Quasi-apology to Richard Swinburne

I recently got ahold of a copy of Richard Swinburne's The Resurrection of God Incarnate. It's bad, but not for the reasons suggested in some reports.

The report emphasizes his use of probability in his work, and makes it sound rather like he reasons "God would either become incarnate or not, so the probability is 50%." Instead, he offers arguments for God being incarnate, and concludes that there's a 25% chance there's a monotheistic God who would become incarnate. Then he discovers - surprise, surprise, that Jesus fits his idea of what a God incarnate should be like.

Look what he's done here, though. Christianity is the only religion with a monotheistic God becomming incarnate. When Swinburne lists God's hypothetical motives, they're all drawn from Christian doctrine. Also, it seems to strike him as obvious that a God incarnate would behave as Jesus supposedly did in the gospels. When you get to the point where he's actually talking about evidence for the resurrection, you realize he's asking you to grant a 1 in 4 chance, a priori, of Christianity being true.

This is dubious on the face of it. Why should Christianity be more likely to be true than any other religion? Some doctrines are odd to say the least. The idea that God would need to get himself killed to be able to forgive us is like saying a father should draw a knife across his arm before forgiving a child. Then there's the issue what incarnation even means (a question that immediately brings to mind Josh McDowell's brilliant bad ant argument).

If we grant that Christianity might be true a priori, but is no more likely to be true than any entry of a list of 100 other religions, the chance of the resurrection having happened (assuming Swinburne is right about everything else he says) falls to less than 1 in 2, and further decreases if we add other religions to the list. Of course, the list could easily be a thousand or more entries long if one includes every little tribal cult in the world. The argument fails badly.

However, I feel I need to apologize to Swinburne. The book is bad, but bad in a different way than it initially appeared, so I, Mark Chu-Carroll et. al. were still being unfair.