Two people have been more influential than any others in the development ofmy thought on these topics. The first is John Kenyon, my undergraduate tutor
in Philosophy. The second is Richard Swinburne, my graduate supervisor.
Later in life, I have had the privilege and pleasure of knowing each of them as
colleagues and friends and neither has ever failed to improve my thinking in
my conversations with them. The questions to which this book addresses itself
were first put to me in a philosophically rigorous way by John; and he was the
first to guide me to care about trying to answer them in a similar fashion.
Anybody who is familiar with the work of Richard will recognize his influence
on almost every page of this book: on starting points, we are often in complete
agreement; on conclusions, less so. But in both their cases my debt is of course
not for the conclusions that I reach but for the questions that I ask and the
method by which I seek to answer them. If progress in Philosophy is marked
not so much by an accumulation of answers as by the improvement of one’s
questions, then these two have helped me most in what progress I have been
able to make.
