Various contemporary philosophers, with Richard Swinburne prominent amongst them, have abandoned the traditional philosophical conception of God, according to which He is absolutely simple and eternal (as opposed to sempiternal). These contemporary philosophers conceive of Him as a ‘perfect person’, immaterial, but with human-type virtues in a superhuman degree. I argue that, whilst this development is probably mistaken, nevertheless the traditionalist critics perhaps sometimes exaggerate the differences between these conceptions – except on the crucial issue of God's eternity.

In this article, I classify Richard Swinburne's apologetic strategy for theism, and raise eight structural problems with regard to his Bayesian approach. For example, is theism really a meaningful theory? Does it have any predictive power? If so, isn't theism a degenerating research programme? Furthermore, is it legitimate to immunize theism against empirical refutations? Is Swinburne's tactic of doing so successful?

I rebut a ‘naturalist’ counter to Swinburne's Bayesian cosmological argument, based on the supposedly superior simplicity of naturalism.

Theists such as Swinburne who seek to use natural theological arguments to move from observations about the world to conclusions about the existence (or probable existence) of God seem to need premises concerning what the world would have been like were Theism to have been false, viz. premises to the effect that it would have been (or would probably have been) different from the way we observe the actual world to be. Surely only that way could observations of the actual world be taken to be evidence that Theism is true.1 And surely for such arguments to be dialectically powerful in discussions with Atheists, these premises need to be acceptable to Theists and Atheists alike.2 In this article, I call these claims into question.

I discuss the role of religious experience in Richard Swinburne's probabilistic case for theism. Swinburne draws on his principle of credulity to argue that, if in addition to other evidence we consider that many people have theistic religious experiences, theism comes out as more probable than not. However, on many plausible probability assignments for the relevant non-experiential evidence, the conditional probability of theism already converges towards 1. Moreover, an argument analogous to a general Bayesian argument against phenomenal conservatism suggests that, after we take account of evidence from religious experience, the probability of theism cannot be greater than the prior probability that the best rival hypothesis is false. I conclude that these observations are compatible with what Swinburne would call ‘weak rational belief’ in theism and that such weak belief can be strong enough for rational faith.

In this article, I seek to extend Richard Swinburne's discussion of the practical reasonableness of the religious way of life, by locating his account of the goods of that life within a larger context. Drawing on Thomas Aquinas's category of infused moral virtue, I sketch an account of the motivational lure of the religious life which supplements Swinburne's emphasis on the fulfilment of moral obligation, by considering the significance of, for example, distinctively theological aesthetic goods.

The affective view of faith, as opposed to the doxastic or cognitive view, giving more importance to goodwill than to belief content, has received much support in recent philosophy of religion, including from Richard Swinburne. Swinburne's concept of faith is no less rational than his concept of religious belief, but its rationality is that of an action or of a practically oriented attitude, aiming at the goals of religion, compatible with religious disbelief (belief that the religious content one has faith in is probably false) and even with atheism. I argue that this paradoxical stance, which hardly squares with the Christian tradition, can be avoided, while keeping to an affective view of faith, if we give more weight to the idea that faith is first an answer given to a telling, on the basis of personal trust of the hearer in the authority of the teller – a personal account as opposed to a propositional account of faith.

This article contains my responses to the discussions of my views on the nature of God by Howard Robinson and Herman Philipse, my views on the strength of arguments for the existence of God by Herman Philipse, Brian Leftow, Timothy Mawson, and Christoph Jäger, and my views on the nature and justification of Christian faith by Mark Wynn and Cyrille Michon, contained in this issue of Religious Studies.