Richard G. Swinburne is a British philosopher. He is an Emeritus Professor
of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Over the last 50 years Swinburne
has been an influential proponent of philosophical arguments for the
existence of God. His philosophical contributions are primarily in the
philosophy of religion and philosophy of science. He aroused much discussion with
his early work in the philosophy of religion, a trilogy of books consisting
of The Coherence of Theism, The Existence of God, and Faith and Reason.
Academic career Swinburne received an Open Scholarship
to study classics at Exeter College, Oxford, but in fact graduated with a
first class BA in philosophy, politics, & economics. Swinburne has held various
professorships through his career in academia. From 1972 to 1985 he taught at
Keele University. During part of this time, he gave the Gifford lectures at
Aberdeen from 1982 to 1984, resulting in the book The Evolution of the Soul. From
1985 until his retirement in 2002 he was Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of
the Christian Religion at the University of Oxford. He has continued to publish
regularly since his retirement. Swinburne has been a very active author
throughout his career, producing a major book every two to three years. He has
played an important role in recent debate over the mind-body problem,
defending a substance dualism that recalls the work of Rene Descartes in
important respects. See The Evolution of the Soul, 1997.
His books are primarily very technical works of academic philosophy, but he has
written at the popular level as well. Of the non-technical works, his Is There a
God?, summarising for a non-specialist audience many of his arguments for the
existence of God and plausibility in the belief of that existence, is probably
the most popular, and is available in 22 languages.
Christian apologetics A member of the Orthodox Church, he is
noted as one of the foremost Christian apologists, arguing in his many articles
and books that faith in Christianity is rational and coherent in a rigorous
philosophical sense. William Hasker writes that his "tetralogy on Christian
doctrine, together with his earlier trilogy on the philosophy of theism, is
one of the most important apologetic projects of recent times." While
Swinburne presents many arguments to advance the belief that God exists, he
argues that God is a being whose existence is not logically necessary,
but metaphysically necessary in a way he defines in his The Christian God. Other
subjects on which Swinburne writes include personal identity, and epistemic
justification. He has written in defence of Cartesian dualism and libertarian
free will. Though he is best known for his vigorous
rational defence of Christian intellectual commitments, he also has a
theory of the nature of passionate faith which is developed in his book Faith and
Reason. According to an interview Swinburne did
with Foma magazine, he converted from Anglicanism to Eastern Orthodoxy around
1996: I don't think I changed my beliefs in
any significant way. I always believed in the Apostolic succession: that the
Church has to have its authority dating back to the Apostles, and the general
teaching of the Orthodox Church on the saints and the prayers for the departed
and so on, these things I have always believed.
Swinburne's philosophical method reflects the influence of Thomas
Aquinas. He admits that he draws from Aquinas a systematic approach to
philosophical theology. Swinburne, like Aquinas, moves from basic philosophical
issues, to more specific Christian beliefs.
Swinburne moves in his writing program from the philosophical to the
theological, building his case rigorously. Swinburne relies on his
previous arguments as he defends particular Christian beliefs. Swinburne
has attempted to reassert classical Christian beliefs with an apologetic
method that he believes is compatible with contemporary science. That method
relies heavily on inductive logic, seeking to show that his Christian
beliefs fit best with the evidence. Religious experience
= Swinburne's categories = Swinburne formulated five categories
into which all religious experiences fall:
Public Ordinary – a believer 'sees God's hand at work', whereas other
explanations are cited. Public Extraordinary – an unusual event
that breaches natural law. Private describable using normal
language -. Private indescribable using normal
language - Usually a mystical experience.
Private non-specific - A general feeling of God working in one's life.
Swinburne also coined two principles for the assessment of religious experiences:
Principle of Credulity – with the absence of any reason to disbelieve it,
one should accept what appears to be true
Principle of Testimony – with the absence of any reason to disbelieve
them, one should accept that eyewitnesses or believers are telling
the truth when they testify about religious experiences.
Major books Space and Time, 1968
The Concept of Miracle, 1970, The Coherence of Theism, 1977
The Existence of God, 1979. Faith and Reason, 1981.
The Evolution of the Soul, 1986, ISBN 0-19-823698-0.
Miracles, 1989 Responsibility and Atonement, 1989
Revelation, 1991 The Christian God, 1994
Is There a God?, 1996, ISBN 0-19-823545-3
Simplicity as Evidence of Truth, The Aquinas Lecture, 1997
Providence and the Problem of Evil, 1998 Epistemic Justification, 2001
The Resurrection of God Incarnate, 2003 Was Jesus God?, 2008
Free Will and Modern Science, Ed. 2011, ISBN 978-0197264898
Mind, Brain, and Free Will, 2013 Spiritual autobiography
Richard Swinburne, "The Vocation of a Natural Theologian," in Philosophers Who
Believe, Kelly James Clark, ed., pp. 179–202.
Critical assessment Brown, Colin. Miracles and the Critical
Mind. Exeter: Paternoster; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1984. 180-4.
Chartier, Gary. "Richard Swinburne." Blackwell Companion to the Theologians.
2 vols. Ed. Ian Markham. Oxford: Blackwell 2009. 2: 467–74.
Hick, John. "The religious ambiguity of the universe" An Interpretation of
Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent. This section offers a
critique of Swinburne's probability theorem regarding the existence of God.
Hick, John. "Salvation Through the Blood of Jesus" The Metaphor of God
Incarnate,. This chapter includes a revised version of an academic article
response to and critique of Swinburne's defence of the atonement in his book of
that name. Parks, D. Mark. "Expecting the Christian
Revelation: An Analysis and Critique of Richard Swinburne's Philosophical
Defense of Propositional Revelation." PhD dissertation, Southwestern Baptist
Theological Seminary 1995. Parsons, Keith M. God and the Burden of
Proof: Plantinga, Swinburne, and the Analytic Defense of Theism. Buffalo:
Prometheus 1989. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Divine
Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks. Cambridge:
CUP 1995. See also
Theodicy in contemporary philosophy of religion
List of science and religion scholars References
Sources Vardy, Peter. The Puzzle of God. Collins
Sons and Co. pp. 99–106. External links
Personal Homepage at Oxford University – Includes a curriculum vitae and more
complete list of publications Presentation at Gifford lectures
Richard Swinburne, Faith and Reason review from Diapsalmata
The Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies video interview with Richard
Swinburne 31 May 2010.