Māori (Indigenous people of New Zealand (NZ)) suffer food insecurity disproportionately in New Zealand. Some research suggests that Māori value mātauranga Māori (traditional Māori knowledge) when it comes to the collection, preparation and eating of kai (food). This study explores the connections between mātauranga Māori and kai in regional NZ schools for potential pathways to impact food security for children. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with five primary school principals in the Hawke’s Bay region. Principals were purposively selected on commitments to (...) proactively incorporating mātauranga Māori into their school environment. Reflective thematic analysis was used to analyse the data. Three main themes were identified: teaching and learning around mātauranga Māori and kai; environmental sustainability and the sustainability of kai initiatives; and school values. A strong emphasis was placed on the learning of traditional Māori values around kai and the whenua (land) and the sustainability of teaching programs. School values were invariably bound in Te Ao Māori (a Māori worldview) however, schools felt challenged in aligning their values and their mātauranga Māori-bound teaching practices with the current food provision programme in their schools (Ka Ora, Ka Ako). The programme’s strict nutritional guidelines appeared to challenge traditional Māori approaches to kai. Schools remain an ideal environment for the incorporation of mātauranga Māori to support food security and food education, and future work should explore a demonstration project that incorporates the knowledge gained in this study and ways to integrate mātauranga Māori into Ka Ora, Ka Ako. (shrink)

Richard Swinburne’s Are We Bodies or Souls? presents a sustained case for a view concerning the nature of persons that can be classified as a form of either Cartesian dualism or emergent dualism. This paper comments on two important arguments developed in the book and concludes by considering the problem of the origin of souls.

Mind, Brain, and Free Will, Richard Swinburne’s stimulating new book, covers a great deal of territory. I’ll focus on some of the positions Swinburne defends in the philosophy of mind. Many philosophers are likely to have reservations about the arguments he uses to defend them, and others will think his basic position is unmotivated. My goal in this brief discussion is to articulate some of the reasons why.

Most analytic philosophers hold that if God exists, He exists with broad logical necessity. Richard Swinburne denies the distinction between narrow and broad logical necessity, and argues that if God exists, His existence is narrow-logically contingent. A defender of divine broad logical necessity could grant the latter claim. I argue, however, that not only is God's existence broad-logically necessary, but on a certain understanding of God's relation to modality, it comes out narrow-logically necessary. This piece argues against Swinburne's (...) overall account of modality and rebuts his argument for narrow-logical contingency. (shrink)

Richard Swinburne is one of the most important figures in philosophy of religion who took special interest in the soul. Also he is one of the most prominent defenders of dualism –also known as mind-body dualism or substance dualism– that regards humans as composed of two different substances called body and the soul. He defended the dualist view against contemporary problems of dualism and contributed to it with his three books, namely The Evolution of the Soul; Mind, Brain and (...) Free Will and Are We Bodies or Souls? alongside with other publications. In this paper, I will introduce Swinburne’s version of Cartesian dualism and critically investigate whether it provides us some reasons to believe in the soul. For this reason, I will examine the two principle arguments Swinburne offers in the explanations of dualism –one of them is known as the conceivability argument and the other is based on an imaginary scenario from transplants– along with their critics. To sum up, the main point drawn in this paper will be Swinburne’s arguments for dualism along with some of their critics. (shrink)

Richard Swinburne’s argument in The Existence of God discusses many probabilities, ultimately concluding that God probably exists. Swinburne gives exact values to almost none of these probabilities. I attempted to assign values to the probabilities that met that weak condition that they could be correct. In this paper, I first present a brief outline of Swinburne’s argument in The Existence of God. I then present the problems I encountered in Swinburne’s argument, specifically problems that interfered with (...) my attempt to arrive at values for the probabilities discussed by Swinburne. Finally, I suggest that Swinburne’s argument would be more persuasive if he assigned exact values to his probabilities. (shrink)

We consider the impact of negative natural theology on the prospects of Christian ramified natural theology with reference to Richard Swinburne’s argument for the Incarnation and Resurrection. We argue that Swinburne’s pivotal claim—that God would not allow deceptive evidence to exist for the Incarnation and Resurrection—is refuted by key evidence from negative natural theology. We argue, further, that Swinburne’s argument omits dominating items of evidence of negative natural theology which seem to critically weaken the probability of the (...) Incarnation and Resurrection. Negative natural theology thus serves as a formidable obstacle to Christian ramified natural theology. (shrink)

Swinburne relies on principle P in The Existence of God to argue that God is simple and thus likely to exist. In this paper, I argue that Swinburne does not support P. In particular, his arguments from mathematical simplicity and scientists’ preferences both fail. Given the central role P plays in Swinburne’s overall argument in The Existence of God , I conclude that Swinburne should further support P if his argument that God likely exists is to (...) be persuasive. (shrink)

In tyhis book chapterI provides concise overviews of Richard Swinburne's views on topics in natural theology and also in distinctively Christian philosophical theology; changes in his views are identified. I explain Swinburne's positive, cumulative case for the existence of God, and his discussion of objections to God based on evil, and then move on to outline his views on A tonement, Revelation, the Trinity, and the Incarnation. I then sketch his case for the truth of Christianity, and and (...) his views on faith and its relationship with reason. (shrink)

Swinburne gives reasons for a religious enquirer to disregard the Islamic revelation and to accept the exclusive superiority of the Christian revelation. This essay attempts to explain Swinburne’s reasoning. An attempt is also made to explain what the Islamic revelation is. I argue that on Swinburne’s own account, the Islamic revelation should not be sidelined in favour of the Christian revelation.

This paper examines Richard Swinburne's definitions of 'mental property' and 'physical property'. After some preliminary tidying up (Section 1), the paper introduces eight putative counter-examples to Swinburne's definitions (Section 2). The paper then considers amendments to Swinburne's account of 'mental property' (Section 3) and 'physical property' (Section 4) which deal with these counter-examples. Finally, the paper closes with some brief remarks about the metaphysics of properties (Appendix). Along the way, the paper provides various reasons for thinking that (...) Swinburne's definitions are hardly likely to be acceptable to non-theists. (shrink)

In his Epistemic Justification , Swinburne offers a sophisticated and intuitively plausible causal-doxastic analysis of the basing relation that has escaped the attention of those working on this relation, where the basing relation can be understood as the relation that holds between a reason and one’s belief when the belief is held for that reason. In this paper, I aim to fill this lacuna in the literature by arguing that, despite its initial plausibility, Swinburne’s analysis of the basing (...) relation is subject to a simple counterexample and so must be rejected. (shrink)

Richard Swinburne is one of the most influential contemporary proponents of the analytical philosophy of religion. He is, above all, a traditional theist. However, his interests are very wide-ranging. He has written about nearly all central theological and philosophical issues such as epistemology, metaphysics, theory of mind and ethics. During the “Münstersche Vorlesungen 2007” students and faculty members of the Department of Philosophy at Münster University entered into a skilful and interesting discussion concerning most of Swinburne’s positions. This (...) volume presents their contributions as well as Swinburne's replies. (shrink)

This paper evaluates Richard Swinburne’s modal argument for the existence of souls. After a brief presentation of the argument, wedescribe the main known objection to it, which is called the substitution objection (SO for short), and explain Swinburne’s response to that objection. With this as background, we formalize Swinburne’s argument in a quantified propositional modal language, modifying it so that it is logically valid and contains no tacit assumptions, and we explain why we find Swinburne’s response (...) to SO unsatisfactory. Next, we indicate that, even though SO is quite compelling, a weakening of one of the premises yields a valid argument for the same conclusion which is immune to SO. This version of the argument, however, is epistemically circular. (shrink)

In chapter 2 Swinburne rejects physicalism for two reason. The first is that it is committed to entailments that do not exist. It is suggested that this reason is questionable both because there is no persuasive reason to deny there are such entailments, and also no reason to think that physicalism has such entailments. The second reason is that the mental involves privileged access by the subject and physical features do not allow privileged access. It is proposed that the (...) physical does in fact permit privileged access. In chapter 3 Swinburne defends the Simple View of personal identity. The reasoning is very complex and rich, but it is proposed that Swinburne has not really shown that a reductionist account cannot be correct. (shrink)

Richard Swinburne (Swinburne and Shoemaker 1984; Swinburne 1986) argues that human beings currently alive have non{bodily immaterial parts called souls. In his main argument in support of this conclusion (modal argument), roughly speaking, from the assumption that it is logically possible that a human being survives the destruction of their body and a few additional premises, he infers the actual existence of souls. After a brief presentation of the argument we describe the main known objection to it, (...) called the substitution objection (SO for short), which is raised by Alston and Smythe (1994), Zimmerman (1991) and Stump and Kretzmann (1996). We then explain Swinburne's response to it (1996). This constitutes a background for the discussion that follows. First, we formalize Swinburne's argument in a quantified propositional modal language so that it is logically valid and contains no tacit assumptions, clearing up some notational issues as we go. Having done that, we explain why we find Swinburne's response unsatisfactory. Next, we indicate that even though SO is quite compelling (albeit for a slightly different reason than the one given previously in the literature), a weakening of one of the premises yields a valid argument for the same conclusion and yet immune to SO. Even this version of the argument, we argue, is epistemically circular. (shrink)

This paper argues that (1) Richard Swinburne’s general account of the simplicity of empirical hypotheses fails because it involves a deeply problematic notion of postulating a property, while there is a wide range of hypotheses where the assessment of simplicity rests entirely on the number and kinds of postulated properties, (2) Swinburne’s main argument in ’The Christian God’ for the simplicity of theism, the one based on considerations about pure limitless intentional power, is significantly weaker than he seems (...) to believe. The paper does not draw a conclusion about whether theism is simple. (shrink)

This essay discusses and criticizes Richard Swinburne's inductive argument for the existence of God. In his The Existence of God, Swinburne aims at showing that the existence of God is more probable than not. This is an argument taking into consideration the premises of all traditional arguments for the existence of God. Swinburne uses the phenomena and events that constitute the premises of these arguments as evidence in an attempt to show that his hypothesis is more probably (...) true than nor. Swinburne pursues this task by way of applying Bayes' theorem. The aim of this essay is normative - to judge the strength of Swinburne's argument for the existence of God. My primary objections towards Swinburne is that he professes a subjective concept of probability, that he relies too heavily on simplicity as a virtue of plausible and probable hypotheses and that his concept of God involves an incoherent picture of God's nature. I question not only the actual success of Swinburne's project but what his argument, if it had been successful, would have been able to establish. (shrink)

Simon Blackburn responds to the preceding article by Richard Swinburne.

Examines the distinguished philosopher Richard Swinburne's project in philosophical theology.

In recent decades, Richard Swinburne has offered an influential view of the relationship between faith and reason. In doing so, he focused to a considerable extent on Aquinas’s view of faith. For Swinburne, Aquinas’ view of faith is that to have faith in God is simply to have a belief-that. In contrast, it is another view of faith, which Swinburne calls ‘Lutheran,’ that involves both theoretical beliefs-that and a trust in the Living God. In this article, I (...) argue that Swinburne’s view is not faithful to Aquinas’s doctrine of faith. In the first section, I will explain Swinburne’s view of belief in detail and its application to Aquinas’s doctrine of faith. In the second section, I will bolster my argument by showing that Swinburne’s reading is inconsistent with Aquinas’ statements regarding three relationships, which are essential to Aquinas’s faith. I am referring to the relationships between faith and will, between faith and merit and between faith and doubt. (shrink)

The so-called ”argument from religious experience’ plays a prominent role in today’s analytical philosophy of religion. It is also of considerable importance to richard Swinburne’s apologetic project. However, rather than joining the polyphonic debate around this argument, the present paper examines the fundamental concept of religious experience. The upshot is that Swinburne neither develops a convincing concept of experience nor explains what makes a religious experience religious. The first section examines some problems resulting mainly from terminology, specifically (...) class='Hi'>Swinburne’s use of appear-words as success-verbs. While these problems might be resolved by a recurrence to the observer, the second and third part of our paper present problems not so easily resolved: namely, that Swinburne’s concept of experience as conscious mental events is too broad and inaccurate for its role in the argument given ; and that Swinburne does not even attempt to figure out which features of an experience, when present, turn an experience simpliciter into a distinctly religious experience. Section 4, in conclusion, outlines possible reasons for this unusual and remarkable inaccuracy in conceptualisation. (shrink)

Bei der Renaissance der philosophischen Auseinandersetzung mit Fragen über Gott spielte der Oxforder Philosoph Richard Swinburne eine wesentliche Rolle. Er kann als der bedeutendste zeitgenössische Vertreter der natürlichen Theologie gelten. Natürliche Theologie ist das Unternehmen, philosophisch zu untersuchen, ob es einen Gott gibt und wie er beschaffen ist. Dies ›philosophisch‹ und nicht theologisch zu untersuchen, heißt, direkte Offenbarung dabei nicht als Erkenntnisquelle zu verwenden.

In ’The Coherence of Theism’ Richard Swinburne writes that a person cannot be omniscient and perfectly free. In ’The Existence of God’ Swinburne writes that God is a person who is omniscient and perfectly free. There is a straightforward reason why the two passages are not in tension, but recognition of this reason raises a problem for Swinburne’s argument in ’The Existence of God’ (the conclusion of which is that God likely exists). In this paper I present (...) the problem for Swinburne’s argument. I then consider two potential responses and suggest that neither succeeds. (shrink)

Richard Swinburne argues that if my cerebral hemispheres were each transplanted into a different head, what would happen to me is not determined by my material parts, and I must therefore have an immaterial part. The paper argues that this argument relies on modal claims that Swinburne has not established. And the means he proposes for establishing such claims cannot succeed.

Discussions of immortality have tended to focus on the nature of personal identity and, in a related way, the mind/body problem. Who is that is going to survive, and is it possible to survive bodily destruction? There has been far less discussion of what immortality would be like; e.g. the nature of heaven. Richard Swinburne, however, has recently discussed ‘heaven’, and has constructed a novel theodicy fundamentally based on his conception of what heaven is like. I shall criticize both (...) his conception of heaven – a conception he claims is consonant with the classical theistic one of Aquinas – and also his theodicy. I will argue that his theodicy reintroduces the problem of evil in connection with his idea of heaven – and does nothing to resolve it. (shrink)

Richard Swinburne is one of the best-known names in the international philosophical scene. His apologetic project is considered one of the largest and most impactful and profound of the last century. The interview conducted here explores many biographical and theoretical issues (Omniscience, Eternity, God’s existence, Free will, Analogy, Relational ontology and Powers ontology, Soul-Body relation, Trinity, Evil) and it aims to trace a broad (albeit necessarily partial) path through his numerous works. The interview took place in 2016, in Oxford, (...) at Swinburne’s home. Today, Swinburne’s thought is discussed in monographs and doctoral theses, witnessing to an influence that will undoubtedly be lasting. (shrink)

This paper maintains that Swinburne’s argument that the body is not essential to who I am is vulnerable to a similar objection to that put forward by Arnauld against Descartes: how do I know that my self-identification furnishes a complete and adequate account of the essential “me,” sufficient to show I could really continue to exist even were the body to be destroyed? The paper goes on to criticize Swinburne’s “hyper-Cartesian” position, that we are simply “souls who control (...) bodies,” and thus only contingently human. This denial of our essential humanity compares unfavorably with Descartes’s own more intuitively attractive view that the human being is a genuine entity in its own right. (shrink)

In his recent book, The Existence of God , Richard Swinburne argues that the world as we find it is one that a good and omnipotent God would have good reason to bring about. He does not claim to demonstrate, that is, deductively to prove, that the world is God–made but rather to show that the proposition that God exists and made the world is more likely to be true and hence more reasonable to believe, all things considered, than (...) its negation. He recognizes that in order to sustain this position he has to justify the existence of evil, especially natural evil, or at least to reconcile both the existence and enormous quantity of such evil with the claim that God exists. In fact, however, Swinburne aims beyond mere reconciliation to the point that the existence and nature of the world confirm the claim that God made it. (shrink)

Swinburne relies on principle P in ’The Existence of God’ to argue that God is simple and thus likely to exist. In this paper, I argue that Swinburne does not support P. In particular, his arguments from mathematical simplicity and scientists’ preferences both fail. Given the central role P plays in Swinburne’s overall argument in ’The Existence of God’, I conclude that Swinburne should further support P if his argument that God likely exists is to be (...) persuasive. (shrink)

My review of Swinburne's elaborate and ingenious higher-good type theodicy will begin with an examination of his argument for why the theist needs a theodicy in the first place. After a preliminary sketch of his theodicy and its crucial free-will plank, its rational-choice theoretic arguments will be critically scrutinized.

This study examines an important part of Richard Swinburne’s case for the plausibility of Christianity, namely his Atonement theory. My examination begins by presenting Swinburne’s theory before alluding to the many criticisms it has attracted. I conclude with some lessons which can be learnt about philosophical theology and its use in interreligious dialogue. My main contention is that if philosophical theology is going to be used for inter-religious dialogue, then it should not be used with the expectation that (...) disagreements will be overcome. (shrink)

In this review of Richard Swinburne's Is There a God? , Richard Dawkins admires Swinburne's clarity but is unconvinced by his arguments. Dawkins questions, in particular, Swinburne's suggestion that the hypothesis that God exists and sustains his creation is simpler than the hypothesis that there is no God.

I took it that the definitions Swinburne quotes imply that all of a person's basic beliefs are rational; Swinburne demurs. It still seems to me that these definitions have this consequence. Let me briefly explain why. According to Swinburne, a person's evidence consists of his basic beliefs, weighted by his confidence in them. So presumably we are to think of S's evidence as the set of the beliefs he takes in the basic way, together with a sort (...) of index indicating, for each of those beliefs, his degree of confidence in that belief. Now it is clear, first, that different basic beliefs can be held with different degrees of confidence. I believe 2+1 = 3 more firmly than there are presently some large trees in my backyard, and I believe that second proposition more firmly than I played bridge last night. Nevertheless, I believe all three propositions; I don't just believe them probably. So, the set of my basic beliefs contains propositions, all of which I believe. Further, a belief of mine is ‘rendered probable by [my] evidence’, I take it, just if it is probable with respect to the set of my basic beliefs. But of course probability of 1 with respect to that set; the degree of confidence with which I hold those beliefs does not seem to be relevant. Hence my conclusion that on these definitions all of my basic beliefs are rational. Swinburne points out that some of my basic beliefs may be improbable with respect to the rest of my basic beliefs; these beliefs, then, might be thought irrational, at least if they are not held as firmly as those with respect to which they are improbable. But this seems to me an uninteresting sense of ‘irrational’. Many of my basic beliefs are improbable with respect to my other basic beliefs; they are none the worse for that. I now remember, as it seems to me, that in the second bridge hand last night I was dealt three aces, three jacks, and three deuces. This is unlikely on the rest of my basic beliefs. It is, nonetheless, not irrational in any useful sense; memory is an important and independent source of rational belief, a source such that its deliverances do not necessarily depend, for warrant or rationality, on their probability with respect to other basic beliefs. I believe the same goes for some of my Christian beliefs. They may be improbable with respect to other beliefs, basic or otherwise, that I hold; but that need be nothing whatever against them. Footnotes1 Note: This brief discussion arises out of Richard Swinburne's critical notice of Alvin Plantinga 's Warranted Christian Belief and Plantinga 's reply in Religious Studies, 37, 203–214, 215–222. (shrink)

Most critics of Richard Swinburne’s modal argument for mind-body substance dualism have alleged that the argument is unsound, either because its premises are false or because it commits a modal fallacy. I show that the argument is epistemically circular, and thus provides no support for its conclusion even if it is sound.

In Western thinking, the tradition of the argument for the existence of God beganwith Plato and Aristotle. It was carried forward in medieval scholasticism,eminently in Aquinas‟s so-called quinque viae, and reached its peak in modernphilosophy. To date approximately 1850 different proofs for the existence of Godare known. The most frequently represented and well-known types of proofs arethe ontological, cosmological, teleological and the moral or deontological type,referring respectively to the arguments of Anselm, Aquinas , and Kant. In this paper I will (...) discuss the development of modernphilosophical proofs, from Descartes‟s and Spinoza‟s ontological arguments,through, Leibniz‟s cosmological argument to Swinburne‟s revision of Leibniz. (shrink)