his creation, but not be too obvious about it. Like a good parent, he’ll be torn between interfering too much and interfering too little. He’ll want people to work out their own destiny, to work out what is right and wrong and so on, without his intervening all the time. So he’ll keep his distance. But on the other hand, when there has been a lot of sin around, he will want to help people deal with it, especially those who want his help. He’ll hear their prayers and sometimes he’ll answer them.”
I mentioned the argument of some philosophers that the universe was brought into existence not by a personal God, but by an abstract principle of goodness. That, after all, was what Plato believed.
“Philosophically, the idea of a Platonic principle of goodness is highly suspect,” he said. “But I have a particularly Christian problem with it. Such an abstract principle can’t deal with the problem of evil. There is, as we know, evil and suffering in the world. I have a theodicy—a view of why God should allow evil to happen. I think he allows it to happen because it’s logically necessary if certain goods are to be possible, the goods arising from our possession of free will. God is omnipotent. He can do anything that is logically possible to do. And it isn’t logically possible for him to give us free will and yet to ensure that we always use it in the right way.”
Swinburne paused to take a sip of tea. When he began talking again, his tone had grown almost homiletic. “Now, a good parent allows his children to suffer, sometimes for their own good, and sometimes for the good of other children. A parent who does that, I think, has an obligation to share the child’s suffering. Here’s an example, perhaps a superficial one. Suppose my child needs a special medicine that’s in short supply. I happen to have plenty of that medicine for my child. But suppose my neighbor’s child suffers from the same disease and also needs that medicine. If I share my supply with my neighbor, my own child will have just enough of the medicine to survive. It’s generally believed that it would be okay to make my child suffer so that the other child would survive too. But if I do this, I think I have an obligation to share my child’s suffering. And God has the same sort of obligation. If he makes us suffer for a good cause, there comes a point where he has an obligation to suffer with us. And an abstract principle of goodness can’t do that.”
Despite the gravity of his point, I detected a quaver of mirth in Swinburne’s voice, as if he was pleased by this intellectual twist.
“There’s also the Christian doctrine of the atonement,” he went on. “If my children do bad things to one another, they’re wronging me too, because I’ve lavished a lot of care in trying to prevent this from happening. So, in wronging one another, we wrong God too. What’s God going to do about that? Well, what do we do when we’ve wronged somebody? We make atonement. And there are four elements of atonement: repentance, apology, reparations, and penance. Humans have wronged God mainly by living the wrong sort of life. So how are we going to make it up? Well, we don’t have much time—or inclination—to lead perfect lives, so we can’t really make adequate reparations. On the other hand, making reparations is something that somebody else can help you with if you’re not in the position to do it. In the Christian account, Jesus lived the perfect life, the one that we should have lived. And even though we have lived bad lives, we can offer Jesus’s life in reparation for our own failings. In doing so, we show God that we take those failings seriously, so he will forgive us. That’s the Christian doctrine of the atonement—part Aquinas, part Anselm. It follows from the nature of goodness itself that God will get involved in his creation. That’s a sort of bridge between philosophy and Christianity.”
There was something numinous in his logic. The question Why is there something rather than nothing? had led this philosopher not just to God, but all the way to the historical person of Jesus Christ.
I became aware again of the crucifix hanging on the wall just behind him. Was Swinburne a Roman Catholic? Or was he a member of the