Are there different sorts of theologians? I mean, is natural like a natural-born theologian, or a theological term?

Apparently, a natural theologican tries to prove the existence of God through evidence available to everyone.

Are there different sorts of theologians? I mean, is natural like a natural-born theologian, or a theological term?

I think the answer to that is this:

Apparently, a natural theologican tries to prove the existence of God through evidence available to everyone.

I still say theologian is not the same as logician.

What are the other sorts of theologians, and do they try to prove the existence of God? If so, how?

through evidence available to everyone.

Everyone who has never taken a statistics class, I fear.

What are the other sorts of theologians, and do they try to prove the existence of God?

Rhetoric and stuff.

If so, how?

Or hand puppets. Manger Babies.

God exists, because it says so in the Bible, and the Bible is the word of God.

Hee, hee...Manger Babies. "This octopus has six legs. If I call him a sextapus, will I offend sensibilities?"

it's 50/50 that I will, in fact, be elected Queen Of The World and Ruler Of All. I mean, either I will or I won't, right?

You need to give up this bad attitude and stop selling yourself short.

I recalled that Bob has mentioned Swinburne in the past so I called him, and he's writing me an email explaining this which I will post. But for the interim, I will note that he said Swinburne is arguably the greatest natural theologian since Aquinas.

Okay, see, now I feel bad. But I will say, in my defense, that it seemed unlikely that anyone who, say, was a Professor at Oxford would say any such thing. I was sort of meaning to ridicule that, or perhaps the concept of such a person, rather than the actual person himself, whose assertions I imagine were mangled out of all recognition by, say it again with me, Netscape "News". But it was funnier not to say that part.

Aww, he's so adorable. His email to me follows. He wrote it in, like the last 15 minutes.

Okay, Shawn asked me to write a bit about Richard Swinburne.

Richard Swinburne is a wonder. To give you a sense of how systematic a thinker he is, in his intellectual autobiography he pointed out that he knew in the 1950s that he wanted to prove the existence of God and the defensibility of the Christian account of God. However, he thought first that he should learn some physics and probability theory before doing that, so he got a scholarship to study theoretical physics for three years at either Cambridge or Oxford (I don't remember which), after which he wrote a well regarded introduction to the philosophy of space-time (it was endorsed as a good introduction by one of the foremost philosophers of physics in the U.S., Larry Sklar, in his book, _Space, Time, and Spacetime_). He then wrote an introduction to probability theory that was also well regarded, this time, I think, by Ian Hacking, who is one of the foremost authorities on probability theory (I think he endorsed Swinburne in his _The Emergence of Probability_. (Both Sklar and Hacking, by the way, are atheists.) Swinburne then wrote a trilogy defending generic theism (_The Coherence of Theism_, _The Existence of God_, and _Faith and Reason_) and then a tetrology defending specifically Christian theism. He also wrote important books on philosophy of mind, personal identity, and epistemology. The point is, the guy is distinguished and prolific. That doesn't mean he doesn't hold minority views, but the point is, the guy is smart and respected, so he's not going to make any bone-headed errors.

So, on to the 97% chance of Jesus rising from the dead. First, let me say this claim doesn't strike philosophers as oddly as it might strike other people. This is a field, let me remind you, where David Lewis, the foremost American philosopher until 2002, seriously defended the view that unicorns, goblins, and camels shooting fire out of their humps, are all real (of course, they don't exist in our universe, but they exist in another universe that is just as real), David Chalmers defends the view that tables have consciousness, and Peter Unger defended (but no longer holds) the view that no one and nothing exists.

Back to 97%. First, the article is sensationalistic. Swinburne has not "seemingly done the impossible". Rather, he has applied his Bayesian epistemological theory to a real-world issue: "given the evidence we have, how likely is it that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead?" Don't think of it as any different from the question, "given the evidence we have, how likely is it that FDR knew the Japanese were going to attack?" or "given the evidence we have, how likely is it that _The Laws_ was one of Plato's late works, as opposed to one of his earlier works?"

By the lights of his theory, and according to the evidence he thinks we have, he arrives at the figure of 97%. This all depends on what philosophers call your "priors"; that is, your answer to the question at hand depends on what probability you assign to various things related to the question. For instance, how likely is it that God exists? Swinburne himself thinks the likelihood is close to 1 (i.e., 100%), whereas a philosopher like Quentin Smith thinks the likelihood is close to 0. Swinburne decides, though, to take an agnostic view, just to be conservative, and assigns the likelihood that God exists to be about 50%, given the evidence we have. He then asks questions like, "given what we know about God's character--namely, that he is all-loving and all-powerful (how do we know that? Read Swinburne's other books)--, how likely is it that he would want to make himself known to humanity in a way that is compatible with faith but not coercive of it? Swinburne again guesses that the answer is about 50%. Again, don't take these numbers to be exact. They're just guesses that he argues for in his book, but Swinburne will admit that there are perfectly good arguments for coming up with (continued...)