Swinburne's Heaven: One Hell of a Place

Abstract

Discussions of immortality have tended to focus on the nature of personal identity and, in a related way, the mind/body problem. (i) Who is that is going to survive, and (ii) is it possible to survive bodily destruction? There has been far less discussion of what immortality would be like; e.g. the nature of heaven. Richard Swinburne, however, has recently discussed ‘heaven’, and has constructed a novel theodicy fundamentally based on his conception of what heaven is like. I shall criticize both his conception of heaven – a conception he claims is consonant with the classical theistic one of Aquinas – and also his theodicy. I will argue that his theodicy reintroduces the problem of evil in connection with his idea of heaven – and does nothing to resolve it.