Swinburne

Religious Experience and the Existence of God by Richard Swinburne

Swinburne, Richard. The Existence of God. Clarendon Press, 1987.

Why believe that there is a God at all? My answer is that to suppose that there is a God explains why there is a physical universe at all; why there are the scientific laws there are; why animals and then human beings have evolved; why humans have the opportunity to mold their characters and those of their fellow humans for good or ill and to change the environment in which we live; why we have the well-authenticated account of Christ's life, death and resurrection; why throughout the centuries millions of people (other than ourselves) have had the apparent experience of being in touch with an guided by God, and so much else. In fact, the hypothesis of the existence of God makes sense of the whole of our experience, and it does so better than any other explanation that can be put forward, and that is the grounds for believing it to be true. In this lecture I shall try to show you how it makes sense of the first three of these phenomena. That phenomena evident to all, and in particular the universe and its order, provide good grounds for believing that God exists has been a general Christian, Jewish, and Islamic conviction.

For the practices of the Christian religion (and of any other theistic religion) only have a point if there is a God – there is no point in worshipping a non-existent creator or asking him to do something on Earth or take us to Heaven if he does not exist; or trying to live our lives in accord with his will, if he has no will. If someone is trying to be rational in practicing the Christian (Islamic or Jewish) religion, he needs to believe (to some degree) the creedal claims that underlie the practice.

These claims include as their central claim, one presupposed by all the other claims, the claim that there is a God. None of those thinkers of the first 1850 years of Christianity who thought that there were good arguments for the existence of God thought that all, or even most, believers ought to believe on the basis of those arguments, or that conversion always required accepting those arguments as cogent. Most Christians may well have taken God's existence for granted. Most converts may have believed beforehand that there was a God; their conversion involved accepting more detailed claims about him. And if they did not initially believe that there is a God, they may have come to believe on the basis of religious experience in some sense rather than on the basis of natural theology. But nevertheless, most Christian thinkers before 1850 held that these strong arguments are available, and that those who did not initially believe that there is a God and were rational could be brought to see that there is a God by means of them.

Many post-Kantian religious thinkers have drawn our attention to the roles of our personal religious experience and religious tradition in sustaining religious belief. It is indeed a basic principle of rational belief - which I call the Principle of Credulity - that what seems to you to be so on the basis of experience, probably is so - in the absence of counter-evidence. That is to say, apparent perceptions ought to be taken at their face value in the absence of positive reason for challenge. If it seems to you that you see me lean on the lectern or hear my voice, then probably you do- unless you wake up and find that it was all a dream, or someone shows you that really there is no lectern there; what seems to be a lectern is really a hologram.

And it is also a basic principle of rational belief which I call the Principle of Testimony, that what people tell you is probably true - in the absence of counter-evidence. And so if your teachers tell you that the Earth is many millions of years old, or you read in a newspaper that there has been an earthquake in Turkey, these things are probably so - unless you learn something else which casts doubt on them. When doubt is cast, we need positive arguments to show that there is a lectern there, or that the Earth is many millions of years old. There can be no justification for not extending these general principles of rationality to the case of religious belief. If you have had an experience apparently of God, you probably have; and if your teachers tell you that there is a God, it is rational to believe them - in the absence of counter-evidence. Counter-evidence may take various forms - the fact of pain and suffering may seem incompatible with the existence of God or render it improbable; and rival teachers may tell you that there is no God. Counter-evidence may be strong or weak; and even if fairly strong may (rationally) not disturb the belief of someone who has had an overwhelmingly strong religious experience or believes on the authority of innumerable teachers of diverse backgrounds. But in general the presence of counter-evidence opens up the question of the existence of God which then requires to be backed up by positive arguments (and/or to have negative arguments rebutted) if belief that there is a God is to be rational. But since there is so much more doubt about the existence of God in the skeptical West of today than in most previous cultures and centuries, the need for natural theology is far greater than ever it has been before- both to deepen the faith of the believer, and to convert the unbeliever.

The medievals, paradigmatically Aquinas, tried to cast reasoning from the world to God into the form of a deductive argument. But all that a deductive argument can do is to draw out in its conclusion what you are committed to by its premises. A valid deductive argument is one in which, if you affirm the premises but deny the conclusion, you contradict yourself. Yet it is most implausible to suppose that such a statement as “there is a physical universe but no God” (irrational though it may be to believe it) contains any internal contradiction. It's not like “there exists a round square”. “There is a God‟ goes beyond premises affirming the existence or orderliness of the Universe, to something far bigger. But an argument that purports to be a valid deductive argument and is not valid, is invalid. And in the centuries subsequent to Aquinas many have pointed out the fallacies in the details of Aquinas's arguments.

However, an argument from the existence and orderliness of the Universe to the existence of God is best represented not as a deductive, but as an inductive argument – one in which the premises make the conclusion to some extent probable, perhaps very probable, but not certain. All arguments in Science and history from evidence to theory are inductive; but Aristotle and his successors, who tried (with moderate success) to codify deductive arguments by the forms of the syllogism, had very little understanding of the distinction between deduction and induction, let alone of the criteria of a good inductive argument.

Only today are we beginning to have some understanding of induction. One feature of inductive arguments is that they are cumulative. One piece of evidence stated in one premises may give a certain amount of probability to the conclusion, and another piece of evidence may increase that probability. And if arguments from the universe and its order yield only a probable conclusion, not a certain one, there is room for religious experience and tradition.

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Each of the phenomena cited in my opening paragraph has formed the starting point of an argument for the existence of God. These arguments seem to me to have a common pattern. Some phenomenon E, which we can all observe, is considered. It is claimed that E is puzzling, strange, not to be expected in the ordinary course of things; but that E is to be expected if there is a God; for God has the power to bring about E and he might well choose to do so. Hence the occurrence of E is a reason for supposing that there is a God.

This pattern of argument is one much used in science, history, and all other fields of human inquiry. A detective, for example, finds various clues - John's fingerprints on a burgled safe, John having a lot of money hidden in his house, John being seen near the scene of the burglary at the time when it was committed. He then suggests that these various clues, although they just might have other explanations, are not in general to be expected unless John had robbed the safe. Each clue is some evidence that he did rob the safe, and „confirms‟ (that is, strengthens) the hypothesis that John robbed the safe; and the evidence is cumulative - when put together it makes the hypothesis probable.

Arguments of this kind are inductive arguments to the cause of the phenomena cited as evidence in the premises. Scientists use this pattern of argument to argue to the existence of unobservable entities as causes of the phenomena they observe. For example, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, scientists observed many varied phenomena of chemical interaction, such as that substances combine in fixed ratios by weight to form new substances (e.g. hydrogen and oxygen always form water in a ratio by weight of 1:8). They then claimed that these phenomena would be expected if there existed a hundred or so different kinds of atom, particles far too small to be seen, which combined and recombined in certain simple ways. In their turn physicists postulated electrons, protons, neutrons and other particles in order to account for the behavior of the atoms, as well as for larger-scale observable phenomena; and now they postulate quarks in order to explain the behavior of protons, neutrons and other particles.

To be good arguments (that is, to provide evidence for their hypothesis), arguments of this kind must satisfy four criteria. First, the phenomena they cite as evidence must be the sort of phenomena you would expect to occur if the hypothesis is true. If John did rob the safe it is quite likely that his fingerprints would be found on it. Secondly the phenomena must be much less likely to occur in the normal course of things, that is if the hypothesis is false. We saw in the burglary example how the various clues, such as John's fingerprints on the safe, were not much to be expected in the normal course of things. Thirdly, the hypothesis must be simple. That is, it must postulate the existence and operation of few entities, few kinds of entities, with few easily describable properties behaving in mathematically simple kinds of way. We could always postulate many new entities with complicated properties to explain anything which we find. But our hypothesis will only be supported by the evidence if it postulates few entities that lead us to expect the diverse phenomena that form the evidence.

Thus in the detective story example we could suggest that Brown planted John's fingerprints on the safe, Smith dressed up to look like John at the scene of the crime, and without any collusion with the others Robinson hid the money in John's flat. This new hypothesis would lead us to expect the phenomena we find just as well as does the hypothesis that John robbed the safe. But the latter hypothesis is confirmed by the evidence whereas the former is not. And this is because the hypothesis that John robbed the safe postulates one object - John - doing one deed - robbing the safe - which leads us to expect the several phenomena we find. Scientists always postulate the fewest new entities (e.g., subatomic particles) that are needed to lead us to expect to find the phenomena we observe; and they postulate that those entities do not behave erratically (behave in one way one day, and a different way the next day), but that they behave in accordance with as simple and smooth a mathematical law as is compatible with what is observed. And fourth, the hypothesis must fit in with our knowledge of how the world works in wider fields - what I shall call our background knowledge. The hypothesis that John robbed the safe must fit with what we know from other occasions.

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There are no wider scientific fields relevant to assessing a very general theory of physics, such as Einstein's General Theory of Relativity purporting to explain all physical phenomena. And this criterion will not be relevant in assessing the hypothesis of theism - that there is a God - which is put forward as a hypothesis to explain everything we know (a hypothesis more general than the widest ranging hypothesis of physics). An inductive argument from phenomena to a cause will be stronger the better the four criteria are satisfied i.e. the more probable it is that the phenomena will occur if the postulated cause occurred, the less probable it is that the phenomena will occur if the postulated cause did not occur, the simpler is the postulated cause, and the better the explanation fits with background knowledge. The better the criteria are satisfied, the more probable it is that the purported explanation is true.