Richard Swinburne b. 1934

Richard Swinburne is a British philosopher of religion, long associated with the University of Oxford, and the most prolific defender of natural theology in late-twentieth-century analytic philosophy. The Coherence of Theism, The Existence of God, and Faith and Reason developed a sustained Bayesian argument that the existence of God is more probable than not given the totality of available evidence, drawing on the cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments along with the data of religious experience. His later The Resurrection of God Incarnate applied the same probabilistic methodology to the central historical claims of Christianity.

Richard Granville Swinburne was born at Smethwick in Staffordshire in December 1934. He took his bachelor's at Exeter College, Oxford, in philosophy, politics, and economics in 1959, his bachelor of philosophy at Oxford in 1961, and a diploma in theology from St Stephen's House. After lectureships at Hull and Leeds and the chair of philosophy of religion at the University of Aberdeen, he was elected in 1985 Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford and Fellow of Oriel College, posts he held until his retirement in 2002. He was received into the Eastern Orthodox Church in 1996.

His books include Space and Time (1968), The Concept of Miracle (1970), the central tetralogy The Coherence of Theism (1977), The Existence of God (1979), Faith and Reason (1981), and Responsibility and Atonement (1989); the trilogy on the doctrine of God Revelation (1992), The Christian God (1994), and Providence and the Problem of Evil (1998); and the late Mind, Brain, and Free Will (2013).

Swinburne developed the most sustained Bayesian natural theology of the late twentieth century: each of the classical arguments for God's existence raises the probability of theism, and their cumulative weight, given simplicity as the principal theoretical virtue, makes theism more probable than not. He combines this programme with a robust substance dualism about the soul and a probabilistic apologetics for the central doctrines of Christianity.