Slogging through some turgid & pedantic chapters in Richard Swinburne's The Existence of God. When philosophers decided, about 100 yrs ago, that they should sound like scientists, and put all their reasoning into logico-symbolic equations ("where event E is folded into hypothesis H via prior knowledge K we get probability P divided by..." blah blah)... this was a huge mistake. It's worse than the most dried-up medieval scholasticism. All this stuff should be in the footnotes at the back.

& yet the book's stylistic weaknesses are rendered just about moot by the fabulous logical intelligence at work here.

We have a general mythical-historical notion of a gradual dimming away, in the West, of rational belief in an omnipotent creator-God. This book is perhaps the best evidence that such an historical picture is mistaken. Swinburne walks in no fear of Kant or Hume. & his arguments are cumulative and very strong.

p.s. & I should say that most of Swinburne's book is clear, simple & direct. (He apologizes for the symbology in the intro.)