Richard Swinburne

Richard Swinburne (b. 1934) is Nolloth Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at the University of Oxford. Educated at Exeter College, Oxford, he taught at Hull and Keele before holding the Oxford chair from 1985 to 2002. He converted from Anglicanism to Eastern Orthodoxy in 1996.

Swinburne is best known for a sustained analytic defense of classical theism through three connected trilogies. The philosophical trilogy—The Coherence of Theism (1977), The Existence of God (1979), and Faith and Reason (1981)—argues that theism is coherent, probable on the total evidence, and a rational basis for religious commitment. The Existence of God deploys a cumulative-case Bayesian argument: cosmological, teleological (including fine-tuning), consciousness, providence, religious experience, and historical evidence jointly raise the probability of God above one-half, aided by a simplicity prior favoring theism. A second tetralogy (Responsibility and Atonement, Revelation, The Christian God, Providence and the Problem of Evil) and a third on the historical credentials of Christ extend the project to specifically Christian doctrines, culminating in The Resurrection of God Incarnate (2003).

Critics—including J. L. Mackie, Paul Draper, Quentin Smith, and more recently Herman Philipse—have challenged Swinburne's appeal to simplicity, his prior probabilities, and the legitimacy of treating God as an explanatory hypothesis. His substance-dualist account of the soul has also drawn criticism from naturalist philosophers of mind.