Church of England?
“Neither,” he said. “I’m Eastern Orthodox.”
“Oh,” I blurted out, finding myself at a loss for anything to say.
But Swinburne turned out not to be orthodox in every sense. When I resumed the conversation, I raised the generally accepted theological axiom that God stands outside of time, apprehending the entire history of the cosmos at a glance from the unchanging perspective of eternity. Scholastic thinkers like Aquinas held that such timelessness was one of God’s perfections.
“I don’t endorse that view,” he said, “and I don’t think the Biblical writers did either. They thought of God as being within time, and I do too. The idea that there’s a before and an after for God, that there’s a sense to saying, ‘He did this first and then that,’ is coming back into fashion.”
Why, I wondered aloud, did philosophers of religion so often fail to agree on such fundamental matters? And why was there such a vast metaphysical gulf between Swinburne, who thought the God hypothesis furnished a scientifically viable explanation for the existence of the world, and philosophers like Grünbaum, for whom the very idea was absurd?
“That in itself is an interesting question,” Swinburne said. “And it’s not confined to the philosophy of religion. You find such radical disagreement in every branch of philosophy you can name. And it can have practical consequences. People change their views about the morality of war, of capital punishment, a whole range of moral issues, based on philosophical arguments. But philosophy is a terribly difficult subject, and sorting out the hardest questions in the finite time of a human life is asking a lot. And we’re not only finite, we’re imperfectly rational. Our prejudices creep into our philosophical thinking, especially when it touches on our lives. They cause us to look at certain arguments more carefully, more sensitively, and perhaps to overlook others. Many philosophers were brought up in strictly religious households. As adolescents, they found their religion in conflict with things that were obviously true, and they rebelled against it. Then later, when someone shows them a more appealing sort of religion, they’re not going to grasp it.”
For Swinburne, God was not only a supernatural being to be worshipped and obeyed, but also the terminus of an explanatory chain. One could go no further than God in the quest to resolve the mystery of existence. Swinburne was not a believer in the Principle of Sufficient Reason. He did not think there was an explanation for everything. The metaphysical task, as he saw it, was to find the right stopping point in explaining the world, the one that would minimize the part of reality that was left unexplained. And that stopping point should be the simplest hypothesis that can encompass all the evidence before us.
Still, I could not resist raising the question of why God himself exists. Swinburne had conceded that the “most natural” state of affairs was absolute nothingness: no universe, and no God either. He also thought that a reality consisting of a universe and no God—the kind of reality that atheists believe in—was at least conceivable. Here Swinburne was at odds with many of his theological allies. From Anselm to Descartes to Leibniz on down to present-day philosophical theists (like Alvin Plantinga, of Notre Dame), they have viewed God’s existence as a matter of necessity. Unlike our contingent universe, they held, God could not fail to exist; he contains within himself his own sufficient reason. Indeed, they insisted, his existence could be proved as a matter of logic. Swinburne dissented on this point. Where other philosophical theists talked of necessity, he talked of simplicity; and simplicity, as he saw it, made a hypothesis only probable, not undeniably certain. One could gainsay God’s existence, he held, without being convicted of illogic.
But would Swinburne go so far as to say that God’s existence was a “brute fact”?
“Yes, I would,” he replied. “I would say that. It’s not merely that there is no explanation for God’s existence. There couldn’t be an explanation. One of God’s properties is omnipotence. If anything happens to him, it’s because he allows it to happen. Therefore, if something else brought about God, it could only be because God allowed it to bring about God.”
Here was a line of reasoning I certainly hadn’t heard before. “So you’re not personally puzzled,” I said, “about why God exists—or, I don’t know, maybe you are puzzled.”
Swinburne chuckled—out loud, for once—and said, “I don’t think that anyone thought that God was a logically necessary