Prospect magazine has published an exchange between Daniel Dennett and Richard Swinburne on how we should study religion. One nitpicky point about the opening. While it is true that Swinburne read for a diploma in theology in 1960, it seems a rather egregious mistake to label Swinburne a theologian. Given his faculty title, Emeritus Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion, and the bulk of his publications, it should appear rather obvious that he is a philosopher and not a theologian. It is the kind of thing you'd expect a fact-checker to catch. I find Dennett's claim that we must "set aside the traditional exemption from scrutiny that religions have enjoyed" rather curious in that I have no idea what he is talking about. I don't know how science is demarcated, but religion has been a subject of study within psychology for at least a hundred years. More recently there have been approaches to the subject in evolutionary psychology, and neuroscientists have looked for areas of the brain sensitive to religion. Let me highlight a curious remark by Swinburne too.
The supposition that there is such a God is a very simple one. For it is the supposition that there exists one "person" (not many persons), who is the simplest kind of person there could be.Well now I'm confused because first I thought it was supposed to be three persons and one substance, but then it was three Gods, but now it's just one person and one God.
If Christian theism is such a simple concept, why do people have to spend years at university before getting degrees in theology?
I don't think Swinburne claimed that Christian theism is a simple concept, but that God of the traditional kind associated with western theism is a simple concept.
Matthew,
I'll have to go back and look at Swinburne's additional note 1 on the Trinity in the 2nd edition to _The Existence of God_, but I think what he is saying is that there's one exemplification of two or three properties held in the simplest way, i.e., with no finite measure. The properties are omniscience, omnipotence, and moral perfection if the latter cannot be derived from the first two.
Ted,
If what you say is correct, then that is an expansion of the footnote in the revised edition of EG. There he simply says that loosely speaking God is a person, and in a special sense three persons. I was drawing on the traditional understanding in the first instance, and Swinburne's account in "Could there be more than one God?" and the CG in the second. Both would seem to be in tension with his claim that God exists in one person.
Three things:
1. Swinburne is pretty clear that in his natural theology the hypothesis he's defending is not Christian theism. He's defending the "God of the Philosophers" so to speak. He thinks this is a substratum which can be overlaid and enriched through reflection on history and revelation. The substratum, he thinks, is consistent with all orthodox Christian enrichment.
2. The theological use of "person" as the translation of "prosopon" in Chalcedonian Trinitarianism is not used univocally with "person" in the loose and popular sense. Plantinga is an orthodox Trinitarian and always defines Naturalism as the view that "there's no such person as God".
3. Swinburne is quite careful in the revisions of _The Coherence of Theism_ and _The Existence of God_ to be sensitive to Trinitarian development. I think the key text now that the opus is complete is his discussion of "divine individual" in _The Christian God_.
Here's a relevant quote: "The claim that 'there is only one God' is to be read as the claim that the source of being of all other things has to it this kind of individible unity [the unity of the three divine prosopa in the one divine hypostasis]" (Christian God, 181).
I think he would say essentially the same for the loose and popular sense of the word "person". For though here are three prosopa their wills are necessarily co-willing which he discusses on p. 171ff. This is an important thesis in his defense of Trinitarianism.
One last thing. Aquinas has a good discussion here.
Summa, Part I
Question 29: The divine persons
1. The definition of "person"
2. The comparison of person to essence, subsistence, and hypostasis
3. Is the name of person becoming to God?
4. What does it signify in Him?
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/102900.htm
OK, really last thing: I forgot to mention that the word "person" is, after all, put in quotes in the passage.
Trent,
OK, OK, I get it. I'll now have to go out and get all the revised--revised editions! I'll stand by my remark that the statement is curious. Given his three gods argument I have a hard time seeing three divine beings as the "simplest kind of person there could be". If Swinburne is using "person" in a qualified sense he should alert the reader to that because it’s not obvious. As I’ve been given to understand, one of the perennial challenges for traditional Christians has been arguing from the God of the philosophers to the Trinitarian notion of God. I’ve sometimes heard this called the explanatory gap. Most arguments for the existence of God that I’m aware of begin by trying to establish the existence of the former first, and it would be natural to read Swinburne in this light.
Matthew,
Just a quick follow-up: in the additional note 1 Swinburne claims the arguments he presents are for a necessarily eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly free being. He says "I call such a being a divine being or person" (p. 343). Later he notes that his arguments here do not establish Trinitarianism but are compatible with it.
Just a quick follow-up that essentially confirms Ted Poston's quick follow-up!
The final page of ch. 8 of _The Christian God_ (p. 191) is directly relevant to Matthew Mullins original post here. Swinburne says that "arguments for there being a God and God being 'three persons in one substance' will be of the same kind. My claim is that the data which suggest that there is a God sugest that the most probable kind of God is such that inevitably he becomes tripersonal. It is for this reason that the doctrine of the Trinity is not a more complicated hypothesis than the hypothesis of a sole divine individual; the simplest sort of God to whom arguments lead inevitably tripersonalizes, to coin a word. If some simple hypothesis put forward by a scientist to explain complex data entails some further complex consequences, that makes it no less simple -- especially if there can be other evidence for those consequences."
Back then to the Swinburne remark to which Matthew Mullins drew attention above:
"The supposition that there is such a God is a very simple one. For it is the supposition that there exists one "person" (not many persons), who is the simplest kind of person there could be."
This is entirely compatible with the trinitarian nature of God, on Swinburne's view, because the 'supposition' in the above remark is the supposition of one divine individual -- 'God the Father' -- as a means of explaining the relevant range of empirical data. By the arguments of TCG ch. 8, this 'supposition' itself has complex consequences, i.e. the Trinity. But that doesn't make the original supposition any less simple.
Thus, we get the following statements in Additional Note 1 of EoG (2nd ed.):
"In Christian terms my arguments are arguments to the existence of God the Father, though compatible with some of his activity being mediated through God the Son and God the Holy Spirit" (p. 344).
"God is the whole Trinity consisting of three divine persons; the arguments are arguments to the existence of one divine person, on whom the other two necessarily depend" (p. 345).
Doubtless Swinburne would want his brief remarks to Dennett glossed in this fashion.
"...there have been approaches to the subject in evolutionary psychology..."
Yes, as there were in Marxism, psychoanalysis, and General Semantics, all pseudo-sciences. When EvPsych can show it has the same scientific standing as evolutionary biology, when it e.g. offers some novel, falsifiable explanations corroborated by relevant data, let me know. Meantime I expect a good deal of grant money to be spent, well, on faith.
On reading the Swinburne quote, I though nothing at all of it. I don't see him asserting that there is exactly one person of the relevant sort, just at least one. That's how the existential quantifier works, and I got the sense that the logical form of his sentence was using the existential quantifier.