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16 - The Argument from Laws of Nature Reassessed

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Richard Swinburne
Affiliation:
Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion, University of Oxford
William A. Dembski
Affiliation:
Baylor University, Texas
Michael Ruse
Affiliation:
Florida State University
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Summary

I have campaigned for many years for the view that most of the traditional arguments for the existence of God can be construed as inductive arguments from phenomena to the hypothesis of theism (that there is a God), which best explains them. Each of these phenomena gives some probability to the hypothesis, and together they make it more probable than not. The phenomena can be arranged in decreasing order of generality. The cosmological argument argues from the existence of the universe; the argument from temporal order argues from its being governed by simple laws of nature; the argument from fine-tuning argues from the initial conditions and form and constants of the laws of nature being such as to lead (somewhere in the universe) to the evolution of animal and human bodies. Then we have arguments from those humans' being conscious, from various particular characteristics of humans and their enivronment (their free will, their capacity for causing limited good and harm to each other and especially for moulding their own characters for good or ill), from various historical events (including violations of natural laws), and finally from the religious experiences of so many millions of humans.

I assess these arguments as arguments to the existence of “God” in the traditional sense of a being essentially eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly free, and perfectly good; and I have argued that His perfect goodness follows from the other three properties. God's omnipotence is His ability to do anything logically possible.

Type
Chapter
Information
Debating Design
From Darwin to DNA
, pp. 294 - 308
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2004

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