Swinburne's Is There A God? presents a brief, updated version of his book, The Existence of God, in which Swinburne argued that criteria used in scientific reasoning could be used to argue that God probably exists. This new book is designed for a wider audience than professional philosophers. Nonetheless, there is much that is new and of interest to philosophers in Is There a God? For example, there is a discussion of Stephen Hawking's cosmology, some new ideas in the philosophy (...) of mind, and a new way of formulating the argument that theism is a simpler explanation of the universe than is materialism. (shrink)

Discussions of the intersection of general relativity and thephilosophy of religion rarely take place on the technical levelthat involves the details of the mathematical physics of generalrelativity. John Earman's discussion of theism and generalrelativity in his recent book on spacetime singularities is anexception to this tendency. By virtue of his technical expertise,Earman is able to introduce novel arguments into the debatebetween theists and atheists. In this paper, I state and examineEarman's arguments that it is rationally acceptable to believethat theism and (...) general relativity form a mutually consistent oreven mutually supportive pair. I conclude that each of hisarguments is unsound. (shrink)

This paper aims to outline a counterfactual theory of divine atemporal causation that avoids problems of preemption. As a result, the presentation of the analysis is structured such that my counterfactual analysis directly addresses preemption issues. If these problems can be avoided, the theist is well on her way to proposing a usable metaphysical concept of atemporal divine causation. In the first section, I outline Lewis’ original counterfactual analysis as well as how these cases of preemption cause problems for his (...) analysis. In particular, two cases of preemption have proven problematic for counterfactual analyses: late preemption and trumping preemption. In the second section, I propose a counterfactual analysis of divine causation that is not subject to these problems of preemption. I present a counterfactual analysis of timeless divine causation, supplemented by a definition of what it means for God to allow an event to happen. In the third section, I argue this analysis is not prey to problems of preemption. (shrink)