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.
Epilogue: So What?
Summary
This may be unfair, but this epilogue is so short that it can best be summarized in the following quote from it's own text: "The conclusion of this book was that, on significant balance of probability, there is a God. If you accept it, it follows that you have certain duties. God has given us life and all the good things it contains, including above all the opportunities to mould our characters and help others. ...if we have any sense and any idealism, we cannot leave [duty] at [a moderate amount of worship and obedience]" (122-3). Swinburne then proceeds to introduce new points like so (is that really necessary in an epilogue?) and then explain that god wants us to do our best and achieve great things, and since he created us we have a duty to do our best and achieve great things--he might choose to help us, but it is our duty to try whether he does or not, because he has already paid it forward more than we can ever compensate for.
Christian Response
This isn't so much a Christian response as it is my response to this book and Christianity, but I feel like I am on the same page as Swinburne right up until the epilogue. I guess it's because worship is a weird thing for me. I've always felt like saying thank you and doing my best were the best ways to honor a god, rather than getting down on my knees and telling him/her/it how awesome he/she/it is and how I cower before him/her/it. I guess I feel like that would be awkward for god, because it's always really awkward when someone does that kind of thing to me. I am only human, though. I don't know. That's unrelated.
What IS related is that I think a Christian would maybe feel a bit unfulfilled at the end of this book, just because it is, in the end, a theist book and not a Christian book. It is a book about there being a god, not about Jesus being the son of god and so on, and I don't think this book ever once mentioned Jesus. If Christianity decided Jesus and the biblical stories weren't so big a deal, though, and decided instead to just concentrate on ethics and being a moral person, then I think a good Christian could feel wholly supported by this book. That is, after all, what it's about: there is mostly likely a god, therefore you should do good stuff. If you're looking for more detail, read my previous eight blog posts or check out the book itself.
Personal Response
Throughout this book, Swinburne provided plenty of support for the idea that there being a god makes sense. According to the points he makes, it does indeed make sense, and it obviously makes sense to me as I do believe in a god (that the god I believe in is not the Christian God is irrelevant). However, only in chapter 4 do I see him provide anything that could be considered proof of a god. Of course, there may not be such thing as proof--perhaps a better way to say it would be to say that chapter 4 is the only chapter in which he actually argues for a god being the most reasonable solution rather than simply saying that the existence of god is one reasonable solution among many he does not describe. That said, the reasons he gives in chapter 4 are the reasons, among others, that I believe in a god, and perhaps it is a good thing that the whole book does not read like a door-to-door evangelist, as I would have enjoyed reading that even less than reading what Swinburne did, in fact, write.
THE END
(...of this project, anyway; I fully intend to continue posting on this blog!)
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