The New York Times
11 May 2002
So God’s Really In the Details?
by Emily Eakin
Economists use probability theory to make
forecasts about consumer spending. Actuaries use
it to calculate insurance premiums. Last month,
Richard Swinburne, a professor of philosophy at
Oxford University, put it to work toward less
mundane ends: he invoked it to defend the belief
that Jesus was resurrected from the dead.
“For someone dead for 36 hours to come to life
again is, according to the laws of nature, extremely
improbable,” Mr. Swinburne told an audience of
more than 100 philosophers who had convened at
Yale University in April for a conference on ethics
and belief. “But if there is a God of the traditional
kind, natural laws only operate because he makes
them operate.”
Mr. Swinburne, a commanding figure with
snow-white hair and piercing blue eyes, proceeded
to weigh evidence for and against the
Resurrection, assigning values to factors like the
probability that there is a God, the nature of Jesus’
behavior during his lifetime and the quality of
witness testimony after his death. Then, while his
audience followed along on printed lecture notes,
he plugged his numbers into a dense thicket of
letters and symbols — using a probability formula
known as Bayes’s theorem — and did the math.
“Given e and k, h is true if and only if c is true,”
he said. “The probability of h given e and k is .97”
In plain English, this means that, by Mr.
Swinburne’s calculations, the probability of the
Resurrection comes out to be a whopping 97
percent.
While his highly technical lectures may not net
Christianity many fresh converts, Mr. Swinburne’s
efforts to bring inductive logic to bear on
questions of faith have earned him a considerable
reputation in the small but vibrant world of
Christian academic philosophy. Thanks to the
efforts of Mr. Swinburne and a handful of other
nimble scholarly minds — including Alvin
Plantinga at the University of Notre Dame and
Nicholas Wolterstorff at Yale — religious belief
no longer languishes in a state of philosophical
disrepute. Deploying a range of sophisticated
logical arguments developed over the last 25
years, Christian philosophers have revived faith as
a subject of rigorous academic debate, steadily
chipping away at the assumption — all but
axiomatic in philosophy since the Enlightenment
— that belief in God is logically indefensible.
“They are the first group within 20th-century
Anglo-American philosophy to tackle questions of
religious faith using the tools of philosophy,” said
Brian Leiter, a professor of law and philosophy at
the University of Texas at Austin and editor of the
Philosophical Gourmet Report, which ranks
academic philosophy departments. “It would be
accurate to say that it’s a growth movement.”
Mr. Wolterstorff, who retired from Yale in
December and in whose honor the conference was
organized, agreed. “And it’s not just graybeards,”
he added, referring to the dozens of younger
scholars and graduate students in attendance.
“Within the general discipline, this development
of the philosophy of religion has been
extraordinary.”
To be sure, not all of the movement’s
philosophers agree with one another, use the same
tactics or even hold the same religious beliefs.
Some, including Mr. Swinburne, for example, are
what’s known as evidentialists: they accept the
Enlightenment doctrine that a belief is justified
only when evidence can be found for it outside the
believer’s own mind. According to the classic
evidentialist argument, for faith to be considered
rational it has to be supported by independent
proof, and there simply isn’t any. (Asked what he
would say if God appeared to him after his death
and demanded to know why he had failed to
believe, the British philosopher and staunch
evidentialist Bertrand Russell replied that he
would say, “Not enough evidence, God! Not
enough evidence.”)
In “The Existence of God” (Oxford University
Press, 1979), Mr. Swinburne, a Greek Orthodox
Christian, tried to meet the evidentialist challenge
using Bayes’s theorem. Supplying pages of
intricate, technical argumentation to back up his
claims, he wrote that many natural phenomena —
including the universe itself — are, well, if not
incontrovertible proof of God’s handiwork, at
least “more probable if there is a God than if there
is not.” (Mr. Swinburne, it turns out, is not the first
to enlist Bayes’s theorem in defense of religion. In
a 1763 paper presented to the British Royal
Society, the minister Richard Price used it to show
there was good evidence in favor of the miracles
described in the New Testament.)
More influential at the moment, however, are
the “reformed epistemologists” led by Mr.
Plantinga and Mr. Wolterstorff, who are
Calvinists. These scholars reject the evidentialist
insistence on independent proofs. After all, they
point out, the ability to distinguish good evidence
from bad requires reason, but why trust our ability
to reason? Where’s the proof that our reason is any
good? For the evidentialists, reason is considered a
“basic belief,” one that doesn’t require additional
evidence to be true. But if reason can be
considered a basic belief, then so, too, say the
reformed epistemologists, can faith in God.
Accepting faith as a basic belief, they say, does
not make faith irrational. On the contrary, they
insist, a belief can lack independent evidence and
still be rational. Some beliefs are simply selfevident. Most people know that 1 + 1 = 2, Mr.
Wolterstorff points out, just as they accept beliefs
about their bodily state — like “I feel dizzy” —
without having to consult other sources. “We
believe lots of things that don’t have publicly
formulated arguments,” Mr. Wolterstorff said.
“Reformed epistemology challenges the need for
arguments.”
To buttress their case, the reformed
epistemologists lean on Thomas Reid, an 18thcentury Scottish “common sense” philosopher,
who, arguing that many legitimate beliefs are
simply instinctual, complained: “Are we to admit
nothing but can be proved by reason?”
But despite their intricate arguments, some
critics — including Christians — worry that
reformed epistemologists make it far too easy to
justify any belief, no matter how absurd. Mr.
Plantinga calls this the Great Pumpkin Objection.
As he stated the problem in a seminal 1983 essay,
“Reason and Belief in God”: “If belief in God is
properly basic, why cannot just any belief be
properly basic? What about voodoo or astrology?
What about the belief that the Great Pumpkin
returns every Halloween? Could I properly take
that as basic?”
The answer, as you’d expect, is “certainly not.”
But explaining why turns out to be a formidable
challenge. Mr. Plantinga has devoted three thick
volumes and the last 20 years to the effort,
stressing, among other things, that for a belief to
be justified, it must be held by a person whose
mental faculties are functioning properly.
More aggressively, he has suggested that our
capacity for true beliefs is proof that a divine
creator — rather than Darwinian natural selection
— is behind evolution: if human beings evolved
by random process from mentally primitive
creatures, how could we be sure that any of our
beliefs — including our belief in evolution — are
true?
At the Yale conference, however, neither
Darwin nor the Great Pumpkin Objection seemed
any more pressing than conundrums that have
dogged Christianity far longer — occasionally
giving the event the aura of a medieval synod. If
God is omnipotent and wholly good, why does he
permit evil to occur? the philosophers wondered.
And if God ultimately decides what happens in
the world, in what sense can human beings be said
to have free will?
Mr. Swinburne also came in for his share of
questions. “Bayes’s theorem provides a model of
learning from experience,” one philosopher
observed. “As time goes by, it seems you would
accumulate
more
evidence
against
the
Resurrection because the expected Second
Coming doesn’t occur.”
Mr. Swinburne acknowledged the point was
worth considering. But he wasn’t about to
concede it entirely. When Jesus spoke about the
Second Coming, “he might have said soon but he
certainly didn’t say when,” Mr. Swinburne
insisted, adding, “I don’t think you have a very
strong case there.”