Condescending Dick (AKA Richard Swinburne)

Two nights ago I was at a panel debate with Peter Atkins, Stephen Law, Ard Louis and Richard Swinburne. While panels entirely of white men do bother me , it was a great event - the discussion was over whose discipline (science, philosophy, religion) was best placed to reveal important truths, and as with the event I mentioned in my last post here footage will at some near point be released on YouTube. In lieu of paraphrasing what the four of them said, I’m going to focus in this post on some of the comments Richard Swinburne made, who came in for quite a bashing toward the end.

At one point, toward the end of one of his sections, he made the rather familiar point about suffering that in order for genuine, meaningful choices between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ to be made, a god would need to preserve ‘a chance for people to get hurt’. (He’d previously told Peter Atkins, who brought the incident up in his response, that God allowed the Holocaust to occur so that people could have the opportunity to make good moral choices. Well, thank goodness.)

The implication that moral affiliations can’t be meaningful without suffering is, I think, completely specious. I’ve already mentioned the Holocaust, and it’s becoming a Godwinesque cliché in discussions of morality, but we’d hopefully all agree that rape ought to be prevented - and if it were universally prevented, abolished in fact, would we each become suddenly unable to decide if it were wrong? We certainly don’t need the suffering caused by mass genocides to occur for us to call them wrong in a meaningful way, so the argument that a god would need to make them possible to preserve our conscientious freedom is frankly rather lacking.

And what about people in Heaven, or any other place or plane devoid of suffering? Do dead Christians in the Kingdom of God, who are presumably incapable of causing one another suffering, have no ability to make meaningful moral choices? If not, it can’t be much of a heaven in the first place.

I put that question to Richard Swinburne once the Q&A had begun, but I didn’t feel he answered it. His response was typically vacuous and verbose, with much talk of why good/evil choices would be desirable to God, so I won’t attempt to recall or paraphrase it (I’ll post the recorded version here once it’s online), but I couldn’t help but feel he’d missed the point. Moreover, one got the sense of a pervasive sneeriness in the answer he gave, as if the mere suggestion he’d missed something was laughably far beneath him.

The same condescension came across when Paula Kirby suggested his eagerness to justify suffering revealed privilege or indifference to it, and also when Peter Atkins and Richard Dawkins challenged his claim the god hypothesis is simple. It’s certainly conceivable a deity in charge of the universe wouldn’t require the complex, mechanistic nature with the ‘cogs and levers’ Peter Atkins said it would - but for goodness’ sake, we wouldn’t have theologians if theism were a simple proposition. Millennia have been spent attempting to justify God’s tolerance of suffering, arguing over whether his defining traits are contradictory and investigating which sexual positions he most endorses. This alone should disprove in an instant that a god is a simple explanation of anything - the notion of one existing has far too many consequences, paradoxes and finer points to be considered simple. It raises at least as many questions as it answers.

I should say for the sake of full disclosure that I’d met Richard Swinburne once before two years ago, when he gave a talk on theism and morality in my first university year. (An old colleague has written up some of the evening’s events, but I feel that I ought to give my own account for the record.) The bedrock of his theory on morality vis God is that, as he put it last night ‘we have an obligation to please our benefactors’. We don’t, of course - it’s amusingly stupid to suggest that because someone’s benefited me, I’m inescapably bound to their will - but the point is that life is a gift conferred by God, and we therefore have an obligation to please (i.e. obey) him. Even if the moral mechanics of that are sound, and they’re very much not, I didn’t ask to come into existence. I didn’t sign up to any terms and conditions in return for being given life, and no matter how much I might enjoy having it, God doesn’t get to impose them after the fact.

When I suggested that to him, what Richard Swinburne said was that if I didn’t appreciate God’s gift to me than I ought to return it by killing myself. (Would it be cheap to suggest his defence of theism may have trumped his moral expertise?) He later suggested afterward, when I asked to elaborate on some of the prior arguments to which referred, that he ‘tell [me] what books to read’. Rarely have I experienced such undisguised and patronising nastiness - but thankfully and amusingly, his tone was rather undermined by the determined stream of saliva which escaped his mouth as he said it, creating the appearance of a bloodthirsty toddler.

Richard Swinburne? He looks like a Dick to me.

Alex Gabriel