Richard Swinburne devotes much of his book Faith and Reason 1 to determining the standard of propositional belief required for belief in a religious creed. 2 As the book demonstrates, a key issue in the analysis of religious faith is the degree to which adherents of a creed must believe that creed to be true (in order to count as adherents). After considerable discussion, Swinbume settles on the following standard: "[A]ll that is needed in respect of belief in a creed is belief that it is more probable that that creed is true than that any rival creed is true, a rival creed being one that justifies the pursuit of a different religious way" (p. 162). He claims that this standard is a version of what he calls "weak" credal belief -and weak belief, on his view, is all that can be demanded of believers in a creed.
In this paper I challenge several of Swinburne's claims about credal belief. First, I argue that his concept of "belief relative to alternatives" and the weak credal belief it endorses have highly counterintuitive features. Second, I show that Swinburne confuses weak belief with a distinct (and independent) standard of belief and that the confusion undermines the argument for his preferred standard. Finally, I defend a more satisfactory standard of credal belief (which I call "complete" credal belief) against Swinbume's charge that it demands too much of religious adherents.
1. Belief relative to alternatives
I should say, first, that I substantially agree with Swinburne's probabilistic *I wish to thank Jon Jarrett, Norman Kretzmann, and Richard Swinbume for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.