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)

It is my view that one essential difference between persons and other creatures is to be found in the structure of a person's will. Besides wanting and choosing and being moved to do this or that, men may also want to have certain desires and motives. They are capable of wanting to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are. Many animals appear to have the capacity for what I shall call "first-order desires" or "desires of the (...) first order," which are simply desires to do or not to do one thing or another. No animal other than man, however, appears to have the capacity for reflective self-evaluation that is manifested in the formation of second-order desires. (shrink)