Book Review

The case for God made man

Was Jesus God?

Some stories are so improbable that it is reasonable to believe them, according to Aristotle in the Rhetoric. "Credo quia absurdum", many Christians might agree, misquoting Tertullian, the first of the Latin Church fathers. He did not mean that we should believe because the whole thing is so absurd. On the contrary, like most theologians ever since, Tertullian wanted to balance reason and faith properly. For many people, however, including believers, Christian beliefs seem to defy all reason. Some Christians like it that way.

According to St Thomas Aquinas we can prove that there is a God, relying on purely philosophical arguments (which he thought most people could not understand). There is nothing probable about this, he thought: it is absolutely certain. On the other hand, for St Thomas, there were no other Christian beliefs that could be demonstrated by reason. Richard of St Victor, the twelfth-century Scots-born monk, heads the list of distinguished Paris theologians whom he attacks for thinking we could prove the doctrine of the Trinity. While we can look for arguments to confirm the fittingness of God's triune nature, and should do so, at least if we are intelligent enough and have the leisure, it is a mistake (St Thomas argues) to expect divinely revealed truths to be accessible by reason.

No one will be surprised to find Richard Swinburne arguing that the general character of the world makes it probable that there is a God. Emeritus Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford, he has built up over many years an impressive and much discussed case for Christian theism in terms of mainstream analytic philosophy. Significantly, his earliest work as a philosopher dealt with probability theory. Not something of much interest to most theologians, probability theory nevertheless engages with many of the most vital activities in the modern world, from statistics to quantum mechanics. In a culture where the metaphysical certainties that once underwrote faith have come to seem implausible to many people, it is certainly not out of order to offer an assessment from a probabilistic perspective of the case for Christianity.

The hypothesis that there is a God explains why there is a world at all, why there are the scientific laws that there are, and why animals and then human beings have evolved as we have. It explains why we are moral agents. It makes sense of our experience, doing so better than any other explanation - which constitutes good grounds for believing it to be true. Professor Swinburne has argued all this in earlier books.

Now, however, he takes the argument much further. If there is a God, this God probably is as the Christian Church teaches. For a start, if the existence of persons like us makes it probable that there is a God, then this God must also be a person, in however modified a sense. But a person, on any definition, needs someone to love. Quoting Richard of St Victor, as it happens, Swinburne argues that "anyone who really loves someone will seek the good of that person by finding some third person for him to love and be loved by". Thus, if there is a God who is a person, the doctrine of the Trinity is what we should expect.

The creatures that we are suffer and do much wrong. That is a fact about the world. How would God, who probably is a Trinity of persons, respond to all this suffering and wrongdoing? God would have to live a human life in order to share our suffering. God would use that human life in order to atone for our wrongdoing and, at the same time, teach us how to live good and holy lives. If we think about it, that is to say, the doctrines of the Incarnation and the atonement are just as we should expect. Moreover, there would be no point in having Jesus atone for our sins and show us how to live good lives unless there was some arrangement to make this visibly and tangibly available for all time to come.

It follows, then, that the Church is what Jesus would probably found. It is probable that the work of atonement would require something like the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist. To continue the Incarnate One's teaching something like Scripture and the apostolic tradition is logical. Finally, in order to make it probable that Jesus rose from the dead we need historical evidence, in the form of the testimony of witnesses, that is substantially trustworthy, as Swinburne argues at some length. There is nevertheless a prior probability, before it occurred, that God "would put his signature on the work of Jesus", and "an event like the Resurrection" is what might be expected to occur.

Allowing that the gospels contain "stories which we may reasonably suspect of being metaphysical fables", Swinburne insists that they are "a basically reliable source of information about the life of Jesus". Of course, Jesus did not go about saying, "I am God", yet "the historical evidence of the actions as well as the words of Jesus are such as we would expect if Jesus did teach that he was divine".

Thus, Jesus was not revealed to be divine only at the Resurrection, or in the Easter experience of the disciples, as some theologians would maintain. Without quoting any of them, Swinburne obviously aligns himself with the small, though perhaps increasing, number of New Testament scholars who would conclude from the evidence that Jesus knew all along that he was divine.

Much more adventurously, in an intellectual climate in which Christian fundamentalism and militant atheism often seem the loudest voices, Richard Swinburne argues, against both, that the key doctrines about Jesus - that he was God Incarnate, atoned for our sins, rose from the dead, and founded the Church - each is at least "moderately probable", in terms of sheer logic. It is an exercise in what Catholics used to call natural theology that would have taken St Thomas' breath away.

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