Subject: Philosophy Book Title: The Coherence of Theism
The Coherence of Theism
Swinburne, Richard
Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion, University of Oxford
Print publication date: 1993
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003
Print ISBN-13: 978-0-19-824070-9
doi:10.1093/0198240708.001.0001
Abstract:
Investigates whether the claim that there is a God can be spelt out in a coherent way. Part 1 analyses how we can show some claim to be coherent or incoherent. God is supposed to be a personal being, omnipresent, perfectly free and creator of the universe, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, a source of moral obligation, and eternal. Part 2 analyses how these divine properties can be understood in a coherent and mutually consistent way. Part 3 considers divine necessity and claims that God's existence necessarily must be understood as this being the ultimate brute fact on which all else depends, but his having the divine properties necessarily must be understood as his having these properties being logically necessary for his existence. The final chapter argues that, if a God of the kind analysed in earlier chapters exists, he is worthy of worship.