Faith and Reason. Second Edition. By Richard Swinburne. Pp. viii + 278. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. isbn 0 19 928392 3 and 928393 1. Hardback £55; paper n.p.

Abstract

Every now and then somebody (often an expert in an unrelated field) proclaims the incompatibility of faith and reason. In this book Professor Swinburne sets out to analyse what their relationship actually is. It is a drastically revised version of a book first published in 1981 as the concluding volume of a trilogy (the others being The Coherence of Theism and The Existence of God, itself recently revised and reissued). The book falls into three main sections. In the first, Swinburne distinguishes six possible uses of the phrase ‘rational action’ or ‘rational belief’. In the second, he looks at the nature of faith, the value of religious belief, and the point of religion; and in the third, he discusses creeds, Christian and non-Christian, and the criteria for choosing (rationally) between them. The first section is very densely written, and some sentences are not as easy to follow as is usual with Swinburne. Special expressions—such as kinds of rationality—are defined in terms of other special expressions. This may well be necessary. Indeed, it is genuinely valuable to know what one is talking about when one calls a belief reasonable or unreasonable; but I feel that a table of the six kinds of rational belief would have made it much easier to follow. However, after this first section he concentrates almost entirely on ‘rational5’ actions and beliefs (a rational2 action being one which, given the agent's evidence and the correct probabilities based on that evidence, is the best thing to do, and a rational5 action one which is rational2 and where the agents’ beliefs were based on an adequate amount of investigation).