Richard Swinburne: What Kind of Necessary Being Could God Be?

Visiting Scholar Richard Swinburne gives a lecture to the student body asking the question, What Kind of Necessary Being Could God Be?

[ivjdivfjalekvvjp]

Darn it. I have so much work to do, and now I have another lecture I must watch. This awesome philosophers are taking up so much of my time.

[Mentat]

I applaud and very much support the first half of this talk. I agree entirely with his analysis of necessity. However, I find his arguments against God's necessity very weak indeed, and I don't think he's considered sufficiently such arguments as those of Pruss or Leftow with regard to unrealized possibility, which needs a grounding in the powers of a necessary being.

[Наукаирелигия-нр]

Thanks. in Russia you love and respect your work

[SeekLuminousThings]

Coppleston said that the cosmological argument that it can be reduced to the proposition: "If there exists a contingent being then, necessarily, there exists a Necessary Being." Call this proposition P. Coppleston said that P is a necessary proposition even though it is synthetic rather than analytic since "A contingent being exists" is not an a priori proposition but something that must be discovered by experience. I wonder what Swinburne would say about this. Probably he would say that the proposition, "No contingent being exists, " is metaphysically possible and so P cannot be metaphysically necessary. Still, it would have been a better question than the irrlevant, "What about the evidence for fine tuning?" that someone from Biola asked.

[Salam-]

Has anyone got a copy of the handout that they could possibly upload somewhere, please?

[cnault]

The lecture is referring to the sleeping god Azathoth, Lord of All Things ! Our universe/reality is Azathoth's dream and when he wakens our universe will cease to exist.

[michaelkeelingmodalsurrealist]

I've been pointing out for quite some time the same contradiction Swinburne points to in the QnA. If God has an unauthored particular intrinsic nature, he could not exist by metaphysical necessity, as it is perfectly conceivable that some counterpart being existed with a slightly different nature at some possible world. That God would have the preference that the world be just as it is, rather than some other way, is simply a brute fact. At some possible world his preferences could be otherwise.. He didn't create himself, he is not responsible for his nature being such that it is, and he is eternally bound by that nature. We won a 1/∞ lottery getting just the right God, just the right initial conditions for the creation of a world we could inhabit.

[TheTruthseeker]

Does anybody have anything (handouts, transcript, etc...) that will help with comprehending this?  I have read some of Swinburne's books and they are excellent, but I am not following this at all.

[chrisgale]

This was incredibly difficult to follow!

[terminat]

The Bible is the inspired Word of God. Richard is mistaken when he says that the Psalmist is wrong. The Psalmist is speaking God's Words when he writes that a fool denies God.

[pwnUgood]

God is just a personification of human desires and fears, a symbolic character in the dramas we create about ourselves and a psychological coping mechanism. It affects nothing in the universe outside the human mind.

[mansouribnalandalus]

What is the true he hides according to our pre-conceived answers? I couldn't follow this lecture with so much meta-physico thing. Right, he invented a game, its rules, and make a demonstration.
It would be so easy first to say what is behind the concept of "god".
"One" is the best representation of the concept of god. Even atheist believe in this number and concept, since 0 don't exist.

[Returnality]

It seriously baffles me how any Christian, or anybody at all could hold Swinburne's position. First of all, his answer to "aren't we just lucky that God exists" was nonsensical and seriously beat around the bush. The point wasn't just that we're lucky, it's that God needs some sort of explanation. Answering the question of why God exists at all seems impossible on his view. He just seems to be a brute fact and if he was, why not simply call the universe a brute fact and be an atheist? Second of all, there seems to be a good Leibnizian response to his critique.

First, let's grant a common Leibnizian assumption that a world of only contingent objects is impossible. If it is possible for any collection of contingent objects to be actualized then there must be a necessary object to make that possible, seeing as it must be outside of the contingent set in order to actualize it. If the Leibnizian can argue that said object must be God, then we can, from examining contingent objects and finding that they need an explanation assume the necessity of God. Perhaps the non-existence of God doesn't entail a contradiction, but this line of reasoning seems to be fairly common in modern theistic circles and Swinburne quote frankly seems to ignore it.

[jonkeuviuhc]

He's got scoliosis . You can tell by the way stands ...