist. The Father, being perfectly good, will seek to
avoid conflict by laying down for every other divine persons a
sphere of activity; and the Son and the Spirit, being perfectly
good, will recognise an obligation to conform to his adjudication.

5. The Ontology of the Trinity

This point helps us to make further sense of the ontology of the
Trinity. For if the Son and the Spirit were not caused to exist by
the Father there would be no divine person with the authority to
lay down a sphere of activity for every other. Divine persons
might therefore find themselves in the position of two pedestrians
who come face to face while walking in opposite directions and
bob left and right attempting to avoid each other. Without some

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arbitrary rule (Always keep left) they will only avoid each other
by chanceand an arbitrary rule requires an authority to impose
it. From this Swinburne concludes that there could not be more
than one ontologically necessary person; that is, one person whose
existence is uncaused.
But, he adds, since the perfect goodness of the Father
requires the other two divine persons to exist just as inevitably as
the Father exists, they are what I will call metaphysically
necessary. In Swinburnes taxonomy a person is metaphysically
necessary if it is either ontologically necessary or inevitably caused
to exist by an ontologically necessary person. Thus while the
Father is the only ontologically necessary person all three
members of the Trinity are metaphysically necessary persons and
the Trinity as a whole is ontologically necessary because nothing
else caused it to exist. Because each person exists as inevitably as
every other they are, finally, all equally worthy of worship.

6. Properties of the Persons

A property is essential to a thing if that thing cannot exist without
it. Thus the property having three sides is essential to a triangle
while the property of having a red hypotenuse or being drawn in
pencil is not. Philosophers further recognise two kinds of essential
and nonessential properties: monadic and relational. A monadic
property is simply a property which a thing has apart from its
relation to other things: Thus being brown or made of wood are
monadic properties of my desk. A relational property is a property
which a thing has in relation to other things: Thus being next to
the door or made by a carpenter are relational properties of my
desk.
Critically, some things can share the same monadic properties
and yet be distinct: It is possible that there exists a parallel
universe that contains a person exactly like you in every respect:
the same appearance, mental life, memory and personality. What
makes a particular person who they are is not, therefore, a
combination of monadic properties but something underlying
those properties which philosophers sometimes call haecceity or
thisness. To more easily grasp the concept of thisness it helps to
consider something that lacks it: a gravitational field. Any
gravitational field which had the same strength, shape and size as

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the one which surrounds our earth would be that gravitational
field.
God clearly has properties of the first four kinds. He has the
essential monadic property of being omnipotent and the
nonessential relational property of being the creator of the
universe. But Swinburne suggests that divine persons, like
gravitational fields, lack thisness: There could not be an
ontologically necessary and omnimaximal being who was not the
Father; nor an omnimaximal being sustained in existence by the
Father who was not the Sonand so on. This point, as we shall
shortly see, has important implications for the Trinity. But
meanwhile, the question arises: What exactly differentiates one
divine person from another?
After all, being incorporeal, they lack physical features; being
omniscient, they share the identical set of all true propositions;
being infinitely good, they share an identical and identically
perfect moral character; and being omnipotent, they can all
perform the same unlimited number of actions. What does set
them apart, Swinburne explains, are their relational
properties: The Father is the Father because he has the essential
property of being uncaused; the Son is the Son because he has the
essential property of being caused to exist by an uncaused divine
person acting alone; the Spirit is the Spirit because he is caused to
exist by an uncaused divine person acting in cooperation with a
divine person who is himself caused to exist by the uncaused
divine person acting alone.
Because the divine persons are individuated by relational
properties and lack thisness there is an additional entailment for
the Trinity. That human parents produce a first child does not
determine who that child will be. By contrast, it was not a matter
of chance or arbitrary choice by the Father which Son he caused
to exist: any divine person caused to exist solely by the Father
would have been the Son. And, similarly, any divine person
caused to exist by Father and Son together would have been the
Spirit. For this reason, Swinburne adds, creating the Son was not
merely an equal best act but a unique best actand so
too, mutatis mutandis, for the Spirit.

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 7. The Limit of Three
It might still be wondered why there are only three and not four
or an infinite number of divine persons. For if two divine persons
are better than one, and three better than two, would not four be
better than threeand so on, ad infinitum?

Recall first that God is morally perfect and so must perform a

morally best action when there is one to perform. Sharing his
divinity by creating the Son, and sharing the moral good of
sharing divinity by creating the Spirit with the Son, are both
actions of this kind. But again sharing the moral good of sharing
divinity with a fourth person is not qualitatively different from
sharing the moral good of sharing divinity with a third. And so too
with Richard of St Victors point: The coexistence of three divine
persons provides for each divine person someone other than
himself for every other divine person to love and be loved by but
adding a fourth divine person adds no further good state. And this
means that the Father is under no obligation to create a fourth
divine person.
Nevertheless, one might still object that adding superfluous
divine persons would increase the total good. And so however
many divine persons the Father created it would be still better to
create one more. To address this point we will need to make a
very brief digression into a subclass of equal best actions.
We have already seen that, faced with a choice of equal best
actions, a morally perfect person is unobligated in his choice: He
can choose arbitrarily. Another scenario in which a morally
perfect person can choose arbitrarily is when he is faced with an
unlimited scale of increasingly good actions. For example: People
and stars are good. The universe contains finite quantities of both.
Wouldn't a better universe be one with still more of each? Yes.
But there is no limit to how many there could beeven if there
were infinitely many people and stars there could always be a
few more. And so, here too, there is no morally best action and
God can satisfy the demands of his moral perfection by creating
an arbitrarily finite number of people and stars (perhaps the actual
number: 1011 billion and 1019 respectively) or none at all.
But what has just been said of people and stars cannot be said
of divine persons owing to this critical difference: Divine persons,
by definition, are metaphysically necessitated. And this means that

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when the Father has already fulfilled his divine nature by creating
two further divine persons a fourth divine person becomes
superfluous and so is not metaphysically necessary; that is, his
existence would not be a necessary consequence of an
ontologically necessary being and so he would not be divine.
There cannot be a fourth divine person. There must and can only
be three. [3]
It is in this sense that the "one God" and "three persons" of
Christian doctrine is to be spelled out. The three persons of the
Trinity form a totally integrated divine society which acts as
one coordinated whole. The Trinity itself is therefore a
single divine tripersonal being of which there can only be one.
This is an important point: While the Christian concept of God is
trinitarian it is not "tritheistic" but monotheistic: There are three
persons in one God and, whatever one divine person is and
does, God is and does.

8. Conclusion
We have seen that there are good a priori grounds for thinking
that a perfectly loving God is tripersonal. In places Swinburne's
argument was somewhat difficult but it unfolded from two very
basic moral intuitions. The first was that perfect love among
perfect beings requires both the total sharing of the self with an
equal and the total sharing of the moral good of sharing. The
second was that a perfect and perfectly unselfish love among
divine beings would inevitably produce three beings so that for
each being there is someone other than himself for every other to
love and be loved by.
In closing it is worth noting that the doctrine of the Trinity is
not held by Christians solely on the basis of moral intuitions about
divine love. It is also held because it is believed to have been
revealed by Jesus and proclaimed as a central doctrine by the
Church he founded and which exploded worldwide on the
strength of the evidence for his resurrection. The point of a
revelation, of course, is to tell us things we could not discover for
ourselves. If, on the one hand, Jesus were God Incarnate we might
expect him to reveal truths about the nature of God that are
unexpected but turn out to have deep philosophical meaning
and the doctrine of the Trinity certainly has both these properties;
and if, on the other hand, we have good reason to believe Jesus

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rose from the dead that would be good reason to believe that what
he revealed is true. The a prioriargument for the Trinity and the
historical evidence for the resurrection are therefore mutually
authenticating.
Given all these facts and the coherence of an incarnation
discussed in the previous chapter, together with the background
evidence for bare theism presented in Part II, I conclude that
Christian doctrine has a very high a priori probability.

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 23
Religious Pluralism

It is time to draw together the threads of the last three chapters. I

began by suggesting that religious pluralism should be understood
as a subtype of divine hiddenness which, as we saw in Chapter 6,
is a necessary feature of any antecedent world capable of
producing creatures fit for a relationship with God. For this
reason a plurality of religions making conflicting claims does not
prove that God has not specially revealed himself in one of them.
Generally, my claim was that God has good reason for allowing us
the freedom to form a false conception of him and good reason
for providing a revelation by means of which we can form a
correct one. But in that case, of course, it must be possible for a
determined and conscientious inquirer to distinguish the true
conception from the false. The way to defend Christianity against
the objection from religious pluralism turns out to be the intuitive
and obvious one: Providing arguments and evidence to show that
Christianity is more plausibly true than any other religion. This, I
said, should consist of two steps. First, a priori arguments to
demonstrate that Christian doctrine is more probable and
coherent than the doctrines of any other religion; and second,
historical evidence to demonstrate that the founding miracle of
Christianity is better authenticated than any other miracle in
history. The second step is the subject of Part IV. This chapter
completes the first.

1. Preliminary Considerations
I will find it helpful to frame what follows with three preliminary
considerations.
The first: It is no entailment of the claim that Christianity is
true that every other world religion is completely false. In my
discussion of religious experience I noted Swinburnes point that,
religious experiences in traditions outside of Christianity are of
beings having similar properties to God or of lesser beings but not
of beings whose existence is incompatible with the existence of

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God. Naturally enough, people describe religious experiences in
the vocabulary familiar to them. But this does not of itself entail
that their different descriptions are in conflict. God may be known
under different names to different culturesa point
acknowledged in both the Old and New Testaments. Thus a
Hindu who claims to have had a religious experience is not
necessarily in conflict with a Christian who claims the same. So
long as the adherent of the weaker doctrine is willing to describe
his experience in a less-committed way (I experienced a
supernatural presence, though perhaps not Vishnu, as I first
claimed) there is no reason of principle why he should have to
withdraw it entirely.
The Second: The point just made can hold even when claimed
commands from God are in direct conflict. It was noted earlier
that a morally perfect God cannot lie and if he cannot lie he
cannot reveal two mutually exclusive doctrines about himself
one of which, by the law of noncontradiction, must be false. But,
adds Swinburne, it does not follow that he will not give different
people commands, both of which cannot be executed
successfully. Suppose, for instance, that a Muslim is told by God
to defend Jerusalem against the infidel and a Christian is told by
God to attack it. Does the fact that these commands conflict entail
that at least one of them is false; i.e., not commanded by God?
Not necessarily. For consider, with Swinburne, the possibility that
as a result of historical factors for which humans are to blame,
Muslims and Christians have each developed a different and
limited understanding of God. Plausibly, God himself wishes for
our understanding of him to develop through experience, effort,
and cooperation and not solely by means of divine intervention.
Just as plausibly, God wishes for people at any point in history to
be willing to live and die by the ideals that they then hold. He
therefore commands the Muslim and the Christian each to live by
the beliefs he has knowing that the experience of so doing may
eventually lead each to a deeper understanding. In a like case, a
sage might well sometimes give to each of two persons who sought
his advice the advice to oppose the other thinking it for the good
of both that they should seek to develop their independence and
authority.
The third and final preliminary point: It is no entailment of the
claim that Christianity is true, nor any part of Christian doctrine,

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that any particular person is in Hell. Certainly Christian
doctrine teaches that this possibility exists for those who are
incorrigibly bad. But many of the great Christian thinkers
(including Augustine and Aquinas) allowed that those outside the
Church can attain Heaven and this view became official Roman
Catholic doctrine during the second Vatican Council in 19636.
In short, a successful argument for the truth of Christianity in
the face of religious pluralism does not entail that the religious
experiences and doctrines of other religions are completely false
or that the adherents of those religions are destined for Hell. It
establishes only that, if there is a God and he has revealed himself
to humanity, then he has revealed himself through Jesus and the
Church Jesus founded is where we should seek him.

2. General Objections to Rival Religions

We have seen that there are good a priori grounds for thinking
that God is tripersonal and that, in response to human sin and
suffering, he would likely become incarnate on Earth.
Christianity, of course, makes both claims: That God is a Trinity
of three divine persons and that the second person, the Son,
became incarnate in Jesus Christ. I will now briefly consider the
general relevance of these points to the problem of religious
pluralism.

2.1 The Incarnation

In Chapter 21, I presented Swinburnes argument that God
would become incarnate for three purposes: To discharge an
obligation to share in the human suffering which, though for good
reason, he allows; to offer wrongdoers a means of making
atonement; and to help us live morally good lives by example and
instruction. It was further noted that the life and teaching of God
Incarnate would require a divine signature and that he would
need to establish a worldwide church to tell us what he has done
and how we can avail ourselves of it. Any religion plausibly
claiming to be a divine revelation to humanity must therefore
have global reach: It is improbable in excelsis that God would
give a revelation of himself and fail to ensure that it was made
widely available. And from this it follows that only the major
world religions are plausible candidates for a special revelation

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from God: Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduismwith
consideration also given to Judaism.99
Whatever the moral quality of the life and teaching of Moses,
Muhammad and Buddha they made no claim to be God
Incarnate and they made no claim to be making an atonement for
human wrongdoing. Buddha, notes Swinburne, did not even
believe in the existence of a personal Godsomething for which,
as we saw in Part II, there is good evidence. And while Hindu
holy texts claim that Vishnu became incarnate in Krishna, there is
altogether no historical evidence for the existence of Krishnalet
alone for his having lived a perfect human life filled with much
suffering that ended with a miracle.100 Islam does not claim this
for Muhammad and Buddhism does not claim it for the
Buddhaboth of whose lives ended in entirely unmiraculous
ways. And finally: while many modern messiahs have claimed to
be God Incarnate there is no evidence whatsoever that their lives
had the features with which we are concerned: A life of moral
perfection and great suffering ending in a miracle.
The nine arguments presented in Part II showed that there
very probably is a God and in Chapter 21 we saw that if there is a
God he would very probably become incarnate on Earth. These
ten arguments together show that God will very probably become
incarnate on Earth and if that has already happened101 the points
discussed in the previous paragraph suggest that it was in Jesus

99 Because only 0.2 percent of the world are Jewish (and fewer still practicing
Jews) Judaism is not generally considered a world religion and its inclusion requires a
little justification. I include it for two reasons. The first is that it is known throughout the
world even if it is only practiced by a tiny minority. The second is because of its
importance to the worlds two largest religions. Both the Quran and the New Testament
accept, and are to some degree outgrowths of, the holy texts Judaism.
100 Hindus claim Krishna spoke to his student Arjuna some 5,000 years ago;
meanwhile, no Hindu holy text can be reliably dated prior to the twelfth century AD.
This results in a gap of 4,200 years between the purported existence of Krishna and those
texts purporting to record his words.
101 Swinburne considers, and rejects, the possibility that God has yet to become
incarnate for two reasons. Firstly, because, it would have been dishonest of God to allow
the occurrence of evidence of the strength that there is with respect to Jesus that he was
God Incarnate if he was not in fact God Incarnate. And secondly because, to exceed the
evidence we already have for the incarnation of God in Jesus, a present day incarnation
would need to be overwhelmingtelevised, say, and witnessed by millions. Yet such
overwhelming evidence would dissolve the hiddenness of God and so curtail human
moral freedoma point that was discussed in Chapter 6.

230
Christ that he did so. Therefore, very probably, Jesus Christ was
God Incarnate. The first general consideration therefore
demonstrates that Christianity is far more probably than not, and
far more probably than any rival religion, the special revelation of
God.

2.2 The Trinity

In Chapter 22 I presented Swinburnes a priori argument for the
Trinity. There we saw that an omnipotent God could bring about
an equal to love and be loved by and that an all loving
God would. The argument for no more or less than three
persons, though difficult in places, unfolded from two very basic
moral intuitions. The first was that perfect love among perfect
beings requires both the total sharing of the self with an equal and
the total sharing of the moral good of sharing. The second was
that a perfect and perfectly unselfish love among divine beings
would inevitably produce three beings so that for each being there
is someone other than himself for every other to love and be loved
by.
Buddha himself, as already noted, did not believe in a
personal God and there is no settled position on God in Buddhist
doctrine.102 Classical Buddhism is atheistic, some modern strains
are pantheistic, but none of them affirm belief in a triune God or
anything like it. Islam and Judaism, needless to say, zealously
affirm unitarianism and reject the Christian doctrine of the
Trinity as heretical. On this view God existed alone for all
eternitycapable but unwilling, or willing but incapable, of
creating an equal to love and be loved by. Such a concept of God
is morally defective. Hinduism, finally, occupies the opposite end
of the spectrum in affirming the existence of 330 million deities.
However, since among three divine beings every possible moral
good is already instantiated, additional beings would not be
metaphysically necessary and so, ipso facto, would not be
divine. Such concept of God is theologically incoherent. Thus our
second general consideration also demonstrates that Christianity

102 Asked by a journalist whether Buddhists believe in God, the Dalai Lama gave an
upbeat but rather slippery reply. God exists or God does not exist, he said with a laugh.
Leave the question to us and learn to live peacefully!

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is far more coherent, and so far more probable, than any rival
religion.

3. Specific Objections to Rival Revelation

There are, of course, specific objections that are pressed
against Christianity. Some of these were mentioned in the
Introductionthat the Old Testament contains atrocities and
falsehoods, for example, or that the doctrine of Hell is
unconscionable. In the three chapters following this one I will be
discussing these objections and showing them to be without
warrant. But for the moment I am going to consider specific
objections against the relative plausibility of rival religions since
these will help strengthen my general claim.

3.1 Judaism
In addition to what has already been said, there are two special
considerations of moral and historical coherence which
further diminish the probable truth of the claim that Judaism, sans
Jesus, is the one true revelation of God.
Consider first its obvious inconsistency with our moral
intuitions about what an all loving God is likely to do. The
Christian claim is that an ancient nomadic tribe was chosen to be
the porthole through which God dilated his frame of benevolent
concern to include all of humanity; that is, the Jewish people were
singled out by God because it was through one of their
descendants that God wished to enter the world incarnate in Jesus
and offer atonement and instruction and encouragement to us all.
The Jewish counterclaim has, therefore, a highly implausible
entailment: That our omnibenevolent creator did not invite us all
into a relationship with him but instead remains obsessively
preoccupied with only 0.2 percent of his creations. Indeed,
an all loving Creator who does not seek a loving relationship
with all his creations is oxymoronic.
Consider, next, the historical incoherence. Prior to Jesus the
Temple in Jerusalem was the most sacred site in all of Judaisma
place where the Jewish people made sacrifices to God and
encountered his immediate presence. Moreover: There, under the
Old Covenant, they were required to sacrifice animals in
atonement of sin. In Exodus, we are told that this is a binding act
of Covenant obedience forever. Jesus ministry, meanwhile,

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included this scandalous claim: Henceforth, he said, sin would be
dealt with, and God accessed, through him. Jesus also predicted
that the Temple would fallwhich it did, in 70 AD, just as he
predicted, and to date has not been rebuilt. How, without a
Temple in which to make sacrifices, can Jews obey their eternal
Covenant with God? They cannot. And the Jewish explanation
for this is that, though formerly a binding covenant forever,
sacrifices are no longer required because, quite simply, there is no
longer a Temple.
On the supposition that Judaism is true and Jesus was a false
prophet, these historical facts are not at all to be expected: It is
highly implausible that God would allow the Temple to fall just as
the Church founded by a man blasphemously claiming to be the
New Temple exploded worldwide; and it is just as implausible
that, the Temple having fallen, God would not command a new
one to be built. Recall: Because God is omnipotent, omniscient
and omnipresent, an event only happens because he causes or
allows it and is aware of it when it occurs and present at the place
where it occurs. Thus on historical and theological reflection, the
God of this Jewish anti-Christian narrative is either deceitful,
incompetent or uncaring. Like a trickster deity, he brings about
the destruction of the Temple and so authenticates the claims of a
heretic who now stands at the very centre of human history with
more followers than any other world religion. Or else God fails to
providentially orchestrate history in a way that ensures his plans
are understood and fulfilled. Or else he is the deus
absconditus of Voltaire and Locke who refrains from acting in
human history which he views from afar with cool indifference.
All three ideas are inconsistent with classical theology and Jewish
theism alike.

3.2 Islam
We have already seen that Islam is morally deficient on two
general grounds. In addition, there are several special
considerations which count against it.
The first: Muslims claim that the Quran is the infallible word
of God. Muhammad, they believe, took dictation from God in
writing it and the resulting text, ex hypothesi, cannot contain
error. This claim goes much further than the Christian claim that
the authors of the Bible were inspired by God to write texts in

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their own words through which God mediated his messageand
so has an unwelcome consequence for the Muslim: It means that
proven errors in the Quran may be taken as proof of its inveracity.
I will mention just one representative error: The Quran
incorrectly asserts that Christians believe in a trinity composed of
God, Mary and Jesus. This is evident in passages such as sura 5,
verse 116, which rejects a trinity thus misconceived: God will
say, Jesus, Son of Mary, did you ever say to mankind, Worship
me and my mother as gods besides God?' 'Glory be to you,' he
will answer, 'I could never have claimed what I have no right to.
On the supposition that Muhammad wrote the Quran under
mundane circumstances, this is unsurprising. The Bible was
unavailable on the Arabian Peninsula in his time and his
knowledge of Christian doctrine was learned by hearsay. But it is
not at all to be expected on the supposition that Muhammad took
direct verbatim dictation from an omniscient God. Whether or
not Christianity is true, it is an indisputable historical fact that
Christians at the time did not include Mary in the holy Trinity.
Islam, secondly, gives an account of God that is entirely at
odds with one of his essential attributes: omnibenevolence. The
Bible teaches that God loves all his fallen creatures with a love
that is extravagant, unconditional and self-sacrificial. In the
Quran declarations of Gods lack of love for his creatures repeat
like a drumbeat. We are told that, "God loves not the
unbelievers," "God loves not sinners," "God loves not the proud,"
"God loves not the prodigal," "God loves not the treacherous,"
and even, "God is an enemy to unbelievers." The God of Islam,
clearly enough, loves conditionallythe sort of love of which
Jesus said human sinners and tax collectors are capable and which
he commanded us to improve upon by loving even our enemies
thereby emulating divine love.
Thirdly and finally: The moral deficiency of the God of
Muhammad is most clearly exhibited in the attitude that believers
are commanded to take toward unbelievers. In ominous contrast
to Jesus, Muhammad commanded his followers to murder their
enemies.
Early in his career Muhammad had a positive attitude toward
Jews and Christiansperhaps because he himself belonged to a
persecuted minority. He called them people of the book on
account of their faith in the Bible and believed that, once they

234
understood his message, they would willingly convert to Islam.
But when this did not happen, Muhammad became increasingly
hostile. Indeed, as Muhammad the persecuted prophet gained
political and military strength he transformed into Muhammad
the machiavellian politician and warmonger. Seeking to unify the
divided Arab tribes though a campaign of military expansion,
Muhammad invaded Syria and Iraq. The ninth chapter of the
Quran comes from this period of Muhammads life. It declares,
Kill the idolaters wherever you find them. Arrest them. Besiege
them." Only those who submit to Islam are to be spared. These
are the last commands in the Quran concerning unbelievers.
Muhammad died shortly thereafter in 632 with plans before him
to attack neighboring nations.
Islam claims to have an infallible verbatim dictation from God
that contains errors; it teaches that an all loving God
does not love all; and it enjoins its followers to be violent and has
been propagated by violence from its inception. It is, a
priori, extremely improbable that an all knowing God would
make mistakes or that an all loving God would himself lack love
and command violence and murder. These special considerations
therefore weaken still further the hypothesis that Islam is the
special revelation of God.

3.3 Buddhism
There would seem to be no special considerations in the case of
Buddhism. It is not plausible that a revelation from God would
be nontheistic; that is, that it would deny or omit to mention the
existence of God. But suppose one were to reason: God is not
concerned with our belief in him. He is only concerned for us to
live peaceful lives. Might he have entrusted one man with the
knowledge of how this is to be achieved? However, even ignoring
the results of the last three chapters, there are special
considerations which make even this assumption implausible.
Buddhists believe that a Nepalese prince named Siddhartha
Guatama achieved enlightenment while meditating under a fig
tree in the sixth century B.C. Guatama's insight can be captured
in a single sentence: He realised that all suffering is caused by the
frustration of desire and, since there is no way for finite and
mortal beings to satisfy all their desires, the only way to

235
completely escape from suffering is to detach oneself from desire
itself.
The problem with Buddhas insight is that it only holds if
atheism is true. Consider: If the material world is all that exists
then all our desires are eventually frustrated by old age and death.
Under these circumstances Buddha is right that detaching from
desire is the only way to definitely eliminate suffering during our
earthly life. Is the elimination of suffering, if at all possible, a
moral good? The conclusion of Chapter 5, in which we saw that
suffering is a necessary feature of any world in which virtue is
universally attainable, would suggest that it is not. Moreover, if
there is a God the object of spiritual desire is the supreme and
eternal good at the very heart of reality: God himself. And by
pursuing that desire one is vouchsafed eternal human peace and
happiness while by detachingfrom that desire one risks the
ultimate in human suffering.
Note that the logic of this objection does not depend on a
doctrine of hell. Thou hast made us for thyself, said St.
Augustine, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.
Augustine means that because God made us in his image and for
himself we are incomplete until we find completion in him.
Infinitude is the medium in which we are ultimately intended to
live and breathe. Intellectus naturaliter desiderat esse
semper, observed Aquinas: The mind naturally desires to exist
forever. Thus it is only in loving communion with his creator
that man can find the ultimate happiness for which he was
created. And so it follows that every argument for the existence of
God is an argument against the wisdom of Buddhas project
including, of course, the compelling cumulative case presented in
Part II. Against this background evidence and the considerations
of the previous three chapters a seeker of God has forceful a
priori grounds for disregarding Buddhism.

3.4 Hinduism
In addition to the general considerations already discussed, there
is a special consideration which further diminishes the probable
truth of Hinduism.
Hinduism and some strains of Buddhism affirm a doctrine of
reincarnation. On this view when humans die they are reborn as
other organisms whose fates are determined by the law of karma.

236
The law of karma, relevantly, is a law of moral causation: All our
experiences in this life are determined by our actions in a previous
life. The problem, as we shall now see, is that the law of karma
cannot give a coherent account of moral agency.
Consider the example of a man hiding in a park at night
contemplating murder. On a sudden impulse he decides to go
home and rethink his decisionbut just then a lone woman walks
into view. His bloodlust is suddenly rekindled. For a moment he is
torn between two conflicting impulses. On the karmic view this
scenario presents an insoluble paradox. For if the man attacks the
woman, she is paying the price for past wrongdoing, and in that
case the man has no choice but to murder her: He is merely a cog
in the karmic machine that manufactures her fate. If, on the other
hand, the woman does not deserve to be murdered (perhaps
because her previous life was free from wrongdoing) then the law
of karma will prevent her from being murdered. And in that case
the man will be unable to attack her.
There are further problems with the doctrine of reincarnation
but the one I have mentioned will suffice. A moral system which
either denies moral responsibility to moral agents or in which the
victims of wrongdoing are themselves to blame for the wrong
done against them is incoherent and so cannot be rationally
affirmed.

4. Conclusion
It has been my concern to show that general reflection on the
nature of God and the condition of man give us a priori grounds
for expecting both an Incarnation and a Trinity and we have now
seen that these key features of Christian doctrine are absent from
every other world religion. In view of these two general
considerations, and the various special considerations discussed
after them, I conclude that Christianity has a greater a
priori probability than any other world religion.
This conclusion can now be set against my background claim
that, given the importance of divine hiddenness to human moral
freedom, God has good reason for allowing us to form false
conceptions of him and good reason for providing a revelation by
means of which we can form a correct one. The logic of this
solution to religious pluralism depended on the ability of a
conscientious inquirer to determine the true revelation from the

237
false on a priori and evidential grounds. So long as the special
objections to Christian doctrine are defeasible (and that they are is
the claim of the next three chapters) I suggest that we have such a
priori grounds for Christianity. The evidential grounds which
complete the solution to religious pluralism will, as already noted,
be presented in Part IV.

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 24
Scientific Objections

The conclusion of the previous chapter was that, on general moral

and theological reflection, Christianity has greater a
prioricoherence than any other world religiona conclusion that
was strengthened by specific objections to each of its rivals. It only
remains now to discuss the specific objections pressed against
Christianity and determine what force they have against the
conclusion of the three previous chapters.
As noted in the Introduction, the usual objections to
Christianity fall into three categories. The first category of
objections are general to all religions and arise from religious
pluralism. The second category of objections suggest that
Christianity is antiscientific. And the third category of objections
suggest that Christianity is morally unconscionable. In this
chapter I will discuss the scientific objections and in the two
following chapters the moral objections.
The claim that Christianity is in conflict with science has two
main features. Its proponent claims that the Church is and always
has been a dead hand on scientific progress and he claims that a
Christian is required to believe in all sorts of mythological
nonsense that has been scientifically falsified. We shall now see
that the first of these claims is historically inaccurate and that the
second is misconceived. Both are completely without warrant.

1. The Conflict Thesis

The belief that Christianity has been the historic enemy of science
is sometimes called, the conflict thesis. Its tropes are familiar
enough. Hundreds of years ago scientists began to make
discoveries that conflicted with Christian doctrine. A sclerotic
Church demanded they recant. Those who refused to do so were
burnt at the stake.
The conflict thesis is so widespread and entrenched that it may
surprise many to learn that it has no basis whatsoever in historical
fact. As Alvin Plantinga explains,

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 Modern Western empirical science originated and flourished in
the bosom of Christian theism and nowhere else. Some have
found this anomalous. Bertrand Russell, for example, thought of
the Christian church as repressing and inhibiting the growth of
science. He was therefore disappointed to note that science did
not emerge in China, even though, as he said, the spread of
scientific knowledge there encountered no such obstacles as he
thought the Church put in its way in Europe. But the fact is, it
was Christian Europe that fostered, promoted, and nourished
modern science. It arose nowhere else.

All of the great names of early Western science, moreover, were

serious believers in God: Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Boyle, and
many others. C. F. Von Weizacker goes so far as to say, In this
sense, I call modern science a legacy of Christianity. And
throughout its development, too, Christian theists figure
prominentlyfrom the discovery of genetics by an Augustinian
friar to the discovery of the Big Bang by a Roman Catholic priest.
The conflict thesis is false. Neither Christianity nor the Church
retarded the development of science. Did they, on the contrary,
contribute to the origin and development of a scientific
worldview? As I try to discern its origin, writes Melvin Calvin,
thinking of the same, I seem to find it in a basic notion
discovered 2,000 or 3000 years ago, and enunciated first in the
Western world by the ancient Hebrews: namely that the universe
is governed by a single God and is not the product of the whims of
many gods. Polytheism, Melvin suggests, retarded the
development of a scientific worldview because it primed us to view
the universe as unpredictable. After all, if the governance of
nature is divided up among many independent and capricious
deities then nature itself is capricious and there is no motivation to
look for unifying principles. Monotheism, on the other hand,
inspires just the opposite expectation: That all creation conforms
to a cohesive design conceived by a single rational creator.

2. Scientifically Falsifiable Claims

The historical relationship between the Church and science is,
however, something of an aside. The main point the skeptic wants
to make when he says that Christianity is antiscientific is that it
makes claims which have been scientifically falsified. Genesis, for
instance, tells us that the world and its biota were created in six

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days when we know that our planet and the life on it developed
into its present form over billions of years. Nor was the world
created in 4,000 BCthe conclusion you reach if you take
literally the combined ages of people in the biblical genealogy
back to Adam. Nor was there a worldwide flood in 3,000 BC. And
so on. If the claim The Bible is true is understood to
mean Every sentence in the Bible, taken literally, is
factual then very obviously Christianity makes claims that have
been scientifically falsified.
Modern Christian "fundamentalists" nevertheless insist that the
Bible is literally true; that is, they think that believing that the
Bible is true entails believing that each sentence of the Bible is a
literal statement of fact: There were literally two individuals called
Adam and Eve whom God placed in a literal Garden of Eden in
4,000 BCand so forth. Unfortunately, this view has come to
characterise Christianity in the minds of many skeptics and
explains the objection under discussion: Christians believe
absurdities on faith that have no basis in our current best
understanding of science and history. What these skeptics may not
know is that the fundamentalist view is not the traditional view of
the Church but in fact a heresy which the Church rejects. Indeed,
some of the earliest and most influential Christian theologians
mocked the idea of taking Genesis literally. At the beginning of
the third century, Origen wrote of the Garden of Eden,

Who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a

farmer planted a paradise eastward in Eden and set in it a
visible and palpable tree of life of such a sort that anyone who
tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life? And when
God is said to "walk in the paradise in the cool of the day" and
Adam to hide himself behind a tree, I do not think that anyone
will doubt that these are metaphorical expressions which indicate
certain mysteries by means of a story which does not correspond
to actual events.

The fact that parts of the Bible contain "metaphorical

expressions" does not, of course, mean that those parts are false
any more than the fictionality of Pierre Bezukhov entails that
what War and Peace tells us about the Nepoleonic invasion or
the human condition is false. And nor does it mean that it does

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not include parts which should be taken literally. What is
required, then, is a coherent method of interpretation.

2.1 Genres
To coherently interpret the Bible one must begin by recognising
that it is a big book gradually compiled from smaller books
belonging to different genres. Of these genres Swinburne offers
the following taxonomy.

History
In a newspaper report of a political coup or a larger work of
history each sentence is understood to be literally true or false: It
will be true if it describes accurately what really happened and it
will be false if it does not. It should be noted, however, that
ancient historians did not have the same standards of accuracy as
modern historians and so ancient works of history need to be
judged by the standards the writer was seeking to satisfy: Accurate
in their main historical claims with minor discrepancies of detail.
The Bible contains some works of history, so understood, which
we can assess for overall truth: Kings, St Marks Gospel and the
Acts of the Apostles all belong to this genre.

Historical Fable
In addition to works of history the Bible contains what Swinburne
calls, historical fables. He explains this genre by comparison to
modern television docudramas. A docudrama tells us the main
events in the life of a historical figure but is filled out with fictional
details. The fictional details, importantly, are not claimed by the
author to have occurred but are included to help illustrate general
historical truths. Thus while Queen Elizabeth may not have said
many of the words attributed to her in a docudrama about her it
may nevertheless be a reliable portrait of her life. The Bible, says
Swinburne, contains many books belonging to this genre, such as
Judges and the first and second book of Samuel.

Moral Fables
Thirdly are what Swinburne calls moral fables: Fictional stories
with a moral message. Swinburne suggests that the book of Jonah
is such moral fable. In it, Jonah is called by God to preach in
Nineveh but disobeys and attempts to escape by sea. During a

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storm he is thrown overboard and swallowed by a whaleonly to
be saved and finally succeed in his mission. On this view Jonah is
a fictional story whose purpose is to enjoin the Jews to take their
religious message to the Gentiles. If we are to assess such a book
as true, Swinburne writes, all we can mean by saying that the
book is true is that its moral message is a true one. In a like
case Hamlet is "true" if it is true that, say, crippling indecision
can be the undoing of a sensitive intellectual thrust into
circumstances that require fierce resolve.

Metaphysical Fable
The Bible may also contain some metaphysical fables. These,
according to Swinburne, are fictional stories telling us something
very important about the human condition. Plato's Allegory of
the Cave is a paradigmatic example of a metaphysical fable. And
the opening chapters of the book of Genesis may also be like this;
that is, Genesis may be a sort of prose poem which tells us that all
things were created by and depend on God by means of a story in
which he creates this on the first day, that on the second day, and
so forth. A metaphysical fable will be true if the story, read
metaphorically, tells us something true about the human
condition. If Genesis is a metaphysical fable it will be a true
metaphysical fable if it is true that all things were created by and
depend on God.

Other Genres
The Bible, finally, also contains hymns, personal letters, moral
homilies, theological dialogues and books of still more genres. It
follows from all this that the claim The Bible is true is to be
understood as the claim that each book of the Bible is true by the
criteria of its own genre; that is, each sentence of a work of history
is factual within the limits of accuracy observed by its ancient
author; that each moral fable communicates a true moral
message; that each metaphysical fable tells us something true
about the condition of manand so on.
Nevertheless, major difficulties remain. One is that we do not
know the genre of some books and so do not know by which
criteria they are to be judged true. Another is that there remain
passages in the Bible that are inconsistent with each other. A third
and final difficulty is that there remain at least some passages

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inconsistent with the results of modern science, history and
Christian doctrine. The early Christian theologians, the Church
Fathers, as they are called, were well aware of all these
difficultiesthe only difference being that the science with which
parts of the Bible seemed in conflict was Greek cosmology. In the
next two chapters I will set out the principle of interpretation they
used to settle such difficulties and then argue for its coherence
both in their time and in ours.

2.2 Principle of Interpretation

The principle the Church Fathers used to interpret difficult
passages in the Old Testament was the same principle they used
to determine which books were to form part of the New
Testament; namely, a prior understanding of Christian doctrine
derived from the revelation of God through Jesus which had
become Church orthodoxy before most of the New Testament
was compiled and given its canonical status.103 That a modern
inquirer can establish the existence of God and the resurrection of
Jesus without appealing in any way to the infallibility or the
authority of the Bible is a point to which we shall return; and in
the next chapter the principle of interpretation used by the
Church from its very foundation will be set out in detail and will
be shown to completely resolve the alleged conflict between the
Old Testament and widely held moral and scientific beliefs. For
the time being let us consider just a few points.
It is a logical consequence of the omniscience of God that
God knows all the truths of science and history. And the Fathers
believed that the Church, the intended audience of the Bible,
knew most of the truths of Christian doctrine and many truths of
science. From all this the Fathers concluded: If some biblical
passage understood in its most natural and literal sense is
inconsistent with Christian doctrine, science or history, it should
be interpreted it in a way consistent with Christian doctrine,
science and historyeven if, on some occasions, that

103 In his book The Canon of the New Testament, Bruce Metzger identifies three
criteria by means of which a book was entered into the canon of the New
Testament: Conformity with basic Christian tradition, apostolicity (that is, having been
written by an Apostle or an author in close contact with an Apostle) and widespread
acceptance by the Church at large. And all three criteria apply again to the interpretation
of each book and passage in the canon.

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interpretation is not the most obvious or natural one.104 Thus,
Augustines basic rule, notes Swinburne, was the same as that
of Origen and Gregory. 'We must show,' he said, 'the way to find
out whether a phrase is literal or figurative. And the way is
certainly as follows: Whatever there is in the word of God that
cannot, when taken literally, be referred either to purity of life or
soundness of doctrine, you may set down as metaphorical.'
It needs to be stressed that Augustine, Origen and Gregory
were not minor theologians: The influence of each on early
Christian doctrine was formative and profound. Gregory, for
instance, was one of the leading bishops at the Council of
Constantinople which produced the Nicene Creedthe formal
statement of Christian belief in wide use today. This states that,
"God spoke by the prophets," meaning, inspired the Old
Testament. And Gregory, and so the Church, understood this to
amount to a belief that God had given the Church both a
Bible and a method of interpreting it: The so-called, "Patristic
Method" which is the subject of the next chapter. And there is, as
we shall soon see, no justification for accepting the authority of the
Bible without accepting the authority of the Church to so
interpret it.

2.2 Justification of the Principle

It is important here to understand that while the Church believe
God is the ultimate author of the Bible this doctrine of
inspiration needs to be spelled out with care. In contrast with the
Islamic view that Muhammad took direct verbatim dictation from
Allah, the Church believes God inspired certain human authors to
write certain texts in their own style and from their own limited
worldview, or else inspired them to compile those texts from
various sources, but in such a way that God's message to
humanity was successfully mediated through them. The Bible, as
the Second Vatican Council put it, is "the words of God in the
words of men." Understood in this way, the Christian doctrine of

104 This principle of interpretation has an interesting and relevant implication. It implies
that the human authors of the Bible may have written passages which they understood in
one way but which God intended to be taken in another way; that is, the human authors
of the Bible did not always know how their texts were to be understood.

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inspiration has an important entailment: Precisely because the
Bible is a human production and also a divine revelation (The
Bible, affirmed Pope Gregory the Great, is Gods letter to his
creature) it needs to be interpreted in the light of Gods
beliefs and not those of the human authorsand also in light of
the beliefs of the audience for which it was intended, that is, the
whole human race, and not merely those who first read it. And
the whole human race must further be understood as the
human race of future as well as past centuries.
On the operating assumption that God is the ultimate author
of the Bible and all of humanity its intended audience, the
principle of interpretation adopted by the Church is the only
rational one. It is a basic precept of interpreting texts, notes
Swinburne, that you interpret them in a way consistent with the
authors known beliefs and the beliefs which he believes that his
audience hold. If I write that John is sharp, and I know as well
as my reader than John does not have a pointed edge I must be
understood to be saying something elsethat John is quick
witted. And if I write that "Colonel Winston is a dinosaur" and
know as well as my reader that Colonel Winston is not a
prehistoric reptile I must be understood to be saying something
elsethat Colonel Winston is old or out of touch with the modern
world. And so, generally, if someone produces a sentence which
neither he nor his hearers believe if understood in a literal sense
that sentence must be understood metaphorically.

2.3 Relevance of the Principle to Modern Science

Whether by setting up natural processes or by a more direct
intervention into the conscious life of certain authors, compilers
and copyists, it is plausible to suppose that God inspired the
writing and assembly of a book that communicates deep and
important truths even if some parts of that book, taken literally,
are scientifically and historically false. And while some of the
Fathers disagreed about whether the Bible or the Greeks provided
the best guide to science and so to what God believed, it was
generally regarded as permissible to view Greek science as the best
guide to Gods beliefs. But, as Swinburne notes, they were not
committed to the view that there was no more science to be
discovered. And so if we are to interpret the Bible by their method

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we must interpret it in a way compatible with modern science
and history.
Plausibly, then, the Genesis account of creation teaches us
truthfully that the universe was created by and depends upon God
even while giving a false picture of the method and timescale
the correct method and timescale being something a future
and more intellectually and scientifically sophisticated generation
can discover while retaining the deeper metaphysical truth. And
so Adam and Eve may symbolise the first human individuals or
communities with free will and moral awareness. Original Sin
and the Fall of Man, on this view, would be the subsequent
moment at which conscious wrongdoing began to emerge and
humanity to incur a moral debt to God. And as in the case of the
creation narrative, future generations can discover the exact
processes by which life developed (evolutionary descent
from protocells in the chemical soup of the early Earth, say, rather
than the creation of adult humans from clay) while again retaining
the deeper metaphysical truthand so again
if this scientific paradigm is, like the Greek cosmology of the
Church Fathers, superseded by future scientific discoveries. And
similarly: Many stories contain important moral messages even if
they have no basis in history. Thus while Israel may not really
have worshipped a Golden Calf and been punished by Moses,
everyone who hears the story can understand that no material
object should be worshippedand so generally. I suggest,
concludes Swinburne, that it is plausible to suppose that God
inspired the writing of the Bible to convey both the very limited
message comprehensible at the time a passage was written and the
deeper message comprehensible later.

3. Criteria of Justification outside the Church

Clearly, the principle of interpretation just outlined depends on
the prior truth of at least two features of Christian doctrine;
namely, that there is a God who created and sustains the universe
and that God became incarnate in Jesus whose teachings are
therefore from God. There is, of course, no sense in using the
Bible as the evidential basis for these Christian doctrines because
the prior truth of these doctrines was the principle used in
compiling and interpreting the Bible. However, as already noted,
basic Christian doctrine was derived not from the Bible but from

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the revelation of God through Jesus preserved by the Apostolic
Church he established.
It is worth noting that a modern inquirer, as I have
already suggested, can establish both claims without presupposing
the authority of the Bible; indeed, the existence of God can be
established without appealing to the Bible at all: The nine lines of
evidence presented in Part II concluded to the existence of God
on purely philosophical and scientific grounds. And the
resurrection of Jesus, already probable on a priori grounds, can,
as we shall see in Part IV, be established using accepted criteria of
historical authenticity without presupposing the infallibility or
authority of the New Testament. Once these two conclusions are
independently established (i.e., the existence of God and the
resurrection of Jesus) the principle of interpretation just defended
follows by tautology and so the Bible can be accepted as true
within the limits set out above.
There are two critical points to note. The first is that a
Christian is not, as the skeptic claims, committed to accepting
scientific falsehoods. The second is that he is not committed to
accepting the Bible on faith where faith is understood to mean a
willingness to believe despite a lack of evidence and argument.
This is something worth making explicit. Consider, then, the
following chain of a priori and evidential arguments on the basis
of which a Christian may finally affirm the truth of the Bible,

P1 On the evidence of natural theology it is probable

that there is a God. (The nine lines of evidence presented
in Part II).

P2 Given human sin and suffering, it is probable that,

if there is a God, God, being morally perfect, will
become incarnate. (The a priori argument for the Incarnation
presented in Chapter 21.)

P3 There is good historical evidence for the

resurrection and self-proclaimed deity of Jesus.
(Evidence that in no way presupposes the authority or infallibility
of the New Testamentas we shall see in Part IV.)

P4 It is not plausible that a morally perfect God would

allow evidence of the strength of the evidence for the
resurrection of Jesus if Jesus were not God
Incarnate. (Because a morally perfect being would not deceive.)

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 P5 Jesus was very probably God Incarnate. (From P2 to
P4.)

P6 Therefore, basic Christian doctrine can be

established on independent criteria. (From P1 to P5.)

P7 Therefore, the principle of interpretation used by

the Church to resolve inconsistencies in the Bible is
justified. (Since it is based on the prior truth of basic Christian
doctrine.)

C Therefore, the Bible is probably true. (That is, each

book of the Bible is probably true by the criteria of its own
genre.)

This conclusion is strengthened by a final consideration that

figured prominently in Chapter 21. There it was noted that, since
the human life of God Incarnate would be of limited duration, he
would need to found a worldwide institution to
record, interpret and promulgate his life and teachings: the
Church. This provides further grounds for trusting the authority
of the Church Jesus established in interpreting the Bible. For if
there is a God and Jesus were God Incarnate, as the evidence
suggests, it is very plausible to suppose that God would
providentially guide the history of the Church Jesus founded to
ensure that his teachings are correctly interpreted and made
widely available. And, indeed, the Gospels contain various sayings
implying that Jesus or the Holy Spirit would continue to guide the
Church after his departure. The final words of Jesus in Matthew
are, I am with you always to the end of the age.

4. Miracles
The view that a Christian is required to accept on faith claims that
are in conflict with science is, as we have seen, false. Like Allan
Sandage, who was both a Christian and one of the most
influential astronomers of the 20th century, one can coherently
accept both the evidence of physical cosmology about the age and
timescale of the universe and the deeper metaphysical truths
imparted by the creation account in Genesis. Like the geneticist
Francis Collins, who is both a Christian and the former leader of
the Human Genome Project, one can coherently accept both

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biological evolution and the deeper metaphysical truths imparted
by the Biblical story of Adam and Eveand so forth.105
Nevertheless, after we have successfully reconciled the contents
of the Old Testament with science and history the skeptic has a
further objection: The Bible contains accounts of miracles and a
Christian iscommitted to taking many of these literally; indeed,
Christianity stands or falls on the truth of the claim that Jesus rose
miraculously from the deada point acknowledged by the very
first Christians. Paul writes, And if Christ be not risen, then is
our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. The question
arises: Is it demonstrably absurd and irrational, on a modern
scientific worldview, to believe in miracles?
Let us begin by defining a miracle. A miracle is A claimed
event which, if it occurred, would constitute a violation of
the laws nature. By this definition it is not certain that all of the
extraordinary claims in the New Testament are miracles.
In Where the Conflict Really Lies, for example, Plantigna
includes a Quantum Mechanical account of the transformation of
water into wineprovided by the atheistic but rather sporting
physicist Bradley Monton. GRW, for what it is worth, refers to the
Ghirard-Rimini-Weber approachone of a set of collapse
theories in quantum mechanics. Morton says,

The wave function for each particle is spread throughout an

unbounded region of the universe at every time except perhaps
momentary instants of time. This means that for each particle
there is at most a finite region where it couldnt be localised by a
GRW hit. Some, probably even most, particles could be localised
anywhere. So for changing water into wine, its not a big deal
youve got a bunch of individual particles that are composing the
water, and they can all have GRW hits such that their positions
are redistributed to the locations that would be appropriate for
them to compose wine.

105 Like British philosopher Antony Flew, Allan Sandage and Francis Collins both came
to reject atheism on the basis of the view that the integrated complexity of the physical
world is best explained by intelligent agency. Thus not only were they able to read the
Bible in a way that is consistent with the findings of modern science, their conversion to
theism was based on the findings of modern science.

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Monton's final assessment is that, "all of the other miracles are
unproblematically compatible with quantum mechanics."
Morton helps to show that even the most extraordinary claims
in the New Testament are not in principle beyond the purview of
science but such speculations are, in the end, beside the point.
And this is because the Christian claim is not that the miracles
recorded in the New Testament are Quantum anomalieseven
ones deliberately caused by Jesus. Christians claim that the
miracles of Jesus, and in particular the resurrection of
Jesus, did violate the laws of nature. And since violating the laws
of nature is something which only God could do, the resurrection
constitutes a divine signature on the life and teachings of Jesus.
I will now briefly discuss three standard objections to the belief
in miracles and show that each one is ultimately without warrant.

4.1 The Objection from Scientism

The first objection holds that the scientific method is the only
valid source of knowledge about the world. Its proponent claims:
If something cannot be empirically measured and quantified, or
proven by means of a repeatable experiment, then it cannot be
rationally affirmed. And since miracle claims, by definition, lie
beyond the scope of the scientific method they cannot be affirmed
either.
The problem with this view, dubbed scientism by its critics,
is that it is self-referentially incoherent. Consider: The
claim Science is the only valid source of true beliefs about
the world is a metascientific claima belief about the world that
cannot itself be proved by experiment. To demonstrate its validity
one would therefore need to produce a philosophical proofbut
since this proof would not be the result of an empirical inquiry, it
would, if valid, disqualify itself. Scientism fails its own test for
truth.
Recently, scientism has enjoyed an unselfconscious resurgence
in the writing of the New Atheists but it originates in an obsolete
mid-twentieth century movement in Western philosophy called
Logical Positivism. Logical Positivism held that the only
meaningful statements were those capable of being verified
through sense experience or (as in pure logic and mathematics)
those that are true by tautology. All other claims were subject to
the verification principle championed by A. J. Ayer in his 1936

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book, Language, Truth and Logic. God, interestingly, was
excluded from the conversation: Ayer said that it was just as
absurd to be an atheist as to be a theist. The statements, God
exists and God does not exist simply had no meaning.
By 1945 Logical Positivism has been abandoned by its own
founders. The first problem with the verifiability criterion was that
it forbade universal statements necessary to formulate a
theoretical framework for scientific inquiry. The second problem
was the fatal one already noted: The verifiability criterion itself is
not verifiable. As the mathematician David Berlinski puts it, "All
such arguments, when self-applied, self-destruct."

4.2 The Objection from Hume

A second influential objection against the belief in miracles goes
back to Hume. Hume claimed that the inductive confirmation of
natural law in everyday experience is so overwhelming that no
eyewitness report of a violation of natural law could ever outweigh
it. For instance: The fact that heavy objects are always
and everywhere observed to fall to the Earth is overwhelming
background evidence against a report that, say, a marble bust of
Mozart had levitated into the air. Whether or not this miracle
really occurred, an ordinary subject is rationally compelled to
reject it on the basis of his everyday experience of gravity.
Contemporary philosophers of religion identify two flaws in
Hume's argument, both of which are discussed by Swinburne
in The Existence of God.
Swinburne first notes that, even granting Humes claim that
the only relevant background evidence is our experience of the
laws of nature, there is no reason to suppose that this evidence
always counts decisively against the report. Maybe, Swinburne
writes, so many careful witnesses report very clearly what
happened that their evidence can outweigh the evidence from the
normal operation of laws of nature. In support of this point one
may appeal to the two principles of rationality discussed
in Chapter 18: The Principle of Credulity and the Principle of
Testimonywithout allowing which we quickly find ourselves in a
"skeptical bog."106

106 Recall: The Principle of Credulity states: If to a subject S it seems, in an epistemic
sense, that x is present then, in the absence of special considerations, probably x is

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 But Humes main mistake, continues Swinburne, was his
assumption that in such cases our knowledge of what are the laws
of nature is our only relevant background evidence. Equally
relevant to our assessment of a purported miracle is any
background evidence for the existence of Godsuch as the nine
lines of evidence presented in Part II. And if on
the total background evidence it is probable that there is a God
then it is probable that there exists a being with the power to
violate the laws of nature. Evidence that there is a God is
therefore evidence that laws of nature can be violatedwhich will
have particular relevance in cases where the event is of a kind that
God would have reason to bring about.
What reasons might God have to occasionally bring about an
event that violates laws whose regular operation he usually
ensures? Swinburne suggests that there are reasons of two kinds.
The first is to answer human prayer. A world in which
everything occurred in accordance with natural laws, he notes,
would not be a world in which God had any living interaction
with human beings. The second kind of reason why God might
violate natural law is, "just occasionally to put his signature on the
work or teaching of some prophet in order to show that that work
or teaching was Gods work or teaching."
An Incarnation authenticated by a divine miracle has, as we
saw in Chapter 21, a certain a priori probability given the moral
perfection of God and the obvious general fact of human sin and

present. Thus if Mr Green has the experience of it seeming to him that there is a German
shepherd on his lawn then that is good evidence for his believing that there is a German
shepherd on his lawn. "The principle of Credulity," Swinburne asserts, "is a fundamental
principle of rationality and unless we allow it to have considerable force, we quickly find
ourselves in a skeptical bog in which we can hardly know anything."
In ordinary experience we also use a wider principle: Other things being equal, we
believe that what others tell us is probably true. Most of our beliefs about the world,
observes Swinburne, are based on what others claim to have perceivedbeliefs about
geography and history and science and everything else beyond immediate experience.
Swinburne argues that such beliefs are justified even when (as per usual) we do not
personally vet witnesses for their reliability. Thus the Principle of Testimony: The
experiences of others, in the absence of special considerations, are probably as they
report them.
Given these two principles of rationality, so, contra Hume, receiving detailed reports of
a miracle from several reliable sources may outweigh the inductive evidence of natural law
from everyday experienceeven without including the evidence of natural theology in our
total background evidence.

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suffering. And when this a priori probability is combined with
the evidence for the existence of God from natural theology, a
multiply and independently attested miracle of the right kind
under the right circumstances may outweigh the inductive
evidence that, when natural laws operate in the usual way, such
things do not occur. Thus on the total relevant background
evidence Humes objection fails to establish that a miracle is
always unworthy of credit.

4.3 The Objection from the Laws of Conservation

The third and final objection to miracles claims that special divine
action in the world would violate the laws of physics. Take
Plantingas example of a miracle: God creating ex nihilo an adult
horse in the middle of Times Square. During such an event the
laws of conservation of energy, momentum, and so forth, would
all be violated. Physics, meanwhile, tells us that this is impossible.
The objector therefore concludes miracles are impossible.
However, the laws of conservation in fact apply to systems that
are causally closedclosed to causal influence from without. But
it is no part of standard physics that the universe is causally closed
and whether or not it is depends on whether or not God exists.
For consider: If God does exist then there exists an omnipotent
being who can act upon the universe from without.
Evidence for the existence of God is therefore, equally,
evidence against the causal closure of the universe. And likewise:
any system in which a miracle occurs is, ipso facto, not
constrained by the various conservation laws. One cannot reject a
miracle on the assumption that God does not exist and therefore
the universe is causally closed; indeed, the reported miracle itself is
evidence against the presupposition on the basis of which the
skeptic rejects it.

5. Conclusion
We have seen that both features of the claim that Christianity is in
conflict with science are without warrant. The conflict thesis was
shown to be false: Western empirical science emerged in Christian
Europe and nowhere else and has been assisted throughout its
development by prominent Christian theists. A Christian,
moreover, is not required to accept on faith claims that are in
conflict with science; per contra, much of the alleged conflict

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only arises from taking every sentence of the Bible literallyan
approach promoted by modern fundamentalists but rejected by
the early Church Fathers. A Christian can, and should, accept the
rational and nuanced interpretation of scripture traditionally
provided by the Church Jesus founded. And while a Christian is
committed to the belief that Jesus rose miraculously from the
dead, this is something than can be rationally assessed on the
available evidence of natural theology and history: Claimed
grounds for rejecting reports of miracles out of hand were shown
to be unfounded.

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 25
Violence In The Old Testament

The moral perfection of God is integral to classical theism. In

Chapter 4, I noted Swinburnes suggestion that we understand
this to entail that, God performs only morally best actions of
many kinds and no bad ones. The Old Testament, meanwhile,
contains many passages in which God commands or condones
violence. For example: In the First Book of Samuel, God
commands Saul to smite the Amalekites, adding, Slay both man
and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. A
verse in Psalm 137 appears to bestow a blessing upon one who
seizes a Babylonian child and dashes it against a rock. And in the
twentieth chapter of Deuteronomy, God orders the Israelites to
conquer Canaanthe sixteenth verse concluding: Thou shalt
save alive nothing that breatheth. And so on, bloodthirstily, in
several other passages.
Drawing attention to both the claimed moral perfection of
God and the violence in the Old Testament is a popular tactic
among modern critics of the Christian faith. Typically, the
objection goes something like this: "On the one hand, Christians
believe that God Incarnate commanded us to love our enemies;
on the other hand, Christians believe in a divinely inspired book
in which God commands Israel to slaughter her enemies." The
skeptic asserts that this is a moral paradox and the only way to
resolve it is to conclude that either God is not all loving or that the
Bible was not inspired by God. Christianity, he suggests, entails
contradictions and so should be dismissed out of hand.

1. The General Principle of Interpretation

The problem is not a new one and nor are skeptics the only ones
to notice it. In fact, it was grappled with and pondered by some of
the earliest Christian theologians. In the second century, two
schools of thought went so far as to suggest that the Old
Testament should be jettisoned completely. The Gnostics and
Marcionites both claimed that Jesus was the revelation of the true
God and the Old Testament was the revelation of a separate and

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morally inferior deity. However, this view was rejected as heresy
by the Church which, led by Irenaeus, reasserted the orthodoxy of
the Old Testament but insisted that it be read through the prism
of the New Testament. Both books, the Church said, must be read
together as the common witness to the true God.107
Having adopted this guiding principle of interpretation three
difficulties remain. The first is show what justification there is for
it; the second is to explain exactly how violent passages in the Old
Testament can be understood in light of the moral teachings of
the New Testament; and the third is to explain why those violent
passages are in the Old Testament at all. Such is the basic
structure of this chaptera continuation of Swinburnes
discussion of the Patristic Method touched on in the previous
chapter.

1.1 The Truth Conditions of Sentences

The meaning of a sentence, notes Swinburne, is determined not
merely by the dictionary meanings of the words it contains but
also its literary, social and cultural context. By literary context he
simply means the work of which the sentence forms a part; by
social context the human writer and his intended reader; and by
cultural context the shared beliefs of the culture in which the
writer and reader live.
By way of illustrating all these points, consider the single
sentence, Larry is an elephant. To understand this sentence we
will first need to know its cultural context because this will tell us
the literary genres available to its authorperhaps zoo
guide, childrensfiction and personal letter; and when we

107 To this basic principle of interpretation the influential theologian Origen of
Alexander added an important refinement: We must, he said, read the whole Bible
from the perspective of the last book of the Bible. And there, interestingly, we find a
scene that allegorises and narrowly specifies the principle of interpretation which the
Church was adopting: In Revelation a scroll sealed with seven seals descends from
heaven. No one is able to open until a lamb appears which, stands as though slain.
Taking the scroll to represent the Bible, the seven seals the difficulty of interpreting it, and
the image of the wounded lamb who alone can unlock it Jesus Christ, the Church
concluded that the Old Testament should be read not merely through the prism of the
New Testament in general but through the prism of Christ crucified in particular; in other
words, our guiding principle for interpreting the Old Testament is, according to Church
orthodoxy, an image of God as a figure of supreme meekness and mercy.

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know that, we will then need to know its literary contextperhaps
that it indeed occurs in a zoo guide; and when we know that we
will finally need to know its social contextperhaps that it was
written for the London Zoo of 1950. Only when all three contexts
are known will the truth conditions of the sentence be known.
And then the sentence will be true if it is true that there was an
elephant called Larry in London Zoo in 1950 and false if it is
false.
Sometimes, and relevantly to my purposes, the truth conditions
of the sentence can make it clear that its author intended it to be
understood metaphorically. Thus if the sentence Larry is an
elephant occurs in a personal letter from a mother about her son,
it cannot possibly be understood literally if both the writer and the
reader know that Larry is human. It will, rather, be ascribing to
Larry some quality possessed by elephants (being large, say, or
having a prodigious memory) and so must, in this context, be
understood metaphorically. And if the sentence Larry is an
elephant occurs in a work of children's fiction it will be neither
true nor falsethough if the story has a moral or metaphysical
message the whole story will be true if its moral or metaphysical
message is true and false if it is false.

1.2 The Truth Conditions of Biblical Sentences

The relevance of all this to the Bible can now be shown. As
pointed out in the previous chapter, the Bible is a big book slowly
put together from smaller books of many different literary, social
and cultural contexts. These smaller books, moreover, were put
together from still smaller units of text of many different contexts
themselves put together from still smaller strands of text of yet
other contexts. Strands, units and books were then put together by
compilers with the aid of connecting verses into the books of the
Hebrew Bible which was itself, finally, incorporated into the
Christian Bible as the Old Testament.
Sewing texts together in this way gives them a new literary,
social and cultural context: That of the compiler. The most
familiar modern secular example of this, says Swinburne, is
where one author puts a number of his previously published
papers together into one volume and adds a preface explaining
that while he republishes the papers in the form in which they
were originally published he now wishes some of them to be

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understood with certain qualifications. And when the papers are
placed in this context the author is not expressing the views
contained in the papers so much as quoting them. The meaning
of the whole book will then be whatever the author says it is in
the preface with the qualifications he makes therein.
There are already examples in the Old Testament of
additional text changing the whole meaning of a whole text in this
way. Thus to the end of Ecclesiastes are annexed verses
purporting to summarise its message but which actually give to it
a radically new meaning: a message of existential
resignation (All is vanity!) becomes an exhortation to repose
our hopes in God who alone endures forever. Similar examples
are found in Daniel and Genesis.
From all this it follows that each sentence in the Bible has
many different possible meanings according to the many different
literary, social and cultural contexts of that sentence at each stage
of its inscription. The question arises: What is the context by
means of which Christians should understand a sentence of the
Bible?
It was noted earlier that the social context of a sentence is just
the writer and intended reader. The claim of the Church is that,
The Bible is Gods letter to his creature, where this is
understood to mean that God inspired human writers and
compilers to write and compile texts in order to communicate his
message to humanity. This, then, is the exotic social context of the
Bible. The literary context is the compilation of all the books of
the Old and New Testaments into Holy Scripture. And the
cultural context is that of the Church of the first centuriess of
Christianity which put the Bible together by the criteria of the
revelation it claimed to have received from God Incarnate. So:
While the original author of, say, Isaiah 77 is of considerable
historical interest, it is not what that sentence means
in that context that the Church purports to be revealed truth.
Rather, the revealed truth is whatever meaning the sentence has if
the Bible has the unique social, literary and cultural contexts the
Church claims and which I have just set out.
The remainder of this chapter considers the meaning
violent sentences and passages in the Old Testament have under
these unique truth conditions which are the truth conditions of
Christian orthodoxy. We shall see that when the Bible is read the

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way the Church that compiled and presented it to the world
authorised, the skeptic's moral objections to the Old Testament
lose all force.
2. Application of the Principle
A sentence should always be understood in the most natural and
literal sense possible given its social context: It will be literal if its
author and reader know it to be true and metaphorical if,
understood literally, they know it to be false. However, it follows
from the social context of a biblical sentence as we are now
understanding it that this determination is relative not to the
beliefs of its original human author and his contemporaneous
human readers but to the beliefs of God which the Church claims
were revealed by Jesus and the beliefs of human readers of the
Bible in every age and place; that is, it will be literal if it is
consistent with God's moral beliefs as revealed in Christian
doctrine and as understood by the Church and false if it is in
conflict with the same.
The moral beliefs of the Christian God include, ex hypothesi,
the moral beliefs of the Sermon on the Mount. And so it follows
that if a sentence taken literally contradicts the Sermon on the
Mount or Christian doctrine more generally we must understand
it in some other sense. The Church Fathers, as I say, were well
aware that there are passages in the Old Testament that
contradict Christian doctrine. And they claimed that these
passages must be interpreted in a way consistent with that
doctrine even if that interpretation is less natural.
Psalm 137:9, as I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter,
pronounces a blessing on those who smash against a rock the
children of the Babylonians. This is in clear conflict with the
command of Jesus to Love your enemies and so stands in the
same relation to the Bible as the sentence Larry is an
elephant to a mothers letter about her son. And here, as there,
the incompatibility is resolved by understanding the sentence as
metaphorical. The interpretation could then be filled out as
follows: Since the Jews had become enslaved in Babylon, Babylon
represent evil. Jesus had compared relying on him to building
one's house upon a rock. Psalm 137:9 was then interpreted by
many of the Fathers as a blessing on those who take the offspring
of evil, which are our evil inclinations, and destroy them through
the power of Jesus Christ.

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 Origen, applying the principle in a very general way, claimed
that the whole Old Testament should be read as a symbolic
prefiguration of the New Testament teaching of the Kingdom of
God: The Kingdom of God was a New Jerusalem, the Church a
New Israel and Jesus the new Moses who leads the people of a
New Israel to the New Jerusalem in the way that Moses led the
people of the Old Israel to the Promised Land. And so Old
Testament mention of Jerusalem can be understood as referring
to a heavenly Jerusalem even if it can also be understood
as sometimes referring to an earthly city; and so Old Testament
prophecies that mete out fates to earthly enemies of Israel, Origen
continues, in fact prophecy that God will mete out different fates
in the afterlifea difference of moral relevance being that those
sinners really would have the vices unfairly imputed to Tyre or
Egypt in toto. Origens method of reading the Bible was adopted
by Gregory and eventually Augustine and became a standard
approach to the Bible.

3. Justification of the Principle

We have seen that the method of interpretation adopted by the
Church Fathers resolves the moral conflict between the Old and
New Testaments. But with what justification can a modern
Christian accept it? There are three important points to note.
The first is that the need to interpret biblical sentences and
passages in a metaphorical way existed before Origen, Gregory
and Augustine developed the method of interpretation under
discussion. For example, the biblical sentence, I am the Alpha
and the Omega, would, if taken literally, be telling us that God is
a pair of Greek alphabetic letters. The Song of Songs is an erotic
love poem which, included in "God's letter to his creature," must
be understood in a metaphorical way if it is to have any spiritual
meaning at all. And if Moses were taken to be the author of the
book of Deuteronomy a literal reading of its closing lines would
imply that Moses were himself describing his own burial. If
Origen and others needed biblical authority for their method of
interpretation, adds Swinburne, they would have to look no
further than Saint Paul who explicitly denied that the Old
Testament command, You shall not muzzle an ox while its
treading out the grain, should be interpreted literally. Its meaning

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was, Paul said, that congregations should provide adequate
remuneration for church leaders.
The second point to note is that while the metaphorical way in
which Origen, Gregory and Augustine interpreted some of the
Old Testament may seem unnatural today they developed it in a
cultural context where large scale allegory was very natural and
so in no way ad hoc. The Jewish philosopher Philo, for instance,
had already given allegorical readings of Genesis and other Old
Testament books in the first century BC. Several commentators of
classical Greek literature even interpreted Homer in allegorical
ways: The Iliad and The Odyssey, which purported to tell the
story of the Trojan War and of the return of Odysseus to Ithaca,
were read as metaphorsas a treatise on medicine, by one of
them. In doing so it was usually claimed that the text had a
metaphorical meaning in addition to its literal reading. And
while it is natural to think of a sentence written by a human
author as always having some literal meaning, sometimes, with
good reason, the Church Fathers denied that a biblical sentence
had a literal meaning at all. In these cases it followed that
the human author himself did not know the divine meaning of
what he wrote. But this, too, can claim biblical authority: The
author of the book of Daniel claims not to understand his own
prophecies. "I heard," he writes, "but understood not."
The last point to note was stressed in the previous chapter and
should be stressed again here: Augustine, Origen and Gregory
were not minor theologians. The influence of each on early
Christian doctrine was formative and profound. Gregory, for
instance, was one of the leading bishops at the Council of
Constantinople which produced the Nicene Creedthe formal
statement of Christian belief in wide use today. This states that,
"God spoke by the prophets," meaning, inspired the Old
Testament. And Gregory, and so the Church, understood this to
amount to a belief that God had given the Church both a Bible
and a method of interpreting it: The so-called, "Patristic Method"
which has just been set out. There is no justification for accepting
the authority of the Bible without also accepting the interpretative
method which the Church gave the world together with the Bible
after claiming for the latter its unique authority.

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 3. The Purpose of Violent Passages
The Patristic Method of interpretation resolves the moral conflict
between the Old and New Testaments and we have seen that its
application to the Bible is rationally and historically justified.
However, the argument just given would also seem to entail that
God inspired passages of scripture that, at least at the time of their
inscription, were approving a view of God and of
human behaviour which we now recognise as immoral. Is it really
plausible to think that God would inspire passages which, as then
understood, suggest he is violent and vindictive? In short: The
question arises why the Bible contains these passages in the first
place, and in response to it, Swinburne suggests there are three
things to say.

3.1 Inspiration and Context

The first is that the doctrine of inspiration is not committed to any
view about exactly who was inspiredwhether the original
author of a sentence or the one who compiled it into a larger unit
and thereby gave it a new social, literary and cultural context and
so also a new meaning. The smallest unit, says Swinburne,
may not have been inspired at all. And even just read against
the broad context of the whole Old Testament (that is, the Old
Testament before it was combined with the New into the
Christian Bible) these units of text have a different meaning.
Consider: At the same time that Psalm 137 was written, Jeremiah
wrote a letter to the Jewish exiles in Babylon telling them in Gods
name, to seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into
exile and to pray to the Lord on its behalf for in its welfare you
will find your welfare. If both contemporaneous works were read
as revealed truth by the Jewish exiles, Psalm 137 would not have
the same message it would seem to have in isolation.

3.2 The Principle of Accommodation

The Fathers also recognized a Principle of Accommodation. This
is the idea that just as a human parent may need to use crude
simplifications to help a child understand things that would
otherwise be beyond them (such as during a talk on the Birds
and the Bees) so God may have inspired passages that allowed an
unsophisticated audience to obtain a rudimentary grasp of
concepts otherwise beyond them in order that these concepts may

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be developed into a more adequate form later on. Novatian,
thinking of the attribution to God of bodily emotion, said, The
prophet was speaking about God at that point in symbolic
language fitted to that state of beliefnot as God was but as the
people were able to understand. The Principle of
Accommodation plausibly applies to moral instruction as well.
There are certain moral truths, Swinburne suggests, which
a primitive people are too primitive to grasp or at any rate to
continue to hold. One possible example is as follows: Individuals
suffer as a result of the sins of their parents. This is because God
gives to parents responsibility for their children and wrongdoing
by parents has negative consequences on the development of the
children. However, an individual who suffers due to the sins of his
parents is not guilty of the sins of his parents. But maybe,
speculates Swinburne, this subtle distinction between suffering
in consequence of sin and being guilty of sin was beyond the
capacities of the first recipients of Exodus chapter 20 with its
attribution to God of the intention to punish children for the sins
of their parents. And later parts of the Old Testament make it
very clear that children are not guilty for the sins of their
parents. Jesus himself seems to have recognized that God was
constrained in how strong or how clear a message he was able to
get home to ancient Israel. For when Jesus prohibited all divorce
with one possible exception and the Pharisees pointed out that
Moses had allowed it, Jesus replied, But Moses only wrote this
commandment because of their hardness of heart.
But if primitive people can not readily learn sophisticated
moral truths a final question arises: Why create primitive people?
Its good for people to have the opportunity to work out things
for themselves, Swinburne says, considering this point, even if
they need and get quite a bit of help from God in due course. He
concludes by suggesting it is plausible to suppose God inspired the
writing and compilation of the Bible even if some parts of the
Bible introduce concepts which as originally understood have an
inadequate morality that is capable of being understood in a more
adequate way only later.

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3.3 The Unique Rights and Reasons of God
The last point in response to the question of why there are violent
passages in the Bible is, says Swinburne, to consider the possibility
that some of them are to be taken literally and then try to make
sense of this by deeper reflection on the unique rights and reasons
of God to command certain actions which it would be immoral
for anyone without such rights and reasons to command.
Consider for a moment the supposition that God really did
command the Israelites to kill the Canaanites. Because God is our
holy creator and sustainer from moment to moment our life is a
temporary gift from him which he can take back when he chooses.
Swinburne reasons out the rest as follows: "If A has the right to
take something back from B then A has the right to command
someone else to take it back from B. God therefore has the right
to command someone else to end a life on his behalf." It is,
meanwhile, a moral truism that we have a duty to please our
benefactors and as our holy creator and sustainer God is our
supreme benefactor. Pleasing a supreme benefactor entails
obeying his commands when it is possible to do so and the
commands are morally justified.
It is important to remember here that you cannot postulate
that God gave this command without postulating that God exists
and all that that entails. And what that entails is that human
beings have souls that survive into the afterlife. On an atheistic
ontology the death of a Canaanite or anyone else is eternal; but
on the theistic ontology we are considering death is a painful but
rapid process of metaphysical relocation. So: Gods command, if
such a command really were given, was not in fact to kill the
Canaanites as atheists understand it but to metaphysically
relocate themeach then delivered to his respective moral
renumeration including, for some, eternal bliss.
So much for the rights of God. But what possible reason could
God have had? According to Swinburne, the Old Testament says
the command was issued, "to protect the young monotheistic
religion of Israel from lethal spiritual infection by the polytheism
of the Canaanitesa religion which included child sacrifice and
cultic prostitution." If Jewish monotheism was in fact the
beginning of the true revelation of God that would culminate in
the Incarnation, a lethal spiritual infection would endanger the
spiritual wellbeing of the worldthough once monotheism was

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more firmly established in Israel, such measures, according to the
Old Testament, were not required again. Even if God does not
exist or exists but did not give this command, taking extreme
measures of some kind to end the practice of child sacrifice
would have been justified. But if God does exist and did issue the
command then moral reasoning shows both that God had the
right to issue it and the Israelites had a duty to obey him.
A final question is why God might command the Israelites to
kill the Canaanites rather than send them a plague or himself
miraculously annihilate them. The Israelites had been given the
awesome responsibility of receiving and sharing with the world a
revelation from God. There can be little doubt that the command,
if it were really issued, brought home to them the fearful
importance of worshipping the God who had revealed himself to
them and no other God and thereby vouchsafed the revelation
they had received and ensured that it was made widely available
to future generations.
Swinburne stresses that the answer to violence in the Old
Testament is the Patristic Method with which the bulk of our
discussion has been concerned. All these final points are made
merely to show that deeper reflection on the rights and reasons of
God, may lead us to recognise more inspiration by God of the
early Israelites than we are at first sight inclined to recognise.

4. Conclusion
In this chapter it has been my concern to disprove the claim that
violent passages in the Old Testament are incompatible with the
moral perfection of God. To do this I introduced the Patristic
Method of interpretation developed by the Church Fathers who
compiled the Bible. This was shown to be rationally consistent
with basic principles used to interpret texts and to have a
historical provenance in the early life of the Church. And since
there is no justification for accepting the authority of the Bible
without also accepting the interpretative method which the
Church gave the world together with the Bible after claiming for
the latter its unique authority, I conclude that there are no
indefeasible moral objections against the Christian Bible.

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 26
The Doctrine Of Hell

It is often suggested that the Christian doctrine of Hell is morally

unconscionable. Understanding this doctrine to entail that the
nonbeliever is sent to a physical location where for his nonbelief
he is burned for all eternity, the skeptic makes the obvious point
that this is incompatible with the moral perfection of God: The
claim that God is all loving and the claim that God punishes his
creatures eternally for finite offences are irreconcilable.
Christianity therefore entails an obvious contradiction and so
should, concludes the skeptic, be dismissed out of hand. In what
follows it will be my concern to show that this objection is based
on a crude caricature of Hell that is quite different from what the
Church actually teaches. And we shall see that when that doctrine
is properly understood there are no indefeasible moral objections
against it.
First, however, I will find it helpful to set Hell within its proper
theological context by providing a brief overview of the Christian
view of the afterlife.

1. Death and the End of the World

By now the relationship between divine hiddenness and moral
liberty should be familiar. As we saw in Chapter 6 and again
briefly in Chapter 17, moral self-determination requires a
significant freedom of choice between good and bad actions. And
since certain knowledge that a morally perfect being of unlimited
power was watching us at all times would greatly curtail that
freedom, so, Christians claim, God has situated himself at an
epistemic distance so that we see him only, "through a glass,
darkly." Divine hiddenness and free will together make it possible
for us to become naturally good people fit for an eternal
relationship with God but they also come at a high cost. The high
cost is the moral and natural evil discussed in Chapter 5.
Creating humans, as Swinburne puts it, was taking a great
risk." God therefore has reason to place sensible limits upon his
"risky experiment" both by setting a limit on the duration of a

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human life (and so on the suffering that a human being can cause)
and also by one day bringing the whole world to an end.108 The
Nicene Creed indeed affirms that, sooner or later, God the Son,
will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.
Reflecting on the end of an individual human life and the end
of the world raises the same obvious question; namely, how will a
morally perfect and all powerful being deal with those who have
become naturally good, those who have become incorrigibly bad
and those who remain of an uncertain moral character?

2. The Fate of the Firmly Good

A person who exercises his free will to become a naturally good
person will be a person who naturally wants to do the good: to
reverence what is holy, to express gratitude to his benefactors and
to grow in understanding and in admiration of beauty and truth
while helping others to do the same. Such a person will be
naturally happy in a state of loving communion with God and
God, being morally perfect, will want to give that person the
everlasting happiness of knowing and doing the good forever.
Forever existing in loving communion with God and with others
who are in loving communion with God without the impediments
of suffering and hiddenness is just what being in Heaven would
consist of.
Skeptics do not raise a moral objection against this feature of
the doctrine; however, they do sometimes suggest that happiness
of any sort would, if telescoped to infinity, eventually result in
repetition, boredom and weariness. Any heaven that lasted for
eternity, the argument goes, could end up being its own sort of
hell.
The first thing to note about this objection is its doubtful
assumption that a beatific vision of God is something of which one

108 Christian doctrine claims that those who die before the end of the world enter into
disembodied communion with God until the general resurrection of the dead when God
will recreate the world and souls will be given an immortal resurrection body. Thus
Christianity does not claim that the final fate of the blessed is a disembodied state in a
heavenly realmthat is only a sort of holding pattern for those who die before the end
of the world. Rather, the final fate of the blessed is physical embodiment on a reformed
Earth. For this reason N. T. Wright refers to the Kingdom of God as, "Life after life after
death."

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could grow tired. But there is a further problem with it that can
be clearly demonstrated by reference to the difference between an
actual and a potential infinity. This was something briefly
discussed in Chapter 11. An actual infinity, you may recall,
consists of an infinite number of discrete and simultaneously
existent things: If the universe is infinite then there is, at this
moment, an infinite number of stars. A potential infinity, on the
other hand, is simply the lack of a limit on the increase of some
finite quantity: A man who is given eternity to count to infinity
will never actually arrive at infinity; rather, infinity is simply the
limit that he forever approaches and never reaches. And because
it is not possible to exhaust an infinite fund of things in a
potentially infinite period of time, so God, being infinite, can
forever unfold new novelties, new delights, and new facets of his
infinite knowledge upon his creatures.109 Eye hath not seen, the
Bible tells us, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart
of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love
him.

3. The Fate of Those of Mostly Good Moral Character

Many people on Earth seek to do good but at the end of their lives
remain to various degrees unaware of which actions are good and
which are bad. Given that such people may have a strong basic
inclination to do good but in ignorance fail to satisfy all of their
moral obligations, it is plausible to suppose that a morally perfect
God would wish to be in loving communion with them also. He
could, therefore, help such people to learn after death which
actions are good (such as showing gratitude to and seeking
forgiveness from God) and then, in virtue of their knowledge of
what is in fact good, allow them to enter into loving communion
with himself. Catholic doctrine teaches just such a view: That

109 Catholics hold that God delights in letting those creatures with whom he is in loving
communion cooperate with him in helping other creatures to themselves become fit for
loving communion with him. It is for this reason that Catholics pray for the intercession of
the saints and why Christians of all denominations recognise the duty to evangelise.
Swinburne therefore suggests that one of the activities of the blessed in heaven will be
helping others on Earth. And since there is no reason why God should limit himself to
one universe (and since he may go on creating universes forever) there may be no end to
the cooperation between God and those creatures already in loving communion with him
in helping others to come into loving communion with him.

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many of the dead whom God deems to have been sufficiently
good to go to Heaven need preliminary purification in Purgatory.
Paintings of Purgatory in the Western tradition portray it as a
place of suffering but the doctrine includes some surprisingly
agreeable features. For example, souls in Purgatory know they are
destined for heaven, experience happiness and are in communion
with God. And even the suffering itself is, according to Aquinas
and others, voluntary: Given a vision of God souls willingly
submit to a process that enables them to be in communion with
him. What suffering there is consists in the fact that, as Swinburne
puts it, changing your behaviour, however good your intentions,
can be a bit painful. Thus Purgatory, properly classified, is a
region of Heaven.
The doctrine of Purgatory may help to reconcile verses in the
Bible which state that the only way to Heaven is through Jesus
and the view of many great Christian thinkers that those outside
the Church can attain Heavensomething which has been
official Roman Catholic doctrine since the second Vatican
Council in 1963-6. I am the way, the truth and the life, reads
John 14:6. No one cometh unto the Father, but by me. If Jesus
was God Incarnate his words are true by tautology: No one comes
to God but through God. But it is not stipulated when one
accepts God and so plausible to suppose that those of a basically
good moral character who were nonculpably unable to accept
God's offer of love in the person of Jesus during their earthly life
may accept that offer post mortem in Purgatory.

4. The Fate of Those of Unformed Moral Character

By exercising our free will to choose between good and bad
actions we slowly strengthen or weaken desires of various kinds to
form a moral character. Because this process takes time many
people die young with a moral character that is unformed or else
die so young that they have no moral awareness at all. How will a
morally perfect God deal with such people?
Swinburne suggests several possibilities. Firstly, God could
simply give such people the benefit of the doubt and impose upon
them a firmly good character. The Church teaches that such is
the fate of baptised babies. And while this would allow that person
to exist in blissful communion with God it would have the
disadvantage of depriving them of moral self-determination. God

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may therefore put some into another world with such moral
propensities as they have formed and let them complete there the
task of character formation. Or he could, finally, give them a good
afterlife but one that is suitable for those ignorant of moral
sanctity and so not the life of Heaven as we are understanding it.
The Church teaching on Limbo suggests that this third possibility
exists for somethough it is held as an official theological
hypothesis rather than a dogma. Those in Limbo would exist in a
state of natural though not supernatural happiness; that is, they
would have natural knowledge of God but would not enjoy the
beatific vision. However, as recently as 2007, the Church has
suggested that there are, serious theological and liturgical
grounds, for the plausibility of the first mentioned possibility:
That those of unformed moral character are simply saved.110

5. The Fate of the Incorrigibly Bad

We come at last to the fate of the incorrigibly bad. Let us first
understand incorrigibly bad to describe a person who has
exercised his free will to do evil to such a degree that he has finally
developed an evil character. His natural desire is to perform bad
and selfish actions and in particular to hurt and dominate others.
It was noted earlier that God has good reason to allow moral evil
while people form their moral character in this world. But there is
no good reason for God to allow people to continue hurting
others forever in another world after their moral character is
already fully formed. In what follows I will briefly discuss two
alternative views about the fate of the incorrigibly bad before
defending, but carefully qualifying, the traditional teaching of
the Church. My conclusion will be that while we may reasonably
hope that Hell is empty its possible existence must be affirmed in
view of human freedom.

110 The document was originally commission by Pope John Paul II and realised by the
International Theological Commission on April 20, 2007. It states that, "the ordinary way
of salvation is by the sacrament of baptism," while on the question of salvation outside that
sacrament there are, "reasons for playful hope" though not, "sure knowledge." The tone is
thus optimistic but cautious. Referring to John 16:12 it adds, "There is much that simply
has not been revealed to us."

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5.1 Universalism
It might be wondered: Why does God not simply force upon such
people a good moral character? Some hold that God does just
thisincluding Origen, an influential Church Father, and several
contemporary theologians. This view, because it entails that all
people go to Heaven, is called Universalism. But forcing a good
moral character upon an evil person is forcing upon them a
character which they have persistently and knowingly
chosen not to have. And if God is to respect the free will of
persons in choosing their own moral character he must finally
respect the moral character they have chosen. To do otherwise
would be to rescind the free will he had originally given: God
would then be a sort of moral totalitarian who ensures that, in the
end, whatever choices people make, they become the sort of
people God wants them to be with no ultimate freedom to
determine the sort of person they want to be.
We have seen that incorrigibly bad people are a possible
outcome of any world in which all people enjoy significant moral
self-determination; and we have seen that naturally good people
will be naturally happy in loving communion with a morally
perfect being. By contrast: Allowing oneself to become a collection
of evil desires whose fulfilment is eternally frustrated by an all
powerful being would be a deeply unhappy state. The question
arises: If God will not force a good moral character upon such
people, what is he likely to do with them?

5.2 Annihilationism
Christian theology holds that all things are sustained in existence
by God from one moment to the next. Each one of us therefore
stands in the same relation to God as the piano sonata to the
pianist: The moment God ceases to consciously and deliberately
sustain us in existence is the moment we cease to exist. This
doctrine helps to introduce a second view on the fate of the
incorrigibly bad: Annihilationism. Annihilationism holds that at
the end of the world God simply ceases to sustain the incorrigibly
bad in existence; and the incorrigibly bad, as a result, simply cease
to exist.
Proponents of this view suggest that Bible verses which speak of
evildoers being thrown into a lake of fire in fact symbolize their

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annihilation. If talk of fire is to be taken literally or even as an
analogy for the destiny of the wicked, Swinburne explains, the
consequence of putting the wicked in such a fire would be their
speedy elimination. We have just noted that having all ones
desires frustrated by an all powerful being would be an inherently
miserable state. And so perhaps God would eliminate evil
peopleparticularly if that is what they wanted. It is this fate,
annihilationists insist, that Jesus warned us to avoid in many
places in the New Testament, such as Matthew 10:28,

And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill
the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul
and body in hell.

However, others have objected to annihilationism on the grounds

that, much like universalism, it puts God in the role of a moral
totalitarian. God does not force a good moral character upon
those who have freely chosen evil; rather, he refuses to allow them
to exist at all. And so, in the end, whatever choices people make,
they either become the sort of people God wants them to be or
God destroys them.

5.3 Hell
Let us consider finally the traditional teaching of the Church that
the incorrigibly bad are in danger of Hell. How can we
understand this idea in light of the moral perfection of God? We
can begin to do so by first recognising that Hell is not a physical
location to which people are sent and actively tormented by
God.111 It is, rather, an existential state that results from freely
rejecting the divine love.
Consider now three operating assumptions. One: In Heaven
naturally good people freely submit themselves to the will of God;
two: God, being all loving, wishes for all people to be happy in so
doing (happy in reverencing what is holy, loving those who were
formerly enemies, selflessly cooperating with othersand so

111 Indeed, Augustine believed the suffering of Hell is compounded because God
continues to love the sinner who is not able to return the love. According to the Church,
whatever is the nature of the torments in Hell, "they are not imposed by a vindictive
judge"

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forth); and three: All people are given radical freedom in
determining their own moral character. It follows from all this
that at least somepeople may eternally resist the invitation to
participate in the divine lovepreferring instead to hate their
enemies and the God who enjoins them to let go of that hatred
and to freely and eternally ignore God's sincere heavenly welcome
out of immortal spite or pride or self-pity. As Dallas Willard
expresses it, for some people, "the fires of Heaven, we might
suspect, are hotter than the fires of Hell." C. S. Lewis before him
made a similar point. The gates of Hell, he wrote, are locked
on the inside.
It should also be kept in mind here that any person who finds
themselves in Hell was not thrust there suddenly upon death;
Hell, rather, is the ultimate logical consequence of the pattern of
choices an evil person made throughout his earthly life. God
provides each of us with a conscience and countless opportunities
to exercise our free will for good or evil. An incorrigibly bad
person therefore owes his character to his prolonged and decisive
refusal to heed the deliverances of the conscience which God gave
him in preference for evil. Lewis understood this too. There are
only two kinds of people in the end, he said. Those who say to
God, Thy will be done, and those to whom God says in the
end, Thy will be done.
Understood in this way, Hell has a surprising, ironic
but entirely logical entailment: It pays deep respect to persons.
Faced with the incorrigibly bad, God does not force upon them a
good moral character and he does not destroy them. God accepts
the person they have chosen to be and provides a place in his
created order for them to live out the reality of being that person.
Only in Hell can the free will and so the personhood of the
incorrigibly bad be preserved. Hell, as Willard puts it, is Gods
best for some people. And it was the unhappy possibility of
finding ourselves forever in this state that Jesus is warning us of
when he speaks of the eternal torments of Hell.

6. Conclusion
In discussing the possibility of Hell it is important to remember
that it is no part of Christian doctrine that any particular person,
or that any person at all, is actually in Hell. Not many people, I
would think, allow themselves to become incorrigibly bad and

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the doctrines of Purgatory and Limbo would surely provide an all
loving God with a wide range of options in dealing with those who
are further up on the moral spectrum. Moreover, only God can
know what transpires in a human heart in the final moments of
life and in the first moments of the afterlife. A private moment of
redemption in extremis or even in articulo mortis is always
possible and no one knows what opportunities are available
beyond that.
Reflections similar to these led the twentieth century Catholic
theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar to say, We may reasonably
hope that all people will be saved. Balthasars position thus draws
right back from the deep pessimism of Aquinas and Augustine,
who both held that the mass of humanity will be lost, without
quite affirming the Universalism of Origen and others. Balthasar
instead suggested that we entertain Universalism with a cautious
optimism. Why?
The optimism was justified, Balthasar said, in view of the
radical expression of divine love manifest in the life, death and
resurrection of Jesusthat God should send his Son all the way to
the limits of God-forsakenness in order to bring back into the
divine life all those who had wandered far from it. But
the caution was necessary in view of the radical freedom God
entrusted us witha freedom which, if it is to be honoured and
upheld by God at all, must include at least the possibility of
eternally rejecting God. The Catholic author and theologian Fr.
Robert Barron agrees. A Catholic, he says, must accept the
existence of Hell as a possibility because of human
freedom. But he adds, we may pray, and may even reasonably
hope, that all people will be saved.

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 27
Conclusion

In Part III it has been my concern to show that Christian theism is

coherent where coherent is understood to mean containing or
entailing no contradictions. My objective in doing so was not to
show that Christianity is in fact true but to gain rational
permission to examine the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus.
This was a point discussed in the Introduction. There I noted that
if it could be shown that Christianity lacked internal coherence we
would have the strongest possible epistemic justification for
rejecting it. And in thatcase any historical evidence purporting to
authenticate its founding miracle would need to be met with
profound skepticism. The purpose of Part III was therefore to
clear the air by showing that, whether or not the evidence will
show Christianity to be probablytrue, a priori reasoning shows
its claims to be possibly true.
The structure of Part III is the most intricate of the entire
argument. And since it forms an important part of the
background knowledge against which we will be examining the
historical evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus, I think it would
be helpful to briefly review what has been established in the
previous seven chapters.
In practical terms "clearing the air" involved defending
Christian doctrine against objections. The first objection arose
from religious pluralismthe fact that there are many religions in
the world all making competing claims. In reply to it I suggested
that religious pluralism should be understood as part of the
problem of divine hiddenness. Because divine hiddenness
vouchsafes human moral freedom it is plausible that God would
allow a multiplicity of world religions. But this also entails that, if
he does reveal himself, it must be possible for a determined and
conscientious inquirer to discover that he has done so. And so I
concluded that whatever religion has, on balance, the greatest a
priori coherence and the strongest historical evidence for a

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miraculous authentication is far more probably than not, and far
more probably than any other, the special revelation of God.
This established the structure of the rest of the argument. In
Chapters 21 to 26 I showed that Christianity has greater a
priori coherence and in Part IV I will show that the strength of
the evidence for its founding miracle is better than for any other
claimed miracle in historywhich means, recall, that the reply to
religious pluralism will not be complete until the entire argument
is complete.
It is also worth recalling that while Swinburne's arguments for
the Incarnation and the Trinity were given with a view to
establishing the general coherence of Christianity they greatly
exceeded their brief by establishing the high prior probability of
two basic Christian doctrines: Given human sin and suffering, it is
highly probable that a morally perfect God will become incarnate;
and given that God is all powerful and all loving, God is
necessarily a Trinity. Just as knowledge of Johns criminal past
and present indigence may prove him more likely to have
committed a further crime prior to the discovery of his
fingerprints at the crime scene, so moral reflection on the nature
of God and the condition of man may suggest what God is like
and what he is likely to do prior to our consideration of the
historical evidence for the Resurrection. The arguments
of Chapter 21 and 22 therefore provide a priori grounds for
affirming the probable truth of Christianity prior to the historical
evidencesince Christianity, of course, claims both that God is a
Trinity and that God became incarnate.
Having set out the structure of my response to religious
pluralism and defended two central Christian doctrines, I next
discussed scientific and moral objections to the Bible and moral
objections to the doctrine of Hell and found them all to be without
warrant.
In Chapter 24 the claimed conflict between science and
Christianity was shown to be false: Western empirical science
emerged in Christian Europe and nowhere else and has been
assisted throughout its development by prominent Christian
theists. A Christian, moreover, is not required to accept on faith
claims that are in conflict with science; per contra, the alleged
conflict only arises from taking every sentence of the Bible
literallyan approach promoted by modern fundamentalists but

280
rejected by the Church. To explain this I introduced the Patristic
Method developed by the Church Fathers and argued that a
Christian can, and should, accept the rational and nuanced
interpretation of scripture it allows and which comes down to us
from the Church Jesus founded. And while a
Christian is committed to the belief that Jesus rose miraculously
from the dead, this is something than can be rationally assessed on
the available evidence of natural theology and history: Claimed
grounds for rejecting reports of miracles out of hand were also
shown to be unfounded.
In Chapter 25 the claim that violent passages in the Old
Testament are incompatible with the moral perfection of God was
also shown to be unfounded. There I set out in much more detail
the Patristic Method of interpretation introduced in the previous
chapter and showed it to completely resolve the alleged conflict
and also to be rationally consistent with basic principles used to
interpret texts and also to have a valid historical provenance in
the early life of the Church. And since there is finally no
justification for accepting the authority of the Bible without also
accepting the interpretative method which the Church gave the
world together with the Bible after claiming for the latter its
unique authority, I concluded that there are no indefeasible moral
objections against the Christian Bible.
It only remained to discuss the doctrine of Hell. This was the
subject of Chapter 26. I began by acknowledging that the claim
that God is all loving and the claim that God punishes his
creatures eternally for finite offences are irreconcilable. However,
I then demonstrated that this objection is based on a crude
caricature of Hell that is quite different from what the Church
actually teaches. Hell is not a physical location in which souls are
actively tormented by God but an existential state that an
incorrigibly bad person enters by freely and permanently rejecting
the divine love. Hell, I suggested, therefore pays deep respect to
persons: Faced with the incorrigibly bad, God does not force upon
them a good moral character and he does not destroy them. God
accepts the person they have chosen to be and provides a place in
his created order for them to live out the reality of being that
person. I concluded my discussion of Hell with the suggestion of
Fr. Robert Barron: We must accept the possibility of Hell in view
of human freedom but, in view of the outlandish love God

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demonstrated through the Passion of Jesus, we may also
reasonably hope that it is empty.
So: We have seen that Christian doctrine is coherent; indeed,
that two of its key doctrines have high a priori probability. I
conclude that we have gained rational permission to examine the
evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus. And this is the subject of
the next four chapters.

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 IV
The Evidence for Christian Theism

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 284
 28
Introduction

Before coming to the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus a few

general remarks are in order.

1. The Christ Myth Theory

The first is a response to the claim that no such historical person
as Jesus ever existed. This view, sometimes called, Christ
Mythicism, holds that Jesus is a legendary figure cobbled
together from various pagan myths and gradually embellished
over the centuries. While a popular topic of discussion on the
internet among amateur critics of religion, the Christ Myth
Theory is universally rejected by serious historians for the
excellent reason that the evidence for the historicity of Jesus is
better than that for most other figures of the ancient world. In the
following chapters we shall see that the New Testament is a
historically reliable source of information about Jesus and there
are, moreover, references to him in ancient non-Christian
authors. In addition we also have the indisputable fact of a
worldwide Christian Church that, against initially fierce
persecution, rapidly rose and spread out from Judea in the first
century AD.112 Many details of the life of Jesus, finally, satisfy
accepted criteria of historical authenticity. 113 To deny the

112 Professor C. F. D. Moule of Cambridge writes,
If the coming into existence of the Nazarenes, a phenomenon
undeniably attested by the New Testament, rips a hole in history, a hole
the size and shape of the Resurrection, what does the secular historian
propose to stop it up with? The birth and rapid rise of the Christian
Church remains an unsolved enigma for any historian who refuses to
take seriously the only explanation offered by the Church itself.
113 These will be discussed in the next post. To take one example, consider the
"Criterion of Embarrassment." This is a principle of historical analysis which states that
any detail problematic to an ancient account can be presumed true on the logic that the
author would not have invented a detail problematic to his account. Both the baptism of
and the crucifixion of Jesus are supported by this Criterion since neither are events of a
sort the early Christian Church would wish to invent: Baptism was administered for the
remission of sins and Jesus is held by the church to have been sinless; nor would the
Church have plausibly invented the brutal, humiliating death of its leader.

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existence of Jesus is therefore to adopt a historical skepticism so
radical that one must jettison most of ancient history. Among
mainstream modern historians the existence of Jesus is
historical fact.

2. The Evidence Is Surprisingly Strong

Though universally rejected by serious historians, the Christ Myth
Theory has a certain purchase on popular perception. For this
reason it may be helpful to preface our discussion by noting the
following: Not only is the existence of Jesus historical fact, but the
evidence for his resurrection is surprisingly strong.
This claim is likely to be met with surprise by those unfamiliar
with the consensus in contemporary New Testament scholarship
concerning the historicity of the key facts undergirding the
Resurrection Hypothesis; that is, that Jesus died by crucifixion
and was buried; that his tomb was found to be empty three days
later by a group of his female followers and that various
individuals and groups thereafter had experiences that completely
convinced them that they had seen, spoken to and eaten with a
physically resurrected Jesuspoints to which we shall shortly
return. Meanwhile, a few examples may serve to establish the
present claim that there is a compelling historical case for the
Resurrection to be considered.
Antony Flew is the British philosopher who renounced his
atheism on review of the evidence for the existence of God from
the integrated complexity of the physical worldthe arguments
from cosmic and biological teleology discussed in Chapter
12 and Chapter 13 respectively. Flew did not publicly convert to
Christianity but, as a result of discussions with the historians Gary
Habermas and N. T. Wright, and after 50 years of fierce anti-
religious polemic, he was nevertheless compelled to concede that,
The evidence for the resurrection is better than for claimed
miracles in any other religion. It is outstandingly different in
quality and quantity."
Flew is representative of many skeptics who have been
challenged by the strength of the evidence for the Resurrection.
To his number we may add journalist Lee Strobel and the
criminologist J. Warner Wallace who each began to investigate
the Resurrection evidence as committed atheists (one to disabuse
his wife of her fledgling Christianity; the other to demolish his

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religious coworkers in workplace debates) only to both
unexpectedly come themselves to believe. And not only atheists
but also those with prior religious commitments that would
plausibly prejudice them against belief in the Resurrection of Jesus
have been swayed by the evidence. The Jewish scholar and
historian Pinchas Lapide, for instance, was finally compelled to
conclude that the only explanation for the historical evidence was
that his God, the God of Israel, had raised Jesus from the dead.
The case of Nabeel Queshi is equally dramatic. He was an Islamic
apologist who began a debate with Christian David Wood on the
competing historical claims of their respective religions. The
debate lasted many years. At the end of it, Queshi converted to
Christianity and wrote the best-selling book, Seeking Allah,
Finding Jesus. Historian Gaza Vermes, meanwhile, may
represent the limit to which skepticism may be taken while
responsibly accounting for the facts. He formulated eight possible
theories to explain the historical evidence which fall between two
extremes of opposite certainty. One of those extremes is total
denial and the other is total acceptance and both of them, Vermes
said, are, "not susceptible to rational judgement."
This much is undeniable: Conscientious inquirers have been
challenged and often persuaded by the evidence against strong
predispositions to the contrary. These examples do not of
course make the case for the Resurrection of Jesus but they do
show that there is a case to be heard. And while there are many
rational responses to all of this, ignoring the unavoidable inference
that there is something here that requires attention is not one of
them. The evidence that we will be examining in the following
chapters is worthy of serious consideration.
I noted earlier that the majority of New Testament scholars
affirm the key facts undergirding the inference to the
Resurrection. And in what follows we shall see that while there
are various theories put forward to account for these facts the
Resurrection itself is an inference to the best explanation using the
accepted criteria for assessing competing historical hypotheses. If
all this is so, it might be wondered why the majority of New
Testament scholars do not also affirm the Resurrection
Hypothesis. And this brings us to two final considerations that
need to be borne in mind as we assess the historical case for the
Resurrection.

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 3. The Total Relevant Background Evidence
New Testament historians who affirm the key facts undergirding
the inference to the Resurrection of Jesus but then postulate a
naturalistic explanation for those facts typically do so on
methodological grounds or on the basis of philosophical
presuppositions that lie out the scope of the historical argument.
Bart Ehrman, for example, objects that miracles by their very
nature lie beyond the explanatory scope of the historian.
Historians, he writes, have no difficulty whatsoever speaking
about the belief in Jesus resurrection. For it is a historical fact that
some of Jesus followers came to believe that he had been raised
from the dead soon after his execution. But a historian, qua
historian, cannot adjudicate on whether a miracle occurred. And
so Ehrman places the Resurrection hypothesis in historical
quarantine.
Whatever the merits of this view there is no reason of principle
why the methodological constraints that normatively apply to a
historian should proscribe a synthetic argument for the
resurrection that includes historical evidence. Likewise, the fact
that cosmology is the study of the physical universe has no bearing
on the soundness of a synthetic argument for the existence of God
that includes data on cosmological fine tuningeven though its
formulator, by postulating God, has left the methodological
constraints of pure cosmology for natural theology. Indeed, the
strength of the cumulative case for Christian theism is found
precisely in the cohesion of the evidence for its central claims
across multiple disciplines.
Integral to Ehrmans ban on miracles is the assumption that
history is limited to what can occur in the natural world and that
what can occur in the natural world is determined by the
inductive confirmation of natural law in everyday experience.
This recalls Humes objection to miracles discussed in Chapter 24.
But as we saw there the assumption that our experience of the
laws of nature is our only relevant background evidence is
unwarranted. Equally relevant to our assessment of a purported
miracle is any background evidence for the existence of God
such as the nine lines of evidence presented in Chapters 10 to 18.
And if on the total background evidence it is probable that there
is a God then it is probable that there exists a being with the
power to violate the laws of nature and a claimed miracle can be

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rationally evaluated on the basis of whatever evidence is available
for it.
This is a point I have been at pains to emphasise from the very
beginning of my argument. Clearly enough, if you think it unlikely
that there is a God then, however good the historical evidence,
you will think it unlikely that a God raised Jesus from the dead. If,
on the other hand, you think it very likely that there is a
God and come to see that the Resurrection is an inference to the
best explanation from the historical evidence, then you will think
it very likely that God raised Jesus from the dead. The historical
evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus must therefore be evaluated
against the total relevant background evidence for the existence of
God. And since we have seen Parts II and III that the evidence of
natural theology and a priori reasoning not only establishes that
there very probably is a God but that God will very probably
become incarnate and live a perfect life filled with great suffering
that ends in a miracle, so good historical evidence for a prophet
whose life meets all of these criteria will be very compelling
indeed.

4. Paradigm Pressures
A final of word of caution is due. No one can evaluate this subject
in a vacuum because everyone brings to it a prior attitude towards
the religious life. The Resurrection of Jesus is, as N. T. Wright
puts it, a self-involving hypothesis. And this is because anyone
assessing the historical evidence for the Resurrection who begins
to intuit its credibility will feel himself suddenly implicated in a
very personal way. Here we should recall Nagel who confessed, "I
want atheism to be true. I hope there is no God. I do not want
there to be a God. I do not want the universe to be like that, as
well as Michael Reas observation that, "Most sensible people
would recoil in horror upon hearing that a person of great power
and influence had taken a special interest in them and had very
definite, detailed and not-easily-implemented views about how
they ought to live their lives.114 And if, what is by no means

114 Paradigm pressures apply to the evaluation of arguments for theism in
general and to arguments for Christian theism in particular. And this is because
the moral and religious restrictions that inhere only vaguely in the idea of basic
theism are made concrete and explicit in the exacting and uncompromising
moral teachings of Jesus.

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improbable, one does have a preexisting indisposition to
becoming a Christian he is going to feel the sudden force of
massive paradigm pressures that may interfere with his rational
adjudication of the evidence.
To clarify this point consider someone who has a strong
indisposition to living a religious life; who is examining the
Resurrection evidence for the first time; and who with
considerable unease is just beginning to recognise the force of that
evidence. What options will lie before him if he finds himself
rationally obligated to conclude that Jesus rose from the dead?
There are two. One: Remembering Socrates policy that we must,
Follow the argument wherever it takes us, he may simply draw
the conclusion and declare himself a Christian. This, I suggest,
is the only rational response to the reality of the Incarnation but it
is also, as we are supposing, something he does not want to do.
Two: He may accept the reality of the Incarnation but refuse to
declare himself a Christian. Very few people, however, would be
willing to live in defiance of their own rational principles. Wishing
to avoid this dilemma he may therefore choose to preemptively
resist the deliverances of rational intuition in his ongoing
assessment of the evidence. And in that case his conclusion,
whatever it is, will be a post hoc rationalisation for something
that was determined in advance and on nonrational grounds.
Nagel, though himself an atheist, proposes something of the
sort as an explanation for the monomaniacal, neurotic physicalism
in the philosophy of mind and the dull refusal to look beyond the
embattled physicalistic paradigm. Moreland, taking up the theme,
suggests that from pneumatophobia a man naturally takes refuge
in hylomania.115 The idea applies to the historical case for the
Resurrection with only slight adjustment.
In closing I wish to emphasise this strongly: I am not suggesting
every New Testament scholar who proposes a naturalistic
explanation for the historical facts undergirding the Resurrection
Hypothesis is Christophobic. But suppose, firstly, that it can be
shown that the Resurrection is an inference to the best
explanation using accepted criteria for evaluating competing
historical hypotheses; secondly, that the relevant background

115 That is, from a fear of the spiritual one naturally takes refuge in the physical.

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evidence of natural theology is included and supports that
inference; and thirdly, that methodological issues have been
addressed. If under these conditions, and without further
justification, one insists upon a naturalistic explanation for the
Resurrection evidence then, in the absence of a reason to think
otherwise, we are justified in suspecting that paradigm pressures
are at play. Socrates is surely right. We must follow the argument
wherever it takes us. And this entails we pay no heed to who is
and who is not willing to come with us.

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The New Testament

The Resurrection Hypothesis understands the Resurrection as a

divine signature upon the life of Jesus. However, before presenting
the historical evidence for it we need to settle a few preliminary
matters. First, we need to establish that the New Testament,
which is our primary source of evidence about Jesus, is generally
reliable. Then, we need to draw on that evidence to show that the
life of Jesus was one to which God would affix his signature; one
having, that is, the five features discussed in Chapter 21. Only
then will we be ready to assess the historical evidence for the
Resurrection itself.
This explains the basic structure of what follows. In this
chapter I will argue that the New Testament is generally reliable
and then explain various criteria of historical authenticity that
apply to and further strengthen many of its claims. In the next
chapter I will argue that the life of Jesus does indeed satisfy our
five criteria; that is, I will argue that Jesus claimed to be God
Incarnate and an atonement for human sin while also giving
plausible teachings, founding a church and living a perfect life
filled with suffering. And then in Chapter 31 I will present the
historical case for the Resurrection.
I should also note that in all three chapters I will not be presenting
original research but closely following and compendiating the
work of Gary Habermas, Michael Licona, Richard Swinburne, N.
T. Wright and William Lane Craig.

1. The General Reliability of the New Testament

The main source of evidence about Jesus is the New Testament:
The four Gospels, Acts and the letters claiming to have been
written by St. Paul.

1.1 Paul's Epistles

Paul converted to Christianity three years after the death of Jesus,
in around AD 32, and almost all scholars agree that many of the
letters attributed to him are authentic and so the earliest New

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Testament books. Named after the churches to which they were
addressed, the letters widely acknowledged to have been written
by Paul are I Thessaslonians, Galatians, I and II Corinthians,
Romans, Philippians and Philemon. Though in writing them Paul
was more concerned with settling matters of Christian teaching
than with assembling evidence for the life of Jesus his letters
nevertheless provide a certain amount of very early information
about Jesus and have a personal character which, together with
the careful historical detail they contain, provide a clear picture of
Paul as an honest and conscientious man of obvious intelligence
and learning.
Paul did not know Jesus during his earthly ministry but he
spent time on two occasions with leading disciples who
had followed Jesus and Paul cross-examined them about
him.116 One occasion, according to Galatians, was three years
after his religious experience and conversion on the road to
Damascus when he visited Peter, the leader of the Church, and
James, the brother of Jesus, in Jerusalem. He also interacted with
others who had known Jesus or were close to those who had
known him and thus we have in Paul an authentic and
trustworthy authority relaying to us eyewitness testimony about
Jesus. What Paul writes is what the followers of Jesus claimed to
have seen and heard.

1.2 The Gospels

Each of the four Gospels, meanwhile, seeks to tell us about the life
of Jesus and what he taught and what significance it holds. The
first three Synoptic Gospels are compilations of stories and
teachings from various sources. There are differing views about
when the Gospels achieved their final form but we could
tentatively put Mark at AD 70 and Matthew and Luke at AD
80.117 Luke also wrote Acts which tells us about the life of the
early Church and Pauls contribution to it. Scholars date Acts to

116 In Galatians 2:6 Paul tells us that he actually compared notes with the Apostles and
they, "added nothing to my message." This gives us historical grounds for accepting Paul's
account to be a faithful representation of the testimony of those who were with Jesus
before and, allegedly, after his death.
117 It is not known exactly who Matthew, Mark and Luke were but it is clear that they
were Christians associated with the leadership of the early Church.

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AD 80 with many arguing that most of it was written much
earlier. John probably reached its finished form by around AD
90either written or inspired by St John who was one of the
twelve Apostles of Jesus.
Like Pauls letters, the Synoptic Gospels and Acts present
themselves to us as works of history. At the beginning of his
Gospel Luke writes that he has, undertaken to set down an
orderly account of the events which have been fulfilled among us
just as they were handed on to us by those who from the
beginning were eyewitnesses. This suggests that Luke was
claiming to write a work of history and so must have understood
Mark, from which he drew material, as work of history also; and
this in turn suggests that Matthew understood Mark as a work of
history and so, in using material from Mark, was himself seeking
to write a work of history. Acts, likewise, reads as a work of history
and, as Swinburne notes, is in places is so detailed and matter-of-
fact that it has a diarylike quality.
Such first impressions of historicity are borne out by closer
analysis. There is, for instance, general agreement between the
Gospels about the main events of the life of Jesuseven when
these events have unwanted implications. The Baptism of Jesus is
a good example of this. Since Jesus was held to be sinless, and
baptism was administered for the remission of sins, the Baptism of
Jesus is theologically problematica point which we will return to
in the next chapter. Nevertheless the Synoptic Gospels all dutifully
record this event. Their accounts of Jesus' teachings also square
with each other and with the only account of that teaching outside
the New Testament that has a plausible claim to authenticity;
namely, the Gospel of Thomas. And they agree again on the four
Roman governors and the four kings of Judea who are claimed to
have interacted with Jesus and later with Paul; 118 respectively,
Pilate, Gallio, Festus, Felix and Herod the Great, Herod Antipas
and Herod Agrippa I and II. All eight figures, furthermore, are
known to history and from the writing of contemporary Jewish

118 Some of these interactions allow us to assign precise dates to events described in the
New Testament. Gallio, for example, was governor of Greece for only one year, AD 52,
and so Pauls appearance before him described in Acts 18:12 must have occurred in AD
52.

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historian Josephus who, as already noted, also mentions Jesus and
John the Baptist. The author of the Gospel of John is also clearly
seeking to write an essentially historical work since he records
most of the events recorded in the Synoptic Gospels and on two
occasions declaims solemnly that he or his immediate source were
witnesses to those events.119

2. Qualifications
So far my concern has been to show that, in the absence of some
reason to think otherwise, a number of key New Testament books
should be regarded as basically reliable works of history. But
before drawing a provisional conclusion and moving to the
criteria of historical authenticity, I need to make a few
qualifications.

2.1 Minor Discrepancies of Detail

It was noted above that there is general agreement between the
Gospels on the main events of the life of Jesus and this of course
implies that there is minor disagreement. As we saw in Chapter
24, ancient historians did not have the same standards of accuracy
as modern historians. In a modern newspaper report or a larger
work of history each sentence is understood to be literally true or
false: It will be true if it describes accurately what really happened
and it will be false if it does not. Ancient works of history, by
contrast, must be judged by the standards the writer was seeking
to satisfy: Accurate in their main historical claims with minor
discrepancies of detail. This point needs to be borne in mind
when faced with minor discrepancies of detail between the Gospel
accounts.
However, as N. T. Wright notes, those minor discrepancies of
detail not explained by the different standards of historical
accuracy in the ancient world may actually give us further
grounds for regarding the New Testament testimony as genuine.
This idea seems counterintuitive but is widely recognised in law
courts entrusted with the task of evaluating eyewitness testimony.

119 For instance, John 19:35 says, The man who saw it has given testimony, and his
testimony is true. He knows that he tells the truth, and he testifies so that you also may
believe.

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The reason is as follows: It is psychologically impossible, given
variations of viewpoint and the fallibility of human memory, for
multiple eyewitness accounts to be in perfect agreement down to
the smallest detail. Thus any judge faced with multiple statements
that do so agree is likely to deduce that there has been a collusion
to mislead the court. Nor, obviously, can there be any truth in
testimonies which are in hopeless disagreement on all points.
What is looked for in reliable testimony from multiple
eyewitnesses is precisely what we find in the Gospel accounts:
Agreement on all the most salient features of an event with just
that measure of discrepancy which plausibly accounts for the
normative fallibility of the human witnesses.

2.2 Metaphysical Parables

The second qualification to the general reliability of the New
Testament: There may be some passages in John and perhaps
elsewhere which the original author did not intend to be taken as
literal historysuch as when an event is described which we have
very good reason to think did not occur, which is not multiply
attested and which naturally lends itself to an allegorical reading.
In these cases the author may be giving us what Swinburne has
called a metaphysical parable. This, as the reader may recall
from Chapter 24, is a fictional episode used to set out some deeper
theological truth.
Swinburne suggests that one obvious example of this is the
miracle of Jesus at the pool of Bethesda in John 5:2-18. This tells
of a mysterious pool of water that is regularly disturbed by an
invisible force. The first invalid to get into the water after the
disturbance is healed. However, there is one man who is never
able to get into the water in time. And so Jesus, taking pity on the
man, miraculously heals him.
If this story is taken to be historical it postulates regular events
of the most extraordinary kind for which we have no evidence
from any other source. Perhaps John was misinformed,
speculates Swinburne, but then he also tells us that man had
been sick for thirty-eight years, and likewise, "the people of Israel
wandered in the wilderness for thirty-eight years until Joshua,
which is the Hebrew name for Jesus, led them through the river
Jordan to the promised land." Throughout John it is clear that
symbolism is of central importance to its author. And so plausibly

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this story is a metaphysical parable: a way for John to tell us that,
Jesus helps the sick in soul through the water of baptism into the
kingdom of Heaven.

3. The Miracles
Here the skeptic may be tempted to suggest that since all the
miracles reported in the New Testament are events of the most
extraordinary kind we have very good reason to think none of
them occurred. And so on the logic of the preceding qualification
he may want to suggest that all the miracles of Jesus are
metaphysical parables. However, our reason for doubting the
historicity of John 5:2-18 is not that Jesus worked a miracle but
the allegorical character of the story together with the lack of
historical sources for the healing pool of Bethesdasources which
we might expect if such regular healings occurred there. And this
brings us to the third and final qualification: That while we do not
have lists of eyewitnesses for the miracles Jesus performed during
his ministry, we do have a list of eyewitnesses to the Resurrection,
and so the former miracles can be rationally affirmed on the
strength of the evidence for the latter.
This is an important point and so worth spelling out in detail.
The main reason skeptics object to the Gospel stories is that
they describe miraculous events; events which, if they had
occurred, would be violations of the laws of nature. Implicit in
such objections is Humes mistake of assuming that our inductive
experience of the laws of nature is our only relevant background
evidence. But as we have seen in Chapter 24 and again
in Chapter 27, equally relevant to our assessment of a purported
miracle is any background evidence for the existence of God
such as the nine lines of evidence presented in Part II. And if on
the total background evidence it is probable that there is a God
then it is probable that there exists a being with the power to
violate the laws of nature. Evidence that there is a God is
therefore evidence that miraculous events can occurwhich will
have particular relevance in cases where the event is of a kind that
God would have reason to bring about.
What reason might God have to work miracles through Jesus?
Most of the miracles of Jesus during his ministry were healings
and it is a priori very plausible that God Incarnate, being morally
perfect, would perform them out of compassion and also to show

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that, while for good reason he temporarily allows suffering, God
has the means and the will to eventually bring it to an end. And
since, as we saw in Chapter 21, God Incarnate would also need to
found a Church, it is likewise probable that he would perform
miracles to accumulate a following and demonstrate his divine
authorityof which the Resurrection, again, would be the
supreme proof. The Virgin Birth and Ascension, finally, would
help those who learned about them to properly understand the
doctrine of the Incarnationa point discussed at the end
of Chapter 21.
However, even if we have good reason to think that there is a
God who can suspend the laws of nature, and good a
priori grounds for thinking that he is likely to do so in some
particular way, we will still require substantial historical evidence
to affirm that a miracle has in fact occurred. A moment ago I
noted that we do not have lists of eyewitnesses for the miracles
Jesus performed during his ministry. The exception is the
Resurrection for which, as we shall see in Chapter 31, the
evidence is very strong. If God affixed his signature to the life of
Jesus by raising him from the dead, it is very plausible that he
worked other miracles through him. Curing lepers and healing
withered hands fulfil a similar purpose to the Resurrectionboth
vindicating the authority and teachings of Jesus and providing
evidence of Gods reality and intentions. 120 In short: if the
Resurrection really happened then the probability of the other
miracles is increased beyond the evidence available for them and
so they may be regarded as historical alsojust as, analogously, it
is rational to believe a man who claims to be able to consistently
win at poker on thin evidence if he has already provided very
strong evidence that he can read minds.

4. Provisional Conclusion
The Principle of Testimony is a basic principle of rationality
which states: In the absence of a reason to believe otherwise, what

120 Including, in the case of the Resurrection, proof of the general resurrection at the
end of history. Thus Swinburne writes: The Resurrection provided partial fulfilment of
Jesuss prediction that all humans would be raised from the dead by showing that one
human (Jesus) was raised. That showed that resurrection is possible and so could happen
to us.

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people tell us is probably true. Most of our beliefs about the
world, observes Swinburne, are based on what others claim to
have perceivedbeliefs about geography and history and science
and everything else beyond immediate experience. We would
indeed be imprisoned within the small circle of our own
immediate experience if testimony did not normally have this
force. And we should likewise understand that testimony, again in
the absence of a reason to believe otherwise, in its most natural
literal sense.
Many of the early Christians, including Paul, were killed for
refusing to recant Christian doctrines founded on the life and
teachings of Jesus and this suggests that they had a very strong
and literal belief in those doctrines. We have also seen that the
authors of key books of the New Testament understood
themselves to be writing works of history and that those books
commend themselves as basically reliable historical sources. In
view of all these special considerations and the absence of a reason
to believe otherwise, I conclude that on the historical evidence
and against the background evidence for the existence of God
from natural theology the New Testament is a generally reliable
source of information about Jesus.

5. The Criteria of Historical Authenticity

As noted at the start of this chapter, my conclusion that the New
Testament is a generally reliable source of information about Jesus
is supported by the so-called criteria of historical authenticity
that apply to and further strengthen many of its claims. Before
introducing these it is important to note that they state sufficient
but not necessary conditions of historicity; in other words, that
one or nnumber of criteria apply to p is further reason to
regard p as historically authentic but that only one or none of the
criteria apply to q is not a reason to regard q as historically
inauthentic. It should also be borne in mind that they are not
infallible guides to authenticity; rather, we should regard them as
Indicators of Authenticity. We could summarise all this by just
saying that the probability that some saying or event in the New
Testament is historical is greater for its satisfying the criteria than
it would be if it did not. There are a number of such criteria but I
will mention only five which are the most important and will be of
use in the following two chapters.

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5.1 Early Multiple Attestation
According to this criterion the historicity of p is more probable
if p appears in early, multiple and independent sources near in
time and space to the alleged occurrence of p. It applies at many
points to the New Testament of which I will give just one example
here. The Resurrection appearances are multiply attested in
Pauline and Gospel sources and were quickly proclaimed by the
first Christians in the very city where Jesus had been crucified and
buried. In his first letter to the Corinthians Paul says that the risen
Jesus was seen by as many as five hundred witnesses at one time
and adds that many of those witnesses are still alive to be
questioned. If Paul made up this claim and then announced it in
the place where, within living memory of his audience, it was
alleged to have occurred, he would have been exposed as a fraud.
This gives us further reason for thinking that it is historically
reliable.
Attestation has particular force when it originates in a hostile
witness and we see this throughout the New Testament also. To
again give just one example: The Sanhedrin, the Jewish court
which engineered the crucifixion of Jesus, responded to the
Christian claim that he had risen from the dead by accusing the
disciples of stealing the body. This is an incidental admission from
hostile witnesses of a fact that actually corroborates the
Resurrection Hypothesis; namely, since the Sanhedrin would
certainly have produced the corpse of Jesus if they could, the
accusation strongly suggests that the tomb of Jesus was empty
which is precisely what the Christians claimed a group of women
had discovered on Easter morning. As Paul Maier notes, "if a
source admits a fact that is decidedly not in its favour, the fact is to
be presumed genuine."

5.2 Dissimiliarity
This criterion states that the historicity of p is more probable
if p is dissimilar to the prior beliefs of those claiming its
occurrence. The death and Resurrection of Jesus satisfy this
criterion very clearly: Since first century Jews expected a Messiah
who overthrows the Roman occupiers and a general resurrection
at the end of history, a Messiah who dies and is individually

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resurrected in the middle of history represents a very strange and
dramatic mutation within the Jewish worldview. N. T. Wright
makes this point central to his massive study The Resurrection
of the Son of God in which he argues that only the Resurrection
itself can satisfactorily account for the emergence of a sincere
Jewish belief in a dying and rising Messiah. The historicity of the
New Testament claim that Jesus rose from the dead is thus highly
probable on the criterion of dissimilarity.

5.3 Embarrassment
The criterion of embarrassment states that the historicity of p is
more probable if p is problematic for the one who claims the
occurrence of psince people do not lie to their own
disadvantage. It applies to many New Testament claims but to
none more obviously than the crucifixion of Jesus. Prior to the
Resurrection the Apostles had believed that Jesus was the Messiah
prophesied to defeat the foreign occupying power and restore the
throne of David in Jerusalem. His ignominious execution by the
very foreign power his followers expected him to overthrow was
therefore a profound embarrassment: It dashed their hopes of his
triumph and appeared to confirm the Sanhedrin claim that Jesus
was a false prophet accused by God. On the criterion of
embarrassment the historicity of the crucifixion is highly probable.

5.4 Historical Congruence

This criterion states that the historicity of p is more probable
if p coheres with known historical facts about the context in
which p is said to have occurred. This criterion applies at many
points of the New Testament of which I will mention just one:
The New Testament claims that Joseph of Arimathea requested
the body of Jesus from Pilate so that he could bury it before the
Sabbath; that Joseph and Nicodemus together bound the body in
linen and placed it in a hewn tomb; and, finally, that when the
Sabbath was over a group of female followers of Jesus arrived at
the tomb with spices to anoint the body. Because all of these
details are congruent with our knowledge of Jewish burial customs
in the first century the criterion of historical congruence gives us
further grounds for affirming their historicity.

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5.5 Semitisms
This criterion states that the historicity of a New Testament
sentence p is more probable if it contains traces of an Aramaic or
Hebraic origin. Since the New Testament was written in Greek
and Jesus spoke Aramaic, traces of Aramaic in the Greek of the
New Testament argue in favour of a primitive tradition that
originates in Jesus. We see this, for example, in Pauls quotation of
a creedal tradition in Corinthians. I delivered to you, he
reminds the Corinthians, what I also received," suggesting the
transmission of an oral tradition. Paul then recites a list of
eyewitnesses to the risen Jesus which, as Habermas and Licona
point out, contains numerous hints of an Aramaic origin that
would seem to vouch for its authenticityincluding the fourfold
use of the Greek term for "that," hoti, common in Aramaic
narration, and the use of the name Cephas (He appeared to
Cephas) which is the Aramaic for Peter.

6. Conclusion
As noted, these criteria of authenticity further strengthen the
conclusion reached in the first half of this chapter: That several
key New Testament books are historically reliable sources of
information about Jesus. Having established this, let us now
consider whether the historical evidence shows that the life of
Jesus has the five features of God Incarnate discussed in Chapter
21.

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The Life Of Jesus

In Chapter 21, I gave Swinburnes a priori argument for the

Incarnation. This showed that, if there is a God, then it is highly
probable that he will respond to our sin and suffering by entering
into history in human form: in order to discharge an obligation to
share in the suffering which, though for good reason, he allows; to
offer wrongdoers a means of making atonement and to help us
live morally good lives by example and instruction. The fulfilment
of these purposes requires that the life of God Incarnate satisfy
five initial criteria: he himself must live a life that is morally
perfect and filled with suffering; he must claim to be divine; he
must claim to be making an atonement for human sin; he must
give plausible teachings and establish a worldwide church to tell
future generations what he has done and how they may avail
themselves of it. A sixth and final criterion is that his life must
receive a divine signature; that is, God must involve himself in the
life of the person in whom he became incarnate by means of some
action only God can perform. This will prove that the life, claims
and teaching of that person have received divine approval and so
that person was, indeed, God Incarnate.
In this chapter I am going to argue that on the evidence we
have the life of Jesus satisfies the first five criteria and in the next
chapter I will argue that it satisfies the sixth. My general
discussion here follows Swinburne point by point with
interpolations from other sources.121

1. Jesus Led a Perfect Life Filled with Suffering

The only possible evidence for the moral character of a persons
life is their public behaviour. However, the evidence we have for
the life of Jesus is the evidence we would expect if he had led a
perfect life. It is, for example, almost universally acknowledged
that Jesus befriended and ate with the outcasts of society. In Jesus

121 See Richard Swinburne, Was Jesus God? (2008).

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the Jew, distinguished Jewish scholar Geza Vermes writes of Jesus
that,

In one respect more than any other he differed from both his
contemporaries and even his prophetic predecessors. The
prophets spoke on behalf of the honest poor, and defended the
widows and the fatherless, those oppressed and exploited by the
wicked, rich and powerful. Jesus went further. In addition to
proclaiming these blessed, he actually took his stand among the
pariahs of his world, those despised by the respectable. Sinners
were his table companions and the ostracised tax collectors and
prostitutes his friends.

In first century Judea, tax collectors were loathed because they

had a reputation for extracting more taxes than they were
authorised to by the Roman authorities for whom they worked.
Thus when Jesus went to stay with the tax collector Zacchaeus,
those who learned of it complained that, He has gone to be the
guest of a notorious sinner. Jesus showed love to all.
The Gospels also report that Jesus was often swarmed and
harried by crowds and always met them with the same
unwavering compassion, generosity and love. Luke, for instance,
tells us of one occasion on which so many people surrounded the
house in which Jesus was staying that a group of men carrying a
cripple could find no way in. And so the men ripped a hole in the
roof and lowered the cripple and stretcher on which he lay into
the house. At this means of entry, farcical in its intrusiveness, Jesus
did not evince the slightest annoyance. Friend, Jesus told the
cripple, your sins are forgiven. And so generally thought his
ministry. When he saw the crowds, Matthew tells us, he had
compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless,
like sheep without a shepherd.
Prayer and religious experience played an important part in
the life of Jesus who consistently taught his followers to seek
repentance from, pray and give thanks to God. This is a great
moral good for at least three reasons. God, if he exists at all, is the
consummation of all love, power, beauty and intelligence lying at
the heart of reality. It follows that a relationship with God is the
greatest possible good available to the creature. And since it is a
moral truism that we owe gratitude to our benefactors and God,
as the holy source of our existence from moment to moment, is

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our supreme benefactor, it follows also that it is good for us to
show gratitude to God. And, finally, since we all wrong God
directly by failing to show him that gratitude and indirectly by
wronging each other, it is good that we should show repentance to
God and seek his forgiveness. Like John the Baptist, Jesus did not
reserve his teaching for committed disciples or a spiritual elite; he
taught publicly to all who were willing to listen. The personal and
public spiritual life of Jesus is therefore a further mark of moral
perfection.
In the previous chapter it was noted that the Baptism of Jesus
seems theologically problematic. However, the fact that Jesus
sought baptism from John the Baptist does not imply that Jesus
considered himself a sinner: Not until the foundation of the
Christian Church in the years after the Resurrection was baptism
administered solely for the remission of the sins of the person
being baptised. There is no evidence that Johns baptism of Jesus
had this character and Jewish historian Josephus denied that it
did. Baptism was sometimes sought as a means of identifying
oneself with the Israelites and their collective need for the
remission of sins and in I Corinthians 15:29 Paul mentions the
practice, which did not continue, of being baptised on behalf of
the dead.
Throughout his three year ministry Jesus lived as an itinerant
teacher and, in the absence of a reason to think otherwise, we
should believe him when he states that, The Son of Man has
nowhere to lay his head. All the Gospel accounts of his betrayal,
arrest, trial and execution also emphasise that he willingly yielded
himself at each stage of his ordeal despite knowing that doing so
would result in death. Jesus therefore showed a radical
commitment to the cause of changing people by reason and
example rather than by force or insurrection.
That Jesus also led a life involving pain and suffering is more
obvious on the historical evidence than almost anything else. But
let us examine it in a little more detail.
The life of Jesus ended with his Crucifixion engineered by the
Jewish high court and carried out by the Romans. The charge
pressed against Jesus by the Jewish authorities was blasphemy
which is how they characterised and understood the fact that Jesus
claimed rights that belonged to God alone. However, if, as the

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evidence will suggest, Jesus was in fact God Incarnate, then Jesus
was innocent of that charge.
The Gospels all claim that the Jewish authorities told the
Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, that Jesus claimed to be King
of the Jews. On the criterion of dissimilarity, the historicity of this
detail is highly probable: The phrase King of the Jews was not
used by Jews or by anyone else in the Gospels but is very plausibly
a way of explaining the Jewish concept of Messiah to Romans
ignorant of the Jewish religion. However, it was also a phrase all
too easy for them to misunderstand: Pilate might understand it to
mean that Jesus planned to overthrow the Romans by force.
So: The claims which Jesus made were claims which, if he
were God incarnate, he had the right to make and which were
plausibly misunderstood by the Roman authorities. And this
means that the Roman authorities, at the instigation of the Jewish
authorities, condemned an innocent man to death. In being
deserted by his followers and dying by crucifixion when innocent
of the charges against him, Jesus shared in the suffering and
injustice of human life in a very profound wayas is quite evident
during his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. Just how brutal
death by crucifixion was we shall see in the next chapter. And the
Gospels all make it clear that Jesus willingly submitted to both the
agony and the injustice.

2. Jesus Claimed to be Divine

The Gospel writers report Jesus referring to himself as, Son of
God. This phrase did not mean then what it came to mean in
later Christian theology or imply that Jesus was divine: It may
simply have meant Messiah or Righteous Person. However,
there is evidence that Jesus insinuated his divinity before his
Crucifixion and evidence that he proclaimed it openly afterwards.
And there is also a good reason why he needed to proceed in this
way rather than simply claim, I am God, from the beginning of
his ministry.
If God were to become incarnate for the reasons discussed
in Chapter 21, he needed to take on a human body and a human
way of thinking and acting in addition to his divine natureas
eventually codified in the Council of Chalcedon. This is
something it is difficult to understand and very easy to
misunderstand. Thus if Jesus had announced during his earthy

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ministry, I am God, his listeners and those who learned of the
claim would have understood him to be telling them that he was a
pagan god: a powerful and lustful being who had emerged from
the primeval chaos and now occupied a human body but not the
holy source of all being incarnate. Indeed, Geza Vermes writes
that, It is no exaggeration to contend that the identification of a
contemporary historical figure with God would have been
inconceivable to a first century Palestinian Jew. The absence of
an explicit declaration of divinity is not therefore evidence that
Jesus did not believe himself to be God as this was something he
could only proclaim openly after his Crucifixion had laid bare his
humanity and his Resurrection had demonstrated the unique
sense in which he was human. In short: Only under the aspect of
his Crucifixion and Resurrection together did the Incarnation
have any hope of being properly understood.
The Gospel accounts of what Jesus said and did after his
Resurrection are consistent with this view. All manuscripts of
Matthew conclude with Jesus commanding the remaining
disciples to baptise, in the name of the Father and of the Son and
of the Holy Spirit, thereby denoting that the Son, Jesus himself,
is equal in status to God the Father. John also records the explicit
confession of Thomas who did not believe in the Resurrection of
Jesus until he saw it with his own eyes. My Lord and my God,
Thomas exclaims and Jesus does not correct him. Moreover, on
two occasions after the Resurrection Matthew reports that the
disciples worshipped Jesus and many manuscripts of Luke
report the same.
This evidence is particularly compelling placed in its proper
historical and social context; i.e., when it is remembered that the
authors of the New Testament knew that it would be wrong to
worship anyone but God. Matthew and Luke record Jesus quoting
at Satan the Old Testament command to, Worship the Lord
your God and serve him only, when Satan invites Jesus to
worship him. And in Acts 10:26, when Cornelius tries to worship
Peter, Peter admonishes him with the words, Stand up! I am only
a mortal. And, finally, twice in Revelation the angel commands
John, its purported author, not to worship him with the words,
You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you. Worship
God! Jesus, by contrast, is never reported rejecting worship and
Matthew also records some occasions on which the disciples

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worshipped Jesus prior to his Resurrection. All of this evidence is
the evidence we would expect to find if Jesus believed he were
God Incarnate.
I noted earlier that Jesus insinuated his divinity before his
crucifixion. This is evident in several ways.
It is evident first in the very charge of blasphemy which the
Jewish authorities pressed against Jesus during his trial. Clearly
enough, Jesus did not curse God. What was "blasphemous" in the
view of his accusers was that Jesus did things and claimed rights
which only God could do and claim. It is in this way that John
understands the accusation; for instance, in 10:33 he records the
Jews picking up stones to throw at Jesus. It is not for a good work
that we are going to stone you, but for blasphemy, because you,
though only a human being, are making yourself God.
That Jesus was indeed insinuating his divinity prior to his
Resurrection also emerged during his trial. Challenged by
Caiaphas to confirm or deny that he was the Messiah and Son of
the Blessed One, Jesus replied, I am, and then quoted Daniel
7:13: You will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of
power and coming with the clouds of Heaven. His words,
according to Mark, caused an uproar. Caiaphas tore his clothes
and exclaimed, You have heard the blasphemy! What do you
think? and all those present agreed that he should be condemned
to death.
However, the strongest insinuation of divinity to emerge during
the trial of Jesus relates to his predictions about the Temple. Mark
and Matthew record that witnesses testified that Jesus had said he
could or would destroy the Temple and build in three days,
another Temple not made with hands. And John, too, quotes
Jesus as saying this. It is hard to imagine a purely fictional origin
for the accusation that Jesus threatened to destroy the Temple,
writes the liberal biblical scholar E. P. Sanders. What is interesting
is that Mark describes the accusation as false. If Mark was
indeed written after AD 70 he would have known that the
Temple was destroyed by the Romans in that year and, in any
case, he elsewhere relates another prediction by Jesus of its
destruction. All this implies that Mark believed that the
Temple would be destroyed and so the falsity of the accusation
lies in something else: Jesus did not predict that he himself would
destroy and rebuild the Temple; rather, he predicted that the

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Temple would be destroyed and replaced by something else that
had been destroyed and raised up after three days; namely,
Jesus himself. In other words, Jesus predicted that in due course
the Temple would be abolished and God would be accessed and
experienced through him.122 Nowhere does Jesus claim that he
has been commissioned by God to do this. And to replace the
divinely ordained place of worship, and, moreover, to declare
himself to beits replacement, is a claim to divinity.
A fourth and final way in which Jesus insinuated his divinity
was by forgiving sins as the Gospels report he did on at least two
occasions. Why does this fellow speak in this way? protests a
scribe on one of these occasions. It is blasphemy! Who can
forgive sins but God alone?

2.1 Brief Digression on the Humanity of Jesus

The purpose and nature of the Incarnation was introduced
in Chapter 21 and because of it we need to keep the humanity of
Jesus in view during any discussion of his divinity. Again, briefly:
To share in our humanity God allowed himself to develop a
second and separate system of human beliefs acquired through the
sensory experience of a human body. The separation of these two
belief systems, the human and the divine, was a voluntary act
known to his divine mind but not to his human mind. And so
while the divine consciousness would include a human
consciousness the human consciousness would exclude the divine
consciousness. And thismeans that, while remaining divine, Jesus
would act and feel much like ourselves.
We find this doctrine reflected throughout the New Testament.
Thus Luke claims that Jesus increased in wisdom, which
suggests that he was not always fully omniscient and Mark likewise
reports that the Son did not know something which the Father
knows; namely, the day or hour when the world will come to an
end. The cry of dereliction which Jesus sent up from the Cross,
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? further suggests
that Jesus experienced a moment during which he ceased to
believe that God was sustaining him. And there is, finally, a

122 The Letter to the Hebrews describes Jesus as coming as "a high priest" through the
"greater and more perfect tent not made with hands."

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passage in Mark that suggests Jesus was not always omnipotent:
During a visit to the region of Palestine where Jesus grew up he
could, do no deed of power there. That Jesus was tempted is
also clear from the accounts of the beginning of his ministry in the
Synoptic Gospels; experiences which Hebrews implies involved
real temptations to which Jesus could have succumbed but did
not.
All of this shows that, if Jesus were God Incarnate, he become
God Incarnate in just the way discussed in Chapter 21: By taking
on a separate and limited human nature in addition to his divine
nature.

3. Jesus Claimed to Be Making Atonement

We have already seen that Jesus claimed he was providing a
replacement for the Temple at which Jews offered sacrifices to
God in atonement for sin. And it is consistent with this
understanding that, during the Last Supper, Jesus gave his
disciples bread and wine with the words, This is my body, and,
This is my blood. Since body and blood are elements of
sacrifice, Jesus was telling his disciples that his life was an
atonement for human sin. New Testament accounts of the Last
Supper all understand it in this wayas the New Covenant for
the forgiveness of sin which the Old Testament had prophesied
would one day replace the Old Convent system of Temple
sacrifices.
That Jesus wanted his life to be understood as an atonement
for human sin is also very clearly reflected in the final days of his
earthly ministry. It is clear, for instance, that after challenging the
authorities Jesus took pains to avoid arrest until the Passover by
staying outside Jerusalem and holding the Last Supper in secret;
clear, in other words, that Jesus timed his trial and execution to
coincide with the Passover which commemorates the Exodus of
the Jews out of Egypt. And just as the Exodus told of the Jews'
escape from enslavement, so, claims the New Testament, did the
death of Jesus vouchsafe an escape for all humanity from
enslavement to sin, guilt and death. Instituting the Eucharist
shortly before allowing himself to be crucified at Passover
therefore conveyed an unmistakeable message within first century
Jewish culture: That Jesus understood himself to be, dying for
our sins.

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 4. Jesus Gave Plausible Teachings

4.1 On God
Jesus taught that God is the all powerful, all knowing and morally
perfect creator and sustainer of the worldan understanding of
God consistent with that of philosophical theology. He also taught
the great love of God for sinful human beings who in turn should
love, rely on and worship God. All of this is clearly reflected in the
parables of Jesus, such as the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the
Parable of the Lost Sheep and the Parable of the Lost Coin, along
with his explicit statements to the same effect: That God loves
man more than the lilies and the birds on whom he also bestows
love. And all this, in turn, is consistent with the omnibenevolence
of God.
In Chapter 22 we saw that if God exists and is all powerful and
all loving God is necessarily a Trinity. And Jesus is reported to
have said things which insinuate just this. It is no objection to this
doctrine that Jesus did not teach it explicitly by saying, for
example, God is a Trinity. For if a claim by Jesus to be God
Incarnate would have been misunderstood before his Crucifixion
and Resurrection so, a fortiori, would a claim that God was a
Trinity have been misunderstood; mistaken, almost certainly, for
the polytheism held by ordinary Greeks and Romans.
Nevertheless, there are two insinuations made by Jesus which
provided the Church with material to develop the doctrine.
Firstly, while implying his divinity, Jesus sharply differentiated
himself from God the Father. All things have been handed over
to me by my Father, Luke reports Jesus as saying, and no one
knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is
except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal
him. Secondly, there is much in the New Testament about the
role and personhood of the Holy Spirit. Mark and Matthew
report Jesus seeing the Spirit descend on him in the form of a
dove during his baptism and thereafter claim the Spirit drove
Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted. The disciples themselves
could not have known of the latter unless Jesus himself had told
them and it seems that the Spirit was recognized at his baptism
only by Jesus himself. Acts tells of the guidance of the Holy Spirit
in spreading the Gospel. And John reports Jesus as teaching his

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disciples that the Holy Spirit would guide the Church after Jesus is
no longer among them in bodily form. In that passage Jesus refers
to the Holy Spirit as the Advocate and also with the personal
pronoun he. And there is, finally, the command of Jesus at the
end of Matthew to baptise in the name of the Father, the Son
and the Holy Spirit, which denotes that the Holy Spirit, like the
Son, is equal in status to God the Father.

4.2 On Love and Forgiveness

It is also consistent with the moral perfection and the moral
authority of God that Jesus taught us to show unconditional love
for each other and to forgive each other for wrongdoing, not
seven times but, I tell you, seventy-seven times, as Matthew
reports Jesus saying. This is the obvious application of the Parable
of the Two Servants and the Lords Prayer in which we are
enjoined to pray, Forgive us our debts as we have also forgiven
our debtors. In other words, to avoid hypocrisy by forgiving
others before ourselves seeking the forgiveness of God. That,
above all else, we should love one another is the central theme of
the Sermon on the Mount. And asked to summarise his message,
Jesus declares, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy
heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first
and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou
shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

4.3 On Morality
Jesus seems to have endorsed the Old Testament teaching
contained in the Ten Commandments concerning the minimum
moral requirements of a good human life: To worship God alone,
respect our parents, refrain from theft, murder, adultery and lying
and the importance of prayer, fasting and almsgiving are also
important elements of his teaching. However, Old Testament also
contains detailed Jewish laws concerning ritual and sacrifice which
the Church (inspired, as it claimed, by the Holy Spirit) taught
Christians need no longer conform to. In doing so they
understood themselves to be acting in the spirit of the teachings of
Jesus and Jesus himself taught that following him was more
important than conforming to exact details of ritual. I noted
earlier that, when asked to summarise his teaching, Jesus declared
the two greatest commandments were, Thou shalt love the Lord

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thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and Thou shalt
love thy neighbour as thyself. And then, critically, Jesus adds,
On these two commandments hang all the law and the
prophets. Paul, understanding the point, compendiates it in
seven words: Love is the fulfilling of the law. Both the teachings
of Jesus on basic morality and the interpretation of those teachings
by the Church are therefore consistent and plausible.
In Chapter 21, we also saw that God may create obligations to
help us form the habit of doing what is supererogatorily good.
When a parent tells a child to do the shopping for a sick
neighbour the parent makes a nonobligatory good action
obligatory in the hope that the child will develop a habit of doing
good beyond what is obligated and so become a morally
exemplary person. And Jesus certainly created some moral
obligations of this kind. For example, during his discussion of the
Old Testament command to Love your neighbour as yourself,
Jesus was asked, And who is my neighbour? and in reply told
the parable of the Good Samaritan with its clear message that our
neighbour is anyone at all with whom we are in contact. So
interpreted the Command is very demanding and presses us to
conform to the standard of morality which a morally perfect God
would want to become natural to us. And this, too, is consistent
with what a morally perfect God would be likely to teach and so
evidence of a kind we would expect if Jesus were God Incarnate.

4.4 On the End of the World and the Afterlife

And finally: It was noted at the start of Chapter 26 that while God
has good reason for allowing humans to suffer he has equally good
reason to place sensible limits upon that sufferingboth by
placing a limit on the duration of a human life (and so on the
suffering that a human being can experience or cause) and also by
one day bringing the whole world to an end. And Jesus indeed
taught that, sooner or later, there would be a Parousia, or end of
the world, followed by a Last Judgment. This second teaching
entails that human beings will enter into different final states
according to the moral character they freely formed during their
earthly lifea subject discussed in Chapter 26 and, with the

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careful qualifications made there, also something we might expect
God to do.123

5. Jesus Founded a Church

It was noted in Chapter 21 that since the human life of God
Incarnate would be of limited duration he would need to ensure
that his message was passed on to future generations and the
obvious way of doing this would be to found a worldwide
institution or church. At the end of Matthew, Jesus tells the
Apostles to, go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them
in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit
and teaching them everything I have commanded you. This
suggests, plainly enough, that Jesus was entrusting the community
he had formed with the task of taking his message to the world.
Within the context of first century Judaism there are indications
that this community was intended to have institutional character.
For instance: That there were twelve Apostles is recorded
throughout the New Testament and fixed so firmly in the minds
of its authors that after Judas betrayed Jesus and only eleven
remained they continued to refer to them as the Twelve. Israel,
meanwhile, had traditionally had twelve tribes deriving from
twelve leaders. And so any Jewish prophet who founded a
community of twelve leaders with a sacrificial ceremony had to be
understood as founding a New Israel. The sacrificial ceremony
was, of course, the Eucharist and all subsequent Christian
communities regularly met to celebrate it in keeping with what
Jesus had instructed them to do.
Moreover, Matthew twice records Jesus saying, Whatever you
bind on earth with be bound in Heaven and whatever you loose
on earth will be loosed in Heaven which suggests that the
Church would continue the teachings of Jesus. And there are,

123 While Jesus refused to name an exact date when the end of the world, or "Parousia,"
would occur, his followers expected it to happen very soon. However, as Swinburne
notes, "there is no good reason to suppose that in the final days of his life or after his
Resurrection Jesus himself expected the Parousia to happen soon." On the contrary, the
institution of the Eucharist implied a continued belief in Church organisation after his
death and all the remarks attributed to him after his death concern his commissioning of
the disciples to convert the whole world through the non-miraculous process of
evangelismsomething that would clearly take a very long time.

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finally, various passages throughout the Gospels in which Jesus
tells the disciples that the Holy Spirit will continue to guide the
Church after his departure. Thus John reports Jesus saying, And
I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to
help you and be with you forever. And Matthew closes with Jesus
promising, I am with you always until the end of the age.

6. Conclusion
It has been my concern in this chapter to show that the life of
Jesus satisfies the five initial criteria discussed in Chapter 21. And
we have now seen that the evidence we have is the evidence we
would expect if Jesus had lived a perfect life filled with suffering,
claimed to be divine and an atonement for human sin, given
plausible teachings and founded a church. We come now to the
sixth and last criterion; namely, that on the evidence it is plausible
to suppose that God affixed his signature to the life of Jesus by
raising him from the dead.

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 31
The Resurrection Of Jesus

We come at last to the Resurrection evidence for which the

previous 11 Chapters have laid the groundwork: By showing that
religious pluralism is resolvable; Christian doctrine coherent and
probable and the New Testament a generally reliable source of
information about Jesus whose life is also the kind of life to which
God would plausibly affix his signature. It is important to note
that in making the case for the Resurrection of Jesus we need not
assume that the New Testament is inspired or infallible. Here, as
in the previous two chapters, we will be treating the New
Testament as we would treat any other collection of ancient
documents: approaching it with caution and skepticism and
testing its claims against the criteria of historical authenticity.
However, if in doing so we find ourselves rationally obligated to
conclude on the evidence that Jesus rose from the dead, that will
have implications for the status of the Bible as Holy Scripturea
point I will discuss in the next chapter.

Structure of the Argument

The historical case for the Resurrection of Jesus has three main
components. I will first introduce what the historian Gary
Habermas calls the minimal facts. These are four New
Testament claims which undergird the inference to the
Resurrection and which, because they satisfy multiple criteria of
historical authenticity, are accepted by the majority of historians.
Then I will introduce the explanatory options. These are the five
candidate hypotheses (four naturalistic and one miraculous) that
have been put forward to account for the minimal facts. And lastly
I will evaluate those competing hypotheses using the criteria
historians employ in such cases and which I will introduce and
explain in due course.
My general concern in this chapter will be to show that when
one uses accepted criteria for evaluating competing
hypotheses and includes the evidence for the existence of God
from natural theology in the total background evidence, the

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Resurrection emerges as an inference to the best explanation for
the historically certain facts about Jesus and the early Church.

1. The Minimal Facts

In Chapter 29 I showed that many books of the New Testament
should be regarded as basically reliable works of historymany of
whose key claims also satisfy multiple criteria of historical
authenticity. That discussion will have particular relevance to
what follows because the minimal facts with which we are now
concerned are facts about Jesus and the early Church which are
accepted by the majority of critical scholars precisely because they
satisfy many of these criteria. The minimal facts are,

1. Crucifixion and Burial. That after his crucifixion and

death under the governorship of Pontius Pilate, Jesus was
buried in a tomb by one Joseph of Arimathea.
2. The Empty Tomb. That days later the tomb was found to
be empty by a group of Jesus' female followers.
3. The Post Mortem Appearances. That thereafter various
individuals and groups, at various times and places, had
experiences that completely convinced them that they had
seen, touched, spoken to and eaten with the risen Jesus.
4. A Sincere Belief in the Resurrection. That these
experiences completely transformed the disciples, inspired a
belief among them that God had raised Jesus from the
dead and led to the formation of the Church.

Before coming to the various hypotheses that have been put

forward to explain these four facts, let us consider how the criteria
of authenticity apply to each one. The crucifixion of Jesus is
historical bedrock and so can be treated briefly. Not only is it
prohibitively improbable that the disciples would invent the
brutal, humiliating death of their leader but the event is described
in the four canonical Gospels, Acts, the New Testament epistles
and attested to in multiple Christian and non-Christian sources in
the ancient world. There is simply no dispute whatever on this
point among serious historians. Thus Bart Ehrman and John
Dominic Crossan, both renowned New Testament historians and
skeptics, state that the crucifixion of Jesus on the orders of Pontius
Pilate is as certain as any historical fact can be. The remaining
minimal facts are as follows.

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1.1 The Burial and Empty Tomb
The claim that Jesus was buried in a tomb that was later found to
be empty satisfies several criteria of historical authenticity.
Multiple independent attestation, for instance, is satisfied by the
four canonical Gospels which all begin their accounts of the
Resurrection with women visiting the tomb to anoint the body of
Jesus on the morning of the first Easter Sunday and being
surprised to discover that his body was not there. And Acts and a
very early creedal tradition quoted by Paul in Corinthians both
mention the burial and presuppose that the tomb is empty.124
The empty tomb also satisfies the criterion of embarrassment at
multiple points. This, you may recall, argues that any detail
problematic to an ancient account can be presumed true on the
logic that an author does not invent a detail problematic to his
own account. To appreciate its application here it is enough to
know that Joseph of Arimathea, the man who both supplied the
tomb and buried Jesus in it, was a member of the Sanhedrin; and
the Sanhedrin was the Jewish court which had engineered the
crucifixion of Jesus. If the Gospel authors wished to fabricate a
story about the death and burial of Jesus they would not have
given the Sanhedrin the dual role of murdering Jesus and then
humanely laying him to rest. According to John A. T. Robinson
of Cambridge, the entombment of Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea
is, one of the earliest and best attested facts about Jesus.
The criterion of embarrassment applies again to the discovery of
the empty tomb by specifically female followers. And this is
because, in first century Jewish culture, the eyewitness testimony
of women was held in such low esteem that it was not permitted in
a court of law. It is for this reason highly improbable that the
Gospel authors would have hung a pivotal event in their story on
the testimony of those witnesses least likely to be believed. The
criterion of embarrassment suggests that both these inconvenient
detailsthe burial of Jesus by a member of the Sanhedrin and the

124 First century Jews had a broad vocabulary for various post mortem states and
resurrection always meant the physical raising of the body and so by entailment an empty
tomb. Thus when Paul says that Jesus was raised it is implied that the tomb is empty as
surely as, Jane got up and went to work implies that her bed is empty.

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discovery of the empty tomb by a group of female followersare
truths reluctantly but dutifully recorded.
The empty tomb is also indirectly testified by hostile witnesses.
Matthew, for example, tells us that one of the first Sanhedrin
responses to the claim that Jesus rose from the dead was to say
that the disciples had stolen the body. Since Joseph of Arimathea
was a member of the Sanhedrin, the Sanhedrin would themselves
have been aware of the location of the tomb. And so if the tomb
had not been empty they could have silenced Christianity for all
eternity by producing the corpse of Jesus. The fact that they did
not, but instead sought to explain away the empty tomb,
strongly supports the Gospel claim that the tomb was in fact
empty.
A further detail that must be noted here is that Christianity
flourished in the very city were Jesus had been crucified and
buried shortly after he had been crucified and buried. As Paul
Althaus notes, the Resurrection story, could not have been
maintained in Jerusalem for a single day, for a single hour, if the
emptiness of the tomb had not been established as a fact for all
concerned.
And a final point that argues for the historicity of the empty
tomb is that Christians claimed it was discovered on a Sunday and
Sunday was thereafter universally adopted by Christians for the
celebration of the Eucharist or Last Supper. Since Christian
communities spread out from Jerusalem very quickly and took
with them the custom of celebrating the Eucharist on a Sunday,
the choice of day must predate the spread of Christian
communitiesotherwise there would have been disputes about
when to celebrate and authoritative instructions given to settle
those disputes as we have evidence for in other
matters.125 However, all early references to the Eucharist assume
a weekly Sunday celebration, including Acts and I Corinthians,
with Revelation calling Sunday, the Lords day.
To understand the relevance of all this to the empty tomb
consider that there are other days on which it might have seemed
natural for Christians to celebrate the Eucharistsuch as the day
of the original Last Supper, a Thursday, or annually rather than

125 Such as disputes about circumcision and eating sacrificial meat which were resolved
by the Council of Jerusalem described in Acts 15.

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weekly. But no such customs are known. And so the most
plausible explanation for total agreement on the theological
significance of Sunday from the very beginning of the Church is
that Christians believed that the Resurrection had occurred on
Sunday. Such a belief, clearly enough, would have to have been
shared by the Apostles and would just as clearly have been
insupportable unlessthey had seen the empty tomb or the risen
Jesus on that dayand in the latter case they would certainly
have investigated the tomb. All this demonstrates that the visit to
the empty tomb on Easter Sunday was not a late invention read
back into history but a separately authenticated event.
For all these reasons the historicity of the discovery of the
empty tomb is accepted by the vast majority of scholars
including skeptics and even including Jewish scholars such as
Pinchas Lapide and Geza Vermes. By far most exegetes, writes
New Testament critic Jacob Kremer, hold firmly to the reliability
of the biblical statements about the empty tomb. D. H. Can
Daalen adds that, "It is extremely difficult to object to the empty
tomb on historical grounds. Those who deny it do so on the basis
of theological or philosophical assumptions."

1.2 The Post Mortem Appearances

Matthew, Luke, John, Acts and I Corinthians all provide lists of
eyewitnesses who claim to have talked with Jesus after his death
on the Cross. The earliest of these lists is a credal tradition from
the Jerusalem church passed on by Paul in I Corinthains 15:5-8,

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also

received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the
Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third
day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to
Cephas, then to the Twelve. Then he appeared to more than
five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive,
though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James,
then to all the Apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he
appeared also to me.

He appeared to Cephas.
Here Paul faithfully quotes the Aramaic form of Peter, which, as
already noted, is one of many Semitisms in the creed that argues
for its authenticity. Paul, you may also recall, spent time cross-

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examining Peter and also James in Jerusalem and we can
therefore be certain that Peter described the appearance to Paul.
And the appearance is mentioned again in another early credal
tradition found in Luke 24:34. In view of this early and multiple
attestation virtually all New Testament scholars agree that,
however one may wish to explain it, Peter did experience a post
mortem appearance of the risen Jesus.

Then to the Twelve.

The twelve refers to the original group of disciples chosen by
Jesussans Judas, who had by this time committed suicide but
whose absence did not affect the formal appellation. As with the
appearance to Peter, its inclusion in the credal tradition
constitutes very early independent attestation which is further
corroborated by separate accounts in Luke 24:36 and John 20:19.
The most notable feature of this particular appearance is that
during it Jesus is said to have shown the disciples his wounds and
then eaten a fish. In doing so Jesus demonstrated both the
corporeality and continuity of his resurrection body: That he
was physically raised from the dead in the same body that was
crucified. Because it is vouched for by Paul, included in the
earliest credal traditions, and independently described by both
Luke and John, the historicity of this appearance is highly
probable on the criterion of early multiple attestation.

Then to more than five hundred brothers at one time.

The third appearance is notable not only for the number of
witnesses involved but also for Paul's avowal that most of them,
are still alive, though some have fallen asleep, which suggests
that Paul was in personal contact with some of them. As
renowned New Testament scholar C. H. Dodd remarks, There
can hardly be any purpose in mentioning the fact unless Paul is
saying, in effect, The witnesses are there to be questioned. No
one making up a claim this elaborate would invite those whom he
wishes to deceive to discover his deception when the option of
claiming they were all now dead was available. And again, we
know that Paul would not have included this appearance in his list
of witnesses unless it had been confirmed by Peter and James with
whom he spent time after his conversion. All these points support
the historicity of the third appearance.

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Then he appeared to James.
James, either the brother or a close relative of Jesus, was an
unbeliever prior to the resurrectiona detail which, by the
criterion of embarrassment, may be regarded as a historical.
Second only to the conversion of Paul, James undergoes the most
radical transformation of any New Testament figure. He is
already found among the believers in the upper room in
Jerusalem in Acts 1:14; he is visited by Paul as an Apostle in
Galatians 1:19; and in just over a decade has become one of the
three pillars of the church and a member of the Council of
Elders. In AD 60, according to the Jewish historian Josephus,
James is illegally stoned to death by the Sanhedrin for his faith in
Jesus. Thus the conversion of and the appearance to James amply
satisfies the criterion of hostile testimony. Skeptical critic Hans
Grass acknowledges that the conversion of James is among the
best evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.

Then to all the Apostles.

This appearance appears to refer to a wider circle of followers
known to the Twelve and attested to in Acts 1:21. Is historicity is
supported by Pauls personal acquaintance with the Apostles with
whom he had been in contact and from whom he had received
the list.

Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared to me

The conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus is the most
dramatic transformation of any Apostle in the New Testament.
Saul of Tarsus, who took the name Paul after his conversion, was
a respected Pharisee and fierce enemy of Christianity engaged by
the Sanhedrin to persecute its followers. He was referred to
beyond the borders of Palestine as, the wolf who stalked, the
fold of the lamb (Acts 9:13) and had personally overseen the
torture and execution of Christians (22:19). On the day of his
conversion, Paul was on his way from Jerusalem to Damascus
with a clutch of arrest warrants for unnamed followers of the
Christian Way.
However: By the time Saul arrived in Damascus, and still
blinded by what he had seen, he had conceived a sudden
frightened categorical belief in the deity of Jesusclear proof of
which is found in the renunciation of his high station and entry

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into a life of poverty, ostracism, beatings, abuse, and, finally,
martyrdom in Rome under the reign of Nero.126 And what he had
seen was, according to his own account in 1 Corinthians 9:1,
Jesus our Lord. The conversion of Paul therefore abundantly
satisfies the criterion of hostile testimony.

Other Appearances.
The earliest list of Resurrection witnesses is, as noted, the one
given by Paul and which we have just discussed. However, there
are many other appearances recorded in the New Testament.
Two of the Gospels begin with an appearance earlier than the
appearance to Peter: Matthew reports an appearance of Jesus to
Mary Magdalene and the other Mary on the first Easter
morning and John also reports that Jesus appeared to Mary
Magdalene then. Luke reports that Jesus appeared to and spoke at
length with Cleopas and another disciple on the road to Emmaus
and lists a further appearance in Jerusalem to the Eleven on
Easter evening. Matthew lists a further appearance in Galilee to
the Eleven and John 20 another appearance to the disciples in
Jerusalem and again a week later. John 21, meanwhile, reports an
appearance to seven disciples, again in Galilee, and Acts, finally,
begins with the claim that Jesus presented himself alive, to the
Apostles by many convincing proofs, and continued to appear
for over forty days, during which time he spoke about the
Kingdom of God, and ate and drank.

Apparent Discrepancies.
As we can see the sources give somewhat different lists of who saw
Jesus where and when and this is often thought to present a
difficulty. However, there is an important reason for these
differences between the list included in Pauls credal statement
and the Gospel lists: The list cited by Paul includes only those
witnesses that Jews, to whom it was being presented as a proof,
were likely to believe. I have already noted that first century Jews

126 The appearance to Paul has unique features: a blinding light and a voice which Pauls
travelling companions experienced without themselves seeing Jesus. Plausibly, however,
these elements of the appearance to Paul are explained by the fact that, unlike the other
Apostles, Jesus appeared to Paul after his ascension into the presence of God.

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would not take the testimony of women seriously and this
accounts for the omission of the two Marys. Cleopas, likewise, was
not a Church leader and his companion may have been his wife
mentioned in John 19:25 as present at the Crucifixion. The
Gospel writers, on the other hand, wrote at a time when Jewish
attitudes had hardened and the Gospel was being taken to the
Gentiles and so they were at liberty to list the other witnesses
without giving any consideration to their credibility before Jews.
And again: since it is very implausible on the criterion of
embarrassment that Matthew and John would report appearances
to women before Peter, the church leader, it may be taken as
historical that they were convinced such appearances had
occurred.
In all, the historical evidence for the post mortem appearances
just discussed is so compelling that even the skeptical German
critic Gerd Ludemann was prepared to concede that, It may be
taken as historically certain that the disciples had experiences after
Jesus' death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.

1.3 A Sincere Belief in the Resurrection

The Jewish disciples of Jesus expected a Messiah who would
overthrow the occupying power of Rome and restore the throne
of David in Jerusalem. His ignominious execution by the very
foreign power they expected him to overthrow represented a
crushing and seemingly irremediable defeat. And while a
universal resurrection was a component of Rabbinic Judaism,
this, as the name suggests, was expected to occur to all Jews
simultaneously at the end of the world. A Messiah who dies and is
individually resurrected in the middle of history was to be a very
strange and dramatic mutation within the Jewish worldview.
That the disciples did not expect the Passion of Jesus is clear
from all four Gospel accounts. It is the reason why they scattered
in despair when Jesus was arrested; why Peter denied him in the
Sanhedrin courtyard; why as a group they shunned the scene of
his execution and, in John 20:19, are found huddling together
behind locked doors, for fear of the Jews. And here an obvious
question arises: How was this group of broken, defeated men
suddenly transformed into fearless zealots who, against fierce
opposition, stormed Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Thessalonica,
Cyprus, Crete and Rome with the radical and incongruous claim

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that the Jewish Messiah had died and risen from the grave; a
claim, moreover, for which they were willing to die?
That they had not expected the Resurrection is also clear. In
Luke the disciples dismissed the women's report as, "an idle tale"
and John reports that when they saw the tomb for themselves
they, "as yet did not understand the scripture that the Messiah is
to suffer and rise from the dead." And even when they
experienced Jesus appearing to them they were still, "disbelieving
in their joy." John also tells us that Thomas did not believe that
the other disciples had seen Jesus and it is suggested that, in this
story, Thomas may represent further disciples. And while
the disciples of course came to believe both in the Resurrection
and in its prefiguration in the Old Testament, these were things
that Jesus had to explain to them when, according to Luke, he
spoke at length with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus.
"Oh, how foolish you are and slow of heart to believe all that the
prophets have declared," was his admonishment. The unanimity
of all the accounts on this point is compelling: The disciples did
not make themselves believe in the Resurrection because they had
been expecting it.
N. T. Wright makes this central to his huge study The
Resurrection of the Son of God and argues that only the
Resurrection itself can provide a satisfactory historical account for
the sudden emergence of a sincere Jewish belief in a dying and
rising Messiah. In a moment we shall consider the merits of this
claim. But first recall the criterion of dissimilarity. This states that
the historicity of p is more probable if p is dissimilar to the prior
beliefs of those claiming its occurrence. Because the death of Jesus
and the belief in his Resurrection abundantly satisfy this criterion
the historicity of both is highly probable. And it is for this reason
that a majority of scholars concede that something must have
happened to the disciples to produce their sudden and sincere
belief that God had raised Jesus physically from the dead.

2. Explanatory Options and Criteria of Justification

Having reviewed and established the historicity of the minimal
facts, we come to the explanatory options and the criteria of
justification with which we shall be evaluating them. The
naturalistic hypotheses are sometimes combined in various ways
but the following captures the main features,

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 1. The Apparent Death Hypothesis. Jesus only swooned on
the Cross and revived in the cool of the tomb.
2. The Conspiracy Hypothesis. Thieves or the disciples
themselves stole the corpse from the tomb.
3. The Hallucination Hypothesis. The disciples only
hallucinated that they saw the risen Jesus.
4. The Mistaken Tomb Hypothesis. The empty tomb which
the disciples found was not the tomb in which Jesus lay.
5. The Resurrection Hypothesis. God raised Jesus from the
dead.

Historians, as I noted at the start of this chapter, use a variety of

criteria in assessing competing historical hypothesis. In his
book Justifying Historical Descriptions, C. B. McCullagh lists
the following as factors which historians typically consider in
determining which historical reconstruction best accounts for the
evidence,

1. Explanatory scope. The best hypothesis will account for

more of the evidence than any other. (The best hypothesis will
leave the fewest facts unexplained)
2. Explanatory power. The best hypothesis will make the
evidence more probable than any other. (On the best
hypothesis the evidence we have will be the evidence we would
expect if the hypothesis were true).
3. Lack of Contrivance. The best hypothesis will postulate the
fewest new beliefs to explain the evidence. (The best hypothesis
will not require ad hoc adjustments to avoid falsification)
4. Lack of Disconfirmation. The best hypothesis will conflict
with the least amount of evidence. (The best hypothesis will not
require us to conclude that too much of our evidence is false).
5. Superiority to Rival Hypotheses. The best hypothesis
will satisfy criteria 14 better than any other hypothesis

3. Analysis
With the historicity of the four minimal facts established and the
criteria of assessment in hand, let us now consider which of our
five explanatory options is an inference to the best explanation.

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3.1 The Apparent Death Hypothesis
The apparent death hypothesis, or swoon theory, finds virtually
no support among contemporary New Testament historians. The
reasons are as follows.
It is massively disconfirmed by our knowledge of Roman
execution methods and military culture. As N. T. Wright notes,
The Romans were very, very good at killing people. They
specialised in it. One reason for this was that the authorities
provided soldiers with a powerful incentive to carry out their
orders successfully: Any soldier who let a prisoner escape would
forfeit his own life in their placesometimes by being buried up
to the neck and burned to death under a fire fuelled by his own
clothes. The rule applied if the escapee was an ordinary prisoner
of war and applied, a fortiori, if he had been charged, like Jesus,
with insurrection against the Roman Empire. Roman soldiers
were also prohibited from leaving the scene of a crucifixion until
death had occurred and it is inconceivable that the soldiers tasked
with executing Jesus would have allowed him to be carried off
unless they were certain he was dead.
The swoon theory is also massively disconfirmed by our
knowledge of crucifixion pathology. Victims of Roman crucifixion
were typically scourged until their arteries, muscles and intestines
had been laid bare. The Gospels report that Jesus was scourged
and that after his scourging he was too weak to carry this Cross to
Golgothaa detail which medical authorities (Edwards, Gabel
and Hosmer, 1986) suggest is consistent with hypovolemic shock.
Once impaled upon the cross, the victim faced an excruciating
physical dilemma: To yield to gravity and slump down,
whereupon the weight of his body would constrict the intercostal
muscles surrounding his lungs and cause asphyxiation and
unconsciousness within around twelve minutes; or to
push up against gravity to maintain consciousness but at the cost
of supporting his entire body weight on pierced feet. As the
historian Gary Habermas observes, it would have been a very
simple matter for a centurion practiced in crucifixion to determine
that Jesus was dead: He would only have to observe that Jesus has
ceased to haul himself up heaving for breath and had remained
slumped on the cross for around half an hour. And the spear in
the side, recorded in John 19:34, provides additional proof of

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mortality: The fluid which gushed forth is consistent with a
rupture of the pericardiumthe sac which surrounds the heart.
And finally: The swoon theory lacks explanatory power to the
point of total incoherence when its proponents attempt to account
for the origin of the transformative belief among the disciples that
God had raised Jesus from the dead. It is prohibitively improbable
that the moribund survivor of a botched execution somehow
extricated himself from his burial shroud, pushed back the heavy
bolder at the entrance of the tomb, overpowered the guard and
limped back to his followerswho all immediately fell at his feet
in frightened awe and proclaimed him the risen Lord and
luminous conqueror of death. As early as 1879, German critic
David Strauss put paid to the swoon theory for all time by
pointing out that a half-dead Jesus would have inspired little more
in the disciples than a wish to provide him with medical care.
According to Habermas, Albert Schweitzer, in his classic volume
surveying historical studies of Jesus, "lists no convinced
proponents of the swoon theory after Strauss's critique in 1838."
In view of its disconfirmation and catastrophic lack of
explanatory power the apparent death hypothesis fails to account
for the Resurrection evidence.

3.2 The Conspiracy Hypothesis

The conspiracy hypothesis imagines that the body of Jesus was
stolenperhaps by his followers, to revere it; or by enemies of
Jesus, to prevent his tomb from becoming the centre of a cult; or
by grave robbers, for profit. However, there are very serious
difficulties with this theory in each of its forms.
If the enemies of Jesus had stolen the body they would have
produced it when Christianity began to flourish in order to
disprove its central claim. Grave robbers were not interested in
bodies, but only in valuables, and while they might have hoped
for a reward from the Sanhedrin, we know that no such reward
was collected because the Sanhedrin did not come into possession
of the body. And if the body had been stolen by friends of Jesus,
they would have told other followers so that they might share in
devotion to the body. But that entails that there were no
appearances; that, in fact, the first Christians were guilty of the
greatest lie ever told, which in turn leaves us without any
explanation for the transformative belief in the resurrection

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among the disciples and for the fact that they were willing to die
for that belief. It is important to note here that while it is possible
for cult members and others to die for mistaken but sincerely held
beliefs, the conspiracy theory holds that the first
Christians knew their claims were false and it is therefore very
improbable indeed that they would be willing to die for them.
Nor does the conspiracy theory explain the embarrassing
elements of the Christian story. In making up stories, one works
from an unlimited palette of options. There is no need to include
inconvenient details and no reason not to include convenient
ones. Why not include, say, a description of the actual
resurrection, male witnesses to the first post mortem appearance
of Jesus, or an appearance to the high priest Caiaphas. A plot to
foster belief in the Resurrection, concludes E. P. Sanders, would
have resulted in a more consistent story."
Because of its lack of explanatory scope, its contrivance and its
disconfirmation by the willingness of the first Christians to die for
their beliefs, the conspiracy hypothesis has been almost universally
rejected by contemporary historians.

3.3 The Hallucination Hypothesis

The hypothesis that the disciples only imagined or hallucinated
the appearances of Jesus lacks explanatory scope because it fails to
account for the empty tomb. And while its proponent may annex
an independent hypothesis to explain that, doing so makes his
final hypothesis more contrived and so less probable.
An even more serious problem with the hallucination
hypothesis is that, as Gary Habermas has shown, the resurrection
appearances are marked by features that are entirely inconsistent
with all the candidate scenarios for hallucination. The most
discussed scenarios are: mass religious hysteria, bereavement
induced hallucinations and idiosyncratic personal visions.
The appearances are inconsistent with mass religious hysteria.
As the anomalistic psychologists Leonard Zusne and Warren
Jones note, mass religious hysterias are in all the relevant cases
experienced by pilgrims who have, traveled long distances and
exuberantly gathered with the explicit desire to see something
special. The resurrection appearances, by contrast, were
experienced by individuals and groups under entirely the wrong
psychological conditions: Rather than feelings of expectation and

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emotional excitement, the early disciples were overwhelmed with
fear, disillusionment and despondency. The chain reaction
necessarily underwriting such an explanation also fails to account
for the experiences of Paul and James who, as skeptics, stood
outside the chain. Habermas concludes that, much of the data
not only differs from, but actually contradicts, the necessary
conditions for collective hallucinations.
The resurrection appearances are also distinctly unlike grief
induced visions of a departed loved one. For while such visions are
fairly common they do not inspire a steadfast conviction that the
deceased has returned bodily to life. In fact, as N. T. Wright
explains, people in the ancient world were very familiar with such
apparitions and had the vocabulary to describe them: such visions,
for them, were simply taken as evidence that the person were
really dead and were certainly never described as "resurrections."
It is worth repeating that a dying and rising Messiah was a totally
incongruous and unexpected notion to a first century Palestinian
Jew. What was culturally available was a belief in
the assumption of prophets into heaven. And since a
hallucinating first century Jew could not do otherwise than to
project a vision of Jesus from his background beliefs, we would
therefore expect him to report a resplendent vision of Jesus amid
the heavenly host and not a physically resurrected Jesus who eats
fish and passes through walls.127
But the greatest difficulty with the hallucination hypothesis is
that the appearances of Jesus were experienced by individuals and
groups at various times and places for forty days and many of
them involved multiple people having conversations with Jesus of

127 One of the strangest things about the post mortem appearances of Jesus is that they
combine prosaic and supernatural elements. Thus Jesus both eats a fish and has long
conversations with his disciples (and so is clearly present and physical in the ordinary way)
but also freely appears in locked rooms and passes through walls. The disciples also
noticed something different about Jesus which they struggled to express. Thus in John
21:12 we read, None of them dared ask, Who are you? They knew it was the Lord. As
N. T. Wright observes of this passage, it, only makes sense if Jesus is, as well as the
same, somehow different. Somehow he had passed through death and into a strange new
world where nobody had ever been before. His body was no longer subject to decay and
death. What might that have been like? Wright suggests that while the resurrection body
of Jesus was undoubtably physical we must also think of it as being, in some obscure way,
transphysical.

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some length. The only way to account for this on the
hallucination hypothesis is to postulate a coincidentally
simultaneous and coextensive series of sustained multisensory
hallucinations experienced by multiple people. And it is massively
improbable that each person in each case would have been in
precisely the right frame of mind; and still more massively
improbable that, just by chance, they would have experienced the
same hallucination as every other person and for the same length
of time.
Habermas notes several further problems with the hypothesis:
that the hallucinations lasted only 40 days and did not continue
among new converts; that Jesus ate and drank before the
witnesses; that the woman held Jesus by the feet; and the fact that
the appearance to Paul occurred before Paul had met the disciples
whom he only later discovered were proclaiming that Jesus had
also appeared to them.
The hallucination hypothesis is therefore disconfirmed by the
psychology of the disciples, their background beliefs and by the
nature of the appearances themselves.

3.4 The Mistaken Tomb Hypothesis

The last naturalistic hypothesis imagines that the disciples mistook
an empty tomb for the tomb of Jesus. However, Joseph of
Arimathea, who owned the tomb, would soon have noticed the
mistake; and if for some reason he hadnt, the Sanhedrin would
have looked to see whether the tomb was really empty when the
Christians began to claim (as they very quickly did) that Jesus had
risen from the dead.
The mistaken tomb hypothesis also makes no attempt to
account for the disciples sincere and transformative belief in the
Resurrection. And so to its problematic first premise the
proponent of this hypothesis must annex either the conspiracy or
hallucination hypothesis making his overall hypothesis more
complicated and so less plausible. And remembering each
of those hypotheses are themselves problematic, what has been
already said about them will apply to whatever pair of
explanations is conjoined.
Because it fails to account for the evidence that the Sanhedrin
knew the location of the tomb and makes no attempt to account
for the disciples' transformative belief in the Resurrection, the

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mistaken tomb hypothesis lacks both explanatory scope and
power. And because it must then be combined with other theories
which are themselves massively disconfirmed by our evidence
about the character and the psychological state of the disciples as
well as the physical appearances of Jesus to followers and skeptics
at multiple times and places, the mistaken tomb hypothesis is
overall a totally inadequate explanation of the Resurrection
evidence.

3.5 The Resurrection Hypothesis

The Resurrection hypothesis claims that God affixed his divine
signature to the life of Jesus by raising Jesus from the dead. Let us
now apply to it our five criteria and see how it fares against the
rival hypotheses already discussed.
The explanatory scope of the Resurrection hypothesis is
exhaustive: It accounts for the empty tomb, the post mortem
appearances and the disciples transformative belief in the
Resurrection. All of these are consequences precisely to be
expected if the hypothesis is true. The Resurrection hypothesis is
also clearly superior to its rivals in explanatory power. It should be
clear from the foregoing discussion that the chief difficulty facing
the skeptical historian is to explain how a group of defeated,
frightened Palestinian Jews developed a sudden, transformative
belief in a dying and rising messiah. We have already seen that
deliberate deception and group hallucination are inconsistent with
the evidence. But that same evidence is precisely what we would
expect if Jesus had confronted his disciples in supernatural good
health a few days after his execution.
It is at the criterion of disconfirmation that the importance of
the previous 30 Chapters comes into sharp focus. Evaluated in
vacuo, historical evidence for a Resurrection would seem to be
disconfirmed by our inductive experience of natural law: The
dead are always and everywhere observed to remain dead. And
clearly the claim that God raised Jesus from the dead is false ipso
facto if one thinks that God does not existand very improbable
if one thinks it very improbable that God exists. But this again is
Humes mistake of assuming that our experience of natural law is
the only relevant background evidence whereas, as I have been at
pains to emphasise, equally relevant is any evidence for the
existence of a God who can violate or suspend natural law: The

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Resurrection evidence must therefore be evaluated against the
total relevant background evidence from natural theology.
In Parts II and III we saw that the evidence of natural theology
and a priori reasoning together not only establish that there very
probably is a God but also that God will very probably become
incarnate and live a perfect life filled with great suffering that ends
in a miracle. And so against the total relevant background
evidence the Resurrection hypothesis is not disconfirmed but in
fact has a high prior probability; that is, natural theology and a
priori reasoning give us grounds in advance of evaluating the
historical evidence for thinking that an event like the Resurrection
will occur.
I conclude that on balance the Resurrection hypothesis satisfies
the criteria of justification far better than every rival
hypothesis. And since good historical evidence for the
Resurrection of Jesus further increases the probability that there is
a God, the coincidence of the two kinds of evidence makes it very
probable indeed on the total evidence that there is a God and that
Jesus was God Incarnate.

4. Conclusion
In this chapter I have established the historicity of four minimal
facts about Jesus and the early Church and then demonstrated
that the Resurrection is an inference to the best explanation for
those facts using accepted criteria for evaluating competing
historical hypotheses. The only possible reason for resisting this
conclusion is a presupposition of atheism or the objection that
miraculous events are disconfirmed by our inductive experience of
natural law. However, since any evidence for the existence of God
is highly relevant to the hypothesis and must be included in our
total background evidence, so the evidence presented in Part II
and Part III leaves us without rational justification for denying the
conclusion of the foregoing argument. On the total evidence of
natural theology and history, I therefore conclude that God raised
Jesus from the dead.

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 32
Conclusion

In Part IV it has been my concern to show that the New

Testament is a generally reliable source of information about
Jesus; that the life of Jesus was the kind of life to which God would
plausibly affix his signature; and that we can know on the
evidence of natural theology, a priori reasoning and history that
God did, in fact, raise Jesus from the dead. In drawing my entire
argument to a close, there are three final matters to consider: the
importance of the historical context of the Resurrection; the
theological significance of the Resurrection to the status of the
Bible and the personal significance of the Resurrection to anyone
who feels persuaded by the evidence that it occurred. After that I
will offer some final thoughts on the role of doubt and faith in the
religious life.

1. The Historical Context of the Resurrection

Sometimes, as a last resort, the skeptic will suggest that even if
God or something like a God does exist and Jesus really did rise
from the dead there is no obvious reason why we should attach
any importance to that fact. Perhaps, the skeptic suggests, it was
just a freak event (a quantum anomaly, say) or perhaps God raised
Jesus from the dead for some unknown reason with which we
need not concern ourselves. Generally, the objection is: It is no
entailment of the Resurrection of Jesus that we should believe
Jesus to be God Incarnate and follow his teachings. I do not think
that the logic of this objection will have widespread appeal;
nevertheless, the point that needs to be made in response to it is of
general importance and so I will make it now.
The Old Testament had two criteria by means of which to test
a prophet. The first was that he must teach in the name of the
God of Israel and not enjoin his followers to worship other gods.
Jesus clearly fulfilled the first criterion: He taught in the name of
the God of Israel and told Jews to worship the God of Israel. The
second criterion was that if the prophet makes a prophecy his
prophecy must come to pass. The prophecy could not be

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something that might reasonably be expected to occur anyway in
the ordinary course of nature but a miracle in response to a prayer
by the prophet would amply satisfy this criterion. Thus Elijah
called upon God to ignite a water-soaked sacrificean event
which, if it occurred, would be understood as an act of God. And
so at the ignition of the sacrifice Elijah was recognized as a true
prophet of Israel.
It is not important whether this story is true. It merely
establishes that the Jews of Jesus' time understood what would
constitute a divine signature on the work of a prophet. And since,
according to Mark, Jesus prophesied his Resurrection on three
separate occasions, so, in the historical context in which it
occurred, the Resurrection of Jesus constituted a divine
imprimatur on the life and teachings of Jesus.
Putting predictions on the lips of heroes was a habit of ancient
authors which has led some modern critics to call Jesus'
predictions into question. However, there are three further and
important predictions which Jesus made and which were fulfilled
by his Resurrection. The first was his prediction that he would
make a sacrifice of his own life for the atonement of human sin.
Clearly enough, crucifixion alone would not demonstrate the
fulfilment of his predictionto have effect an offer of atonement
must be accepted by the party who has been wronged; that is, by
God. But the Resurrection demonstrates that Jesus' offer of
atonement on behalf of the world had been accepted by God and
so that that prediction was fulfilled. A second prediction of Jesus'
that was verified and partially fulfilled: That humans would be
raised from the dead. Jesus' own Resurrection showed that one
man, Jesus himself, was raised and thus Resurrection is possible
and will happen to us. And finally: The Resurrection also
vindicated Jesus' claim to divine authority by reversing and
countermanding the Sanhedrin verdict of blasphemy and
demonstrating that Jesus wasdivine and had supernatural powers
and status.
A final point: The Nicene Creed claims that Jesus, rose again
on the third day according to the scriptures, and, as noted in
the previous Chapter, Jesus himself explained to his disciples that
his suffering, death and entering into glory had been predicted
by the prophets of the Old Testament. Many Old Testament
passages do indeed seem to prefigure the details of the life and

338
death of Jesus with uncanny exactitudethe Suffering Servant
passages in Isaiah and Psalm 22 being the most obvious examples.
Thus Jesus also appears to have fulfilled the Old Testament by
providing those things for which so many of the prophets longed:
complete and final atonement for sin, the triumph of good over
evil and a deep understanding of God. And, of course, Jesus went
on to found a Church tasked with converting the whole world and
promised to one day raise all people of good moral character to
eternal life.
And it is in this religious and historical context that the deity of
Jesus follows by logical entailment from his Resurrection.
Consider: Because God is all powerful, all knowing and all
present, Jesus could only rise from the dead if God caused him to
rise or allowed him to rise while being present at and aware of his
rising. And because God is all good, he would not deceive us by
causing or allowing a false prophet to rise from the dead: For God
to affix his divine signature to a lie would be to corroborate a lie
and that is something God, being morally perfect, would not do.
And so it follows that the Resurrection of Jesus is a divine
vindication of his claim to be God and this means that his
teachings also come from God and should be followed.

2. The Status of the Bible

A second closing consideration concerns the significance of the
Resurrection of Jesus to the status of the Bible. In making the case
for the Resurrection the New Testament was treated like any
other collection of ancient documents: approached with caution
and skepticism and tested against the criteria of historical
authenticity. However, by preceding in this fashion, and
evaluating the historical evidence against the background
evidence of natural theology, we were able to establish that, very
probably, God raised Jesus from the dead.
The reality of the Incarnation and Resurrection has a number
of important consequences and one of them concerns the status of
the Bible. It was noted in Chapter 21 that since the life of God
Incarnate would be of limited duration, he would need to
establish a worldwide Church to record, interpret and share his
message and offer of atonement so that future generations could
learn about and avail themselves of it. And I noted in Chapter 30
that Jesus indeed founded a Church which he tasked with taking

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his message to the world. Critically: Jesus also said that he would
providentially guide that Church in spirit after his Incarnation.
Thus Matthew closes with Jesus promising, I am with you always
until the end of the age.
If Jesus were God it follows that God has providentially guided
the Church in recording, interpreting and sharing the message of
Jesusan activity which includes the compilation and
interpretation of the whole Bible discussed in Chapter 24 and 25.
And this means that the Church is correct in imputing to the
Bible its unique status as Holy Scripture. And so, with the careful
qualifications made in those chapters, that is how we should
regard it.

3. Practical Application
The second important consequence of the Resurrection is deeply
personal.
In the introduction to Part IV, I noted N. T. Wrights
observation that the statement, Jesus rose from the dead is
self-involving. In the revenant passage of The Resurrection of
the Son of God, Wright makes the obvious point that there are
different degrees of this. Consider the strength of self-involvement
that inheres in the statement The Number 10 bus just
passed when I state it blandly while sitting by the living room
window and the same statement screamed in dismay when I am
running to the bus stop on my way to a vital appointment. Wright
continues,

The point is that one cannot say, Jesus of Nazareth was bodily
raised from the dead, with the minimal involvement of the first
of those statements. If it happened, it matters. The world is a
different place. Saying, Jesus of Nazareth was bodily raised from
the dead is not only a self-involving statement; it is a self-
committing statement. We cannot simply leave a flag stuck on a
hill somewhere and sail back home to safety.

Wright is surely right. If some proposition is rational and entails

that certain actions in response to it are rational then it is
irrational for one who affirms that proposition not to take those
actions. I suggested in Chapter 28 that conversion to Christianity
is the only rational response to the reality of the Incarnationand
surely this is logical. If God really exists a relationship with God is

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the greatest possible good available to the creature and if it is
rational to believe that God revealed himself through Jesus then it
is rational to seek that relationship with God through Jesus and
the Church Jesus founded and irrational not to. And so if, as I
have argued, it is indeed probable on the evidence of natural
theology, a priori reasoning and history that God raised Jesus
from the dead then following the teachings of Jesus, and so
conversion to Christianity, is rationally obligatory.

4. Doubt and Faith

Even rationally obligatory propositions are open to doubt and the
possibility and necessity of doubt have been a recurring feature of
my whole argument: In Chapter 6 and 17 and throughout my
discussion of religious pluralism I argued that divine hiddenness is
a necessary feature of any world in which significant moral self-
determination is possible and so a necessary feature of any world
capable of producing virtuous creatures fit for a relationship with
God. It is in keeping with this understanding of the relationship
between divine hiddenness and moral self-determination that one
of the main difficulties of living a religious life is persevering in our
effort to meet the exacting moral standards of God in the face of
fluctuating doubts about his existence. Swinburne finds some
rational grounds for perseverance in the fact that it is good to live
as though God exists whether he exists or not; good, that is, to try
and become the sort of people that a morally perfect being would
choose to sustain for all eternity if such a being existedby being
good and helping others to do the same and by loving each other
and performing virtuous actions. In so far as the religious life helps
us to do this, it is good to live a religious life even if there is no
God.
However, no discussion of religious doubt is complete without
touching on faith. How can we best define this word about which
there is already so much misgiving and misunderstanding?128 I

128 The New Atheists, for example, have repeatedly expressed great contempt for faith
which they regard as irrational and dangerous and cite as one of the central reasons for
their campaign against religion. They all define it, incorrectly, as, "believing something
without evidence."

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foresee no possibility of settling the dispute but would like offer the
three points that I have found most helpful.
In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis provides a very serviceable
definition of faith. Now that I am a Christian, he writes, I do
have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but
when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked
terribly probable. For Lewis, faith is simply, the art of holding
on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your
changing moods. And certainly a person is rational to continue
affirming a proposition without apprehending the evidence that
first led him to accept it. Perhaps many years ago Mr Green
studied the historical evidence which, he believed, made it
probable that Jesus rose from the dead. He therefore believes the
proposition Jesus rose from the dead even though he has now
forgotten the historical evidence. His evidence today is just that he
did once, honestly and conscientiously, examine historical
evidence and reach that conclusion. And this holds, I think, even
if the evidence is remembered but, on a sudden impulse, it all
seems rather improbable. At such times one dismisses the passing
impulse and trusts, or has faith in, the inquiry already undertaken.
This is the first helpful point.
The second is to note that there is virtually nothing about
which doubt is impossible. This was a point discussed in
Chapter 9. Science, for instance, depends on inductive reasoning:
one makes a series of observations and infers a conclusion. Thus
having observed many swans and found them all to be white, it
seems valid to conclude, All swans are white. But no number of
confirming observations, however large, can prove a universal
generalisation. Only the conclusions of sound analytic arguments
are logically necessary; the conclusions of synthetic arguments
based on observation, however probable, are always in principle
falsifiable.
So: In natural theology, as in every other philosophical and
scientific enterprise, we are dealing with arguments whose
premises must be weighed for their plausibility or probability. And
this goes for arguments for atheism as well as theism. In each
case, an argument for or against the existence of God will be a
successful argument if and only if it has a valid logical structure
and its premises are more plausible or probable than their
negations: This, in turn, will make its conclusion more plausibly or

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probably true than false and we will be then rationally obligated
to give it our assent.
We have looked at a total of 13 positive arguments in a
cumulative case for Christian theism. I have shown that those
arguments make it far more probable than not that Jesus was God
Incarnate. To negate this conclusion it is not enough to merely
raise doubts; one would have to show that each premise in each
argument is more plausibly false than true. And so doubt of itself
is of little philosophical significance.
At the close of his book Was Jesus God? Swinburne makes a
similar point: He confronts his doubts and finds that, on balance,
belief in God remains quite rational. I am well aware, he writes,
of objections other than the ones which I have discussed which
can be made to almost every sentence which I have written. And I
am aware of counter-objections which can be advanced in turn
against every objection to my views. He continues,

Argument and counter-argument, qualification and

amplification, can go on forever. But religion is not exceptional
in this respect. With respect to any subject whatever, the
discussion can go on forever. New experiments can always be
done to test Quantum Theory, new interpretations can be
proposed for old experiments, forever. And the same goes for
interpretations of history or theories of politics. But life is short
and we have to act on the basis of what such evidence as we have
had time to investigate shows on balance to be probably true.

My third and final point concerning religious doubt and religious

faith is the most important of all and with it I will close my
argument.
The conclusion of the last 32 chapters is that there is a God:
An omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, necessary, eternal and
perfectly good immaterial person. If you accept that conclusion
then the arguments that led you to do so are thereafter almost
irrelevant: Just as I cannot obtain personal knowledge of my wife
by studying her circulation and blood pressure and metabolism, so
I cannot obtain personal knowledge of God by studying the
philosophy of religion. I obtain that knowledge by building a
relationship with him.
The relevance of all this to faith and doubt is as follows:
By seeking to know God on a personal level through prayer and

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worship we open ourselves to religious experiences which will
have considerably more force and meaning than any
philosophical argument for the existence of God and so further
diminish our doubts. And by coming to know God on a
personal level through those experiences we may also discover a
new kind of faith to draw on: faith not in our own rational
adjudication but faith in God as the person who has proven
himself reliable and so on whom we may rely. Just as a child who
has learnt to trust their father implicitly will trust that he has a
good reason for taking them somewhere without telling them
where he is taking them, so one who has come to trust God
implicitly will trust that he has good reason for allowing them to
suffer doubts and trust, too, that he will keep his promise to one
day bring both the doubt and the suffering to a decisive end.
There is, however, more to having a relationship with God
than our belief, prayer and religious experiences. If you accept
that God exists it follows that you have certain obligations to him.
For example: Because God is the holy source of your existence
who sustains you from moment to moment you should show
gratitude and obedience to him and this entails serving him by
helping to further his divine purposes. God's divine purposes
include willing the good of others and so serving him means giving
to the poor, befriending the lonely, visiting the sick and so on. The
burden is one that God does not force upon us. We can choose to
take it up or choose not to bother. And even if we do take it up it
there are obvious obstacles in our way; obstacles that are
necessary, as Swinburne notes, to ensure that our commitment is
genuine. But Swinburne adds that, God has every reason in due
course to remove those obstaclesto allow us to become the good
people we seek to be, to give us the vision of himselfforever.
Thus Paul writes in I Corinthians: For now we see through a
glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then
shall I know even as also I am known.

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