"Is There a God?": Notes on the Book by Richard Swinburne (VII/VIII)

For more about what's going on here, see this post.

For those of you who'd like to follow along, this is the book I am reading:
          Swinburne, Richard. Is There a God? Revised ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Print.
Chapter VII: How the Existence of God Explains Miracles and Religious Experience
Summary
     Swinburne makes many points in this chapter, very few of which really act towards the claim in the chapter title. The only point he makes which does seem to prove that the existence of god explains miracles and religious experience is that "humans need help" (108), and therefore it is in god's best interest to help us to see his creation work towards beautiful, good ends, and as a purely good being (established in chapter 1), that is something he would do. This does make sense. We as humans are limited beings, and we cannot accomplish everything we set out to do unless we sorely limit what we set out to do--even then it is still likely we will fail once or twice. But, God wants us to succeed, because if there is a god, he is good (according to Swinburne, anyway--this is one point I do not feel he ever fully addressed), and we are his creation, and a good creator would want his creation to succeed at doing good things. Therefore, it makes perfect sense that God would intervene to help us achieve good ends every now and then, though not too often, as I will talk about in my Christian response below.
Christian Response
     The first thing that struck me in this chapter is the following sentence: "[God] will not... intervene in the natural order at all often, for if he did, we would not be able to predict the consequences of our actions and so we would lose control over the world and ourselves" (100-1). That is to say, referring to the previous chapter, God cannot allow us to experience the greater goods and happinesses of responsibility for ourselves and our world if he intervenes too much. This is, I think, a very valid point and a fantastic response to the common Christian supposition that the age of miracles is over, that the world we live in now is mundane. I do not think that just because Jesus does not walk the earth in human form any longer we are doomed to live unmiraculous lives every second that we are alive, but miracles are obviously rare--rare enough that when they do occur to you, most people will not believe you. We are a world full of skeptics, even those among us who call ourselves Christians. It is smart to be a skeptic to an extent, but if Christianity teaches one thing beyond simply a moral code, it is that faith is a necessary component of happiness, whether it is faith in the universe or faith in god or faith in other people, and I think it would be good for Christians to show the learning of that lesson by having in faith in the possibility that miracles could still occur, and knowing when to trust the word of another human being. I know this is a delicate line to walk,  the line between being trusting and being gullible, but it is just something to think about.
Personal Response

     I'll admit I was a little surprised at first when I read the title of this chapter. I thought, "Well, of COURSE the existence of God explains these things. How could it not?" But I then thought back to chapter one, and there really isn't anything that says God would do this kind of thing, and I thought about science, and over time it seems both more likely and less likely that science will be able to explain "supernatural" experiences--more likely because we get closer and more advanced, and less likely because the closer we get, the more complex everything appears to be.
     I also really liked a point Swinburne brought up about how "we may be mistaken in believing that an event is not a divine intervention when really it is, as well as the other way around" (106). This is so true. We have no right or reason to expect that we should know when god intervenes in our world or not, that we should be privy to his actions on our plane. God may have intervened in our lives several times when we passed events off as mere coincidences (although I no longer believe in coincidence, which makes me more likely to ascribe something to an act of god which was in fact only happenstance). This doesn't prove that there is a god, so may not be entirely relevant to the purpose of the book, but it shows that a healthy agnosticism in all things is a good thing, because we never know everything, and we never really know anything for certain, whether there is a god or no.