Swinburne, Richard

  1. Person
  2. 26 December 1934
  3. Male

    1. Born in 1934 at Smethick, Staffordshire, Richard Swinburne is Emeritus Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion, University of Oxford, Emeritus Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford and Fellow of the British Academy.

      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 analytical 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 (1977), The Existence of God (1979), and Faith and Reason (1981).

      Since 1995, he is a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church through conversion. He is noted as one of the foremost Christian apologist, 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 (see modal logic), but metaphysically necessary in a way he defines in his The Christian God. Other subjects on which Swinburne writes include personal identity (in which he espouses a view based on the concept of a soul), and epistemic justification. He has written in defence of Cartesian dualisma and libertarian free will.

      Swinburne formulated five categories into which all religious experiences fall, the public and the private with the related subcategories, while he has also coined two principles for their assessment, namely the principle of credulity and the principle of testimony. He has authored numerous books such as: Epistemic Justification (2001), The Resurrection of God Incarnate (2003), Free Will and Modern Science (2011), Mind, Brain, and Free Will (2013), The Coherence of Theism (2016).

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