Swinburne: The Intrinsic Probability of Theism

In Chapter 5, The Intrinsic Probability of Theism, Swinburne looks again at the definition of the theistic God and adds more detail to it, and then makes his assessment of its prior probability in terms of how simple he finds the conception of God to be.

Whether you agree or not with Swinburne’s idea that a simple concept has a higher prior probability than a complex one (I don’t, because the concept of prior probability is meaningless in this context), it is worth examining this concept of simplicity. All the evidence of the universe available to us is that complex things develop slowly through natural processes from simpler ones. This applies not only to life through evolution, but apparently also to the relatively complex present structure of the universe from simpler beginnings. So even though I find Swinburne’s talk of prior probability entirely misguided, there is still the point that the start of the universe apparently needs to be something simple.

Let’s take a look at what Swinburne thinks of this, starting with Swinburne’s understanding of God

There exists now, and always has existed and will exist, God, a spirit, that is, a non-embodied person who is omnipresent. … In essence, to say that God is disembodied is to deny that there is any volume of matter such that by his basic actions he can control only it and such that he knows of goings-on elsewhere only by their effects on it. By contrast, to say that God is an omnipresent spirit is to say that he knows about goings-on everywhere without being dependent for that knowledge on anything, and can control by basic actions all states of affairs everywhere (in this or any other universe) without being dependent for that power on anything. God is creator of all things in that for all logically contingent things that exist (apart from himself) he himself brings about, or makes or permits other beings to bring about, their existence. He is, that is, the source of the being and power of all other substances.

Clear enough. According to his hypothesis, God created everything, is everywhere, and can do anything not logically contradictory. He then goes on to justify this in terms of simplicity, in order to claim that the hypothesis that there is such a being has a high prior probability.

To start with, theism postulates a God who is just one person, not many. To postulate one substance is to make a very simple postulation.

Quite why one is simpler than zero is not stated. But never mind. Let us continue.

He is infinitely powerful, omnipotent. This is a simpler hypothesis than the hypothesis that there is a God who has such-and-such limited power (for example, the power to re-arrange matter but not to create it). It is simpler in just the same way that the hypothesis that some particle has zero mass, or infinite velocity is simpler than the hypothesis that it has a mass of 0.34127 of some unit, or a velocity of 301,000 km/sec. I finite limitation calls out for explanation of why there is just that particular limit, in a way that limitlessness does not.

I must say that Swinburne is being very selective here. He claims that there must be a limit to human understanding of the universe, and that the existence of this limit doesn’t need explanation, but that there is no limit to the powers of God, and this lack of a limit also requires no explanation. In fact, anything that he chooses to posit appears to require, by definition, no explanation.

As I noted in chapter 3, scientists have always preferred hypotheses of infinite velocity to hypotheses of very large finite velocity, when both were equally compatible with the data. There is a neatness about zero and infinity that particular finite numbers lack.

This is simply ignorant. Swinburne is trying to claim scientific justification for his hypotheses without having taken the trouble to find out how scientists actually think. Scientists haven’t always preferred infinities and zeros and they don’t today. Since Swinburne is keen on talking about Newton and gravity, let us note that Newton himself was extremely bothered by the fact that the action of gravity by his equations appeared to operate at infinite speed – and yet the equations didn’t work for a finite speed for gravity. Newton wrote the following to a colleague in 1692.

“That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.”

Newton was careful to say that he didn’t know why gravity works and what causes it, merely that it does work according to the equations. In the second edition of Principia he wrote.

“I have not yet been able to discover the cause of these properties of gravity from phenomena and I feign no hypotheses... It is enough that gravity does really exist and acts according to the laws I have explained, and that it abundantly serves to account for all the motions of celestial bodies.”

By the way, this also refutes the idea suggested in a previous chapter that scientists were satisfied at the time that Newton’s laws represented a terminus in scientific understanding.

Anyway, on with Swinburne’s simplicity of theism.

Yet a person with zero powers would not be a person at all. So in postulating a person with infinite power, the theist is postulating a person with the simplest kind of power possible.

By accident, Swinburne lets slip a fundamental weakness of his case, even stated in its own terms. A lack of a person, and therefore no associated powers, is simpler – it is zero in both cases, whereas a single person with infinite powers is a single person, and therefore more complex. But onward…

God’s beliefs have a similar infinite quality. Human persons have some few finite beliefs, some true, some fasle, some justified, some not. In so far as they are true and justified (or at any rate justified in a certain way), beliefs amount to knowledge. It would seem most consonant with his omnipotence that an omnipotent being have beliefs that amount to knowledge. For, without true beliefs about the consequences of your actions, you may fail to realize your intentions.

This isn’t making any kind of argument about simplicity. This is merely taking a premise (that God is omnipotent) and following a line of argument that leads to a conclusion that God is also omniscient. The value of the conclusion is only as good as its premise, and so this line of reasoning doesn’t seem to add anything to his claims of prior probability at all.

For a person to act, he has to have intentions. A person could be omnipotent in the sense that whatever (logically possible) action he formed the intention to do, he would succeed in doing, and also omniscient so that he knew what were all the (logically possible) actions available to an omnipotent being in his situation, and yet be predetermined to form certain intentions. His intentions might be determined by causal factors outside his control, or at any rate, as are those of humans, greatly influenced by them. But, if a person is predetermined (or has an inbuilt probabilistic tendency) to act in certain specific ways, this means that a tendency to act in certain ways is built into him. But a person with an inbuilt detailed specification of how to act is a much more complex person than one whose actions are determined only by his uncaused choice at the moment of choice. Such a being I call a perfectly free being. Theism in postulating that God is perfectly free makes the simplest supposition about his choice of intentions.

This tells us nothing about whether such a being is possible. It seems to me that the greater the capabilities, the greater the complexity needed in order to achieve them, and if there is perfect freedom in terms of intentions, then I suggest that involves quite a lot of capability.

A substance who is essentially omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly free is necessarily a terminus of complete explanation. For if some state of affairs E is explained as brought about by God in virtue of his powers and beliefs and intentions, to bring about E, how can the action be further explained?

Well, it would help if there were an explanation of how God came to be in the first place. Swinburne argues as follows

God’s being omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly free is involved in his existing, given that, as we have supposed, these qualities belong to the divine essence. But his existing cannot be due to any contemporaneous factor that makes him exist or allows him to exist. For, if his existence depended on some factor apart from himself, that factor could not depend for its existence on himself (for one cannot have causation in a circle). But if this factor did not depend on God, then God would not have been able to make it exist or not exist, and so would not be omnipotent.

It seems to me that Swinburne has rather painted himself into a corner here. There is no means of explaining the existence of an omnipotent God, since any factor causing God to come into being is by definition not under God’s control, and this would render God not omnipotent. But if he isn’t omnipotent but has circumscribed powers, then the limit of those powers is something which in turn needs to be explained.

Therefore, we simply have to accept the prior probability of a God whose existence (in the form defined by Swinburne) is fundamentally inexplicable without engaging in logical contradictions.

But despite all this, Swinburne grandly concludes.

The intrinsic probability of theism is, relative to other hypotheses about what there is, very high, because of the great simplicity of the hypothesis of theism.

I notice he manages to reach the end of the chapter and conclude that theism is intrinsically more probable than any other hypothesis without considering in detail or even naming any other hypotheses. Moreover he has incorrectly stated the necessary comparison. The correct comparison is the hypothesis of theism against the sum of all hypotheses which do not posit the existence of the theistic God.

Spong: Theism capturing the Jesus story

In the next two chapters, which I will take together, Spong looks at how the theistic story of Christ grew over the years, and he makes an attempt to work out as far as possible what was the original story of Jesus before all the theistic overtones got added.

Spong regards all the theistic additions as unnecessary. He argues of the theistic interpretation of Jesus as the Incarnate Son of God:

It is not original; it was added to an earlier portrait of Jesus. Because it was added to Jesus, it can also be taken off: the theistic interpretation of Jesus does not have to be eternal; theism can die.

In order to demonstrate this, he engages in a bit of commentary on Biblical scholarship and criticism, describing the probable order of writing of the various books of the New Testament.

He mentions that Paul

was converted and baptized, became a missionary, engaged in the controversial task of defining the Christian faith against powerful opponents such as Peter and James whom he called ‘the Lord’s Brother’, completed all of his journeys, wrote all his epistles, and was imprisoned and executed in Rome before any of the canonical gospels was written. There is no evidence that Paul ever had access to a Gospel, if any had in fact been written.

And Paul’s understanding of Jesus is very different from that of the Gospel-writers.

Spong also looks at the Gospel of Thomas and “source Q” whose existence can be inferred from the fact that when you remove those bits of Luke and Matthew which have been taken from Mark, there is a significant body of material still in common between the two Gospels, which points to the possibility that both had access to another document which is now lost. Spong points out that according to these early sources Jesus was not a worker of miracles – there are no miracle stories in either Q or Thomas.

According to Spong, the Gospels themselves were not intended to be historical documents, but rather had a liturgical purpose. Mark’s gospel (the first of the four to be written) fits extremely neatly as a set of readings to be used in synagogue worship through part of the Jewish liturgical year. The start of the Gospel fits the theme of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. The Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) has Jesus healing the sick, the Feast of Tabernacles coincides with Jesus telling harvest parables, and the transfiguration story fits the Festival of Dedication, in which Jews celebrated the time when the light of God was restored to the Temple. Mark (writing after the temple was destroyed in AD 70) offers Jesus as the new temple, the new meeting place between God and human life. The crucifixion and resurrection fits with Passover.

Matthew expanded this theme so that the entire liturgical year could be covered with Christian readings. He provided additional readings (either by expanding Mark’s stories or providing entirely new material) to cover the period from mid April to early September omitted by Mark.

The one major Jewish festival not covered by Mark’s Gospel was Pentecost/Shavuot, which falls within this period. Matthew has Jesus go (like Moses) up a high mountain. Moses returned with the Ten Commandments and the Law. Jesus made the Sermon on the Mount, which is an eight-part commentary on the Beatitudes, found in Psalm 119. For the Jews, Pentecost was a 24-hour liturgical celebration, and Psalm 119 was written in eight parts, each part to be read as part of each three-hour section of the celebration. Each of the sections of the Sermon on the Mount was designed to accompany it.

Matthew fills out the period without major festivals by adding a genealogy, a birth narrative, an expanded baptism story, an expanded temptation story, and a more dramatic resurrection story, complete with earthquakes and the dead rising from their tombs.

Luke and John make further dramatic developments, and in the process, Jesus becomes less and less human and more and more miraculous and godlike.

Spong’s main point in describing all this is to show how the story of Jesus grew in the telling. His argument is that this is evidence of a progressively increased theistic understanding taking over the Jesus story, and that if we strip away these later accretions we can come back to an original nontheistic understanding of Jesus.

The problem with this interpretation is that it seems to me to be both incomplete and founded on an inaccurate premise. Firstly, the Jews of Jesus’ day were thoroughgoing theists – Judaism as a religion hasn’t become theistic in the two thousand years since Jesus, it was most definitely theistic at the time. Second, if the later writings are embellishments and elaborations on an earlier and simpler tale, this fact is not of itself evidence that the earlier tale is either true or (if true) indicative that Jesus was anything more than an unusually good itinerant preacher and teacher within the context of his religion.

Spong ends the chapter asking what a nontheistic Christianity would look like, once the death of theism is accepted and the theistic understandings of the Jesus story are stripped away.

There is an all-too-human response to these sorts of issues which I have mentioned before. The response of Christians to having these awkward issues pointed out to them is either to deny the evidence and assert the primacy of scripture over evidence (which is broadly speaking the fundamentalist position) or to retreat into a set of untestable propositions (which is more or less the liberal position). It seems to me that Spong hovers uneasily between an extreme end of the liberal position and outright atheism. He denies the theistic interpretation of God, but seeks to put something which seems awfully untestable in its place.