mind must contain complicated thoughts. So the divine “brain,” even if it is wholly immaterial, must still be a complex medium of representation, mustn’t it?
“It isn’t logically necessary to have a brain of any kind to have beliefs and purposes,” Swinburne replied. “God can see all of creation without a brain.”
Wouldn’t the ability to see all of creation, brainlessly or not, imply something other than simplicity? If God possessed within himself all knowledge of the world, wouldn’t his internal complexity have to be at least equal to that of the world?
“Hmmmm,” Swinburne said, stroking his chin. “I see what you’re getting at. But look, there are all sorts of things I can do—tie my shoelaces, for example—without thinking about how I do them.”
Yes, I said, but you can tie your shoelaces only because you have complicated neural circuits in your brain.
“That is, of course, true. But it’s one truth that I can tie my shoelaces without thinking. It’s another truth that there are certain things going on in my brain. These are two truths about the world, and they are not necessarily connected with one another.”
I wanted to protest this weird mind-body parallelism he seemed to be buying into, this idea that mental processes and brain processes somehow stream along independently of each other. But I was afraid I was beginning to bore him.
“Let me put the point slightly differently,” Swinburne said, “by way of an analogy. Someone like Dawkins might claim that science never posits the kind of ‘omni’ properties—omni-knowledge, omni-power—that we ascribe to God. But let’s look at Newton’s theory of gravitation. This theory postulates that every particle in the universe has one power and one liability. The power is to exert gravitational force, and the liability is to be subject to it. And the power is an infinite one: each particle influences every other particle in the universe, no matter how far away. So serious physicists have attributed an infinite power to very tiny particles. It’s considered quite proper in science to attribute omni-properties to very simple kinds of objects.”
We had apparently reached an impasse on the issue of simplicity. So I tried to find another weak point in Swinburne’s case.
“It seems to me that your God is closer to an abstract ontological principle than to the heavenly father-figure that religious believers pray to,” I said. “There may be, as you say, a supremely simple entity that explains the existence and nature of the universe. And it may even have some personal characteristics. But to equate this entity to the one that is worshipped in churches seems a bit far-fetched. It’s easy to see how today’s religions grew out of animistic cults and then got more sophisticated, as magical notions of the world gave way to scientific understanding. But those primitive cults weren’t hooking on to anything transcendental.”
“I think that’s wrong,” Swinburne said, quite abruptly and with some severity. “I think it’s always been a matter of the transcendental. The God written about in the New Testament and some of the Old Testament is an omnipotent, omniscient, and all-good creator. And going right back to Jeremiah, you have the idea that the visible world holds evidence of the transcendental. Jeremiah talked of the ‘covenant of night and day’ that God has made. What this means is that the regular alternation of night and day shows the reliability of the creator. And this is, in essence, what philosophers call the argument from design—one of the central arguments for the existence of God. The early Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions all have this kind of transcendental thinking in their background. They just don’t talk about it a lot, because the issue back then was not whether there is a God, but what he was like and what he had done.”
Why, though, should someone who did not grow up in one of these traditions believe in such a God, one who cares about our actions and fates? Why not the abstract and aloof God of the eighteenth-century deists, or the impersonal God of Spinoza?
“Well,” Swinburne said, “those conceptions fail to take seriously the infinite goodness of the creator. Now, what would a good God do? It’s unlikely he’d create a universe and then not take an interest in it. Parents who leave their children to fend for themselves aren’t very good parents. You’d expect God to keep a connection with his creation, and if things go wrong, to help people to straighten them out. He will want to interact with