Interview by Charles ClarkRichard Swinburne, Ph.D., is Emeritus Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion, University of Oxford. His research centers on the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of science. His major contributions to his field began in 1977 with his publication of The Coherence of Theism, the first work in a trilogy completed by The Existence of God and Faith and Reason during the following four years. These works received enthusiastic critical reviews and established Swinburne’s reputation for clear and convincing philosophical argument. His most popular book, Is There a God?, was published in 1996 and offers Swinburne’s case for the existence of God in language accessible to casual reader of philosophy. Professor Swinburne graciously granted this publication an interview. In addition to your philosophical interests, you have a background in the hard sciences and their history, which shows in your acceptance of human evolution, the Big Bang and other scientific theories based upon the evidence, despite objections from some fundamentalist Christians. How does your scientific background affect your philosophical methods and opinions, and how does it relate to your personal faith in God? I acquired my scientific background subsequently to my first degree, and I set myself to acquire that because, when I started to do graduate work in philosophy, it became clear to me that the modern world’s paradigm of knowledge was scientific knowledge. So I wanted to understand how science worked and in particular how science had worked over the centuries, the history of science, in order to understand the criteria which scientists use for judging theories to be true or false. I was enormously impressed by the great theoretical achievements of modern science and they seemed to me to reveal an orderliness in the world that needed explaining. So I suppose that science, as it were, was another push in the direction of religion. What are the differences between scientific knowledge and religious knowledge? Well, I think they are both true and justified by our general inductive standards. That is to say, we have some standards for judging claims about the world to be true or false, which are a bit wider than what we naturally call science, and we use those same criteria in history and in investigations done by detectives and so on. We do have common criteria for assessing scientific theories and for assessing theological claims. That is to say, the evidence that the claim is true is that if a claim is true you would expect to find the evidence, if it’s false you wouldn’t expect to find the evidence, and the claim is a simple one that fits in with other things you know. I think we use these criteria in all cases of inquiry. In both cases, in the case of science as in the case of theological claims, we are dependent to a considerable extent on what other people tell us. We can’t do all the experiments ourselves or anything like that, and so, if you’re in a community that tells you the earth is flat, you believe the earth is flat, and that is a very reasonable thing to do. Likewise, if you’re in a community that tells you that the Koran is true word for word, you believe the Koran is true word for word, because you have no other way of checking it out. There are the common criteria of what we can observe and what other people tell us. This forms our evidence, which is judged by the former criteria I have mentioned. There is, however, in the case of religious knowledge, one further source of knowledge, which doesn’t really apply so much in the scientific case. Many people have significant religious experiences, in the sense of experiences that seem to them to be of God, and it is reasonable to believe such experiences to be of God unless you have counterevidence. It is reasonable in virtue of a very general epistemological principle, which I call the principle of credulity: you should believe that things are as they seem to be in the absence of counterevidence. It is on the basis of this principle that we believe that when we are seeing something, it is probably there, and when we remember something, it probably happened and so on, unless we have counterevidence. So, in summary, I think there are the certain same general criteria for forming both scientific and religious beliefs, criteria for assembling evidence (what we observe, what other people tell us), criteria for moving beyond the evidence to theory, but also, in the religious case, our own personal experiences, internal experiences, must form part of the evidence, and that, I think, is a significant difference for many people. For many other people, religious experience doesn’t play very much a part in their religious beliefs. People come to them on the basis of testimony by apparent experts, which, as I say, is a reasonable thing to do, if you’ve got no counterevidence, or on the basis of seeing it’s the best theory of the world. It is often said that religious faith requires a “leap.” Put another way, many believe that faith and reason are compatible only so far, and ultimately one must choose to follow one and not the other. What do you say about that idea? In your personal view, what is the relationship between faith and reason? Well to begin, you must be very careful what you mean by faith, and I think what the Christian tradition at any rate has meant by faith for much of its two thousand year history is trust. The person of faith is the person who trusts God and acts on the assumption that there is a God. He lives his life on that assumption. Just leaving the religious issue aside for moment, it is a reasonable thing to act on certain assumptions that you don’t believe are true in certain cases. Suppose that I want a million pounds, and there’s something marvelous I can do with a million pounds that I couldn’t otherwise do. It might be sensible to buy a lot of tickets to the lottery and hope that I get a million pounds. No, I don’t think that I will get a million pounds, but that would be a rational thing to do, because the great good that can be achieved by relying on the assumption in question cannot be achieved in any other way. Bearing that in mind, it would be very silly to trust God if you were pretty convinced there is no God, but if you are a bit uncertain, it would be a very sensible thing to trust God if you want a great good that can only be obtained by trusting, that is to say, by living the religious life, and Christianity has taught that the life of heaven is available to people who try to live that life on earth. So, for your own sake and because it seems a life more worth living on earth than other lives, it might be sensible to live the Christian life even if you’re a bit doubtful that there’s a God, simply because any other kind of life, firstly, won’t get you heaven, and secondly, it would be less worth living on earth. That is to say, living the Christian life on the assumption that there is a God would be the most worthwhile thing to do, and, therefore, it’s worth doing even if there’s some doubt about whether it’s true. So, there is a slightly complicated relationship between theoretical belief and faith, but, in general, within the qualifications I have mentioned, it would be only sensible to live the life of faith if at any rate you have some reason to believe that there is a God and that he is trustworthy. You have said that your arguments for the existence of God are probabilistic. What do you mean by that? How does one evaluate the probability that something invisible like God exists? They’re probabilistic in the sense that their conclusions are not certain given the evidence, but the evidence makes the conclusions probable. Of course that’s normally the case in ordinary life with more or less any conclusion. Certainly it’s true of scientific theories, historical theories, detectives’ theories about who did the crime and so on. In almost any case, you could be mistaken, but, in many cases, the evidence suggests you’re very probably right. In other cases, it suggests you’re not. So, it’s not in any way to the demerit of religion that its theories are only probable. How can you assess the probability? Well, you can’t give an exact number. But then again, you can’t give an exact number to the probability that quantum theory is true or relativity theory is true or grand unified theory is true. You can only say it’s high or not so high, or more probable than this, and that’s all you can do in the case of the claim: There is a God. But, if my arguments are correct, then the evidence makes that claim quite probably true, not overwhelmingly probable, but fairly probable, significantly more probable than not. In your book, Is There a God?, you discuss reasons why theism explains the world and its order better than either materialism or humanism. Considering the depth of understanding that science offers us of the material causes of physical phenomena and the psychological causes of human behavior, do we still need God to make sense of the universe? I see as substantial evidence for theism the fact that the universe is a regularly ordered place. When you drop things they always fall to ground, the same law of gravity that holds on earth holds as far as we can tell in the most distant galaxies, and it’s a very remarkable fact that that is the case. Laws of nature are full of entities, what this means is that every particle of the universe behaves in the very same way, codified by the law of gravity, and that certainly does need explaining. It’s really too big an item for science to explain. That is, it is the top level of scientific explanation, this uniformity, but this top level itself needs to be explained, because so many particles behave in exactly the same way. And I’m certainly not invoking a “God of the Gaps” to explain things. My argument arises from the very fact that science has been immensely successful in explaining physical phenomena and even psychological phenomena to a limited extent. Well, what does, as it were, materialist theory tell us about the universe? Well, it tells us that the scientific level is the top level of explanation. That’s to say it’s just a brute fact that every bit of the universe behaves in the same way as every other bit of the universe, in conforming to the law of gravity and the other scientific laws. And this is to postulate an enormous coincidence in the behavior of things. Now normally when we see enormous coincidences and no other possible explanation occurs to us in the terms of the agency of some personal being, we adopt such an explanation. If somebody is dealing cards, and however well they’re shuffled, they always come out in the order such that that person wins the card game, perhaps that’s just a coincidence, but since this is just the sort of thing that a card player might have in mind to bring about, it would be a very natural explanation to suppose that he did bring it about and it was not simply a chance coincidence. That is to say, if you get enormous coincidences, which are such that a possible personal agent would have a reason for bringing them about, then that is quite a probable explanation of that occurrence, which is the one that theism offers but materialism or humanism doesn’t. One subject that you have dealt with extensively in your writing is the Problem of Evil, which is an objection to theism on the grounds that the existence of evil is inconsistent with the existence of an all-powerful, all-good God. How do you reconcile that inconsistency? Why would God permit evil to occur? Taking any person with moral sensitivity, it must occur to them that perhaps a perfectly good God would not allow people to suffer. But then, when you reflect on the matter a bit, you can see that suffering does serve a significant purpose. If God is really to give us freedom to make our own decisions and to have decisions that make a real difference to the world for good or evil, then he must let us have a free choice between good and evil. And if he wants us to be able to not merely make a difference in things, but to form our own characters so that some good actions come naturally to us, then he’s got to put us into a position where we have to make important choices for the kind of person we are to be. And so, for these reasons, he’s got to allow us to learn about evil, and he’s got to allow us to suffer in order that we may choose to cope with that suffering and by so doing form our character. You can’t form a character unless you find yourself in difficult or awkward and painful situations, because it’s in those that people show themselves at their best and develop such a character. So to give us real choices and to allow us to develop our character, there is a point in God allowing us to suffer in various ways, and although of course he might have chosen, and perhaps in other worlds has chosen, to make actually good people who don’t suffer, they don’t have the same choice of their own destiny that we do. And therefore I think that, given the limited period of earthly life, God is justified in allowing evil to occur, and we can be grateful for the opportunities that He gives us through suffering.