Richard Swinburne Quotes on God
Richard Swinburne’s trilogy on the philosophy of theism — The Coherence of Theism (1977), The Existence of God (1979), and Faith and Reason (1981) — gave late twentieth-century analytic philosophy of religion its most ambitious systematic defense of the rational credibility of Christian theism. The central project, integrating Bayesian probability theory with the classical natural-theological inheritance, treats the existence of God as the simplest and most explanatorily powerful hypothesis for the basic features of the universe — its existence, order, and capacity to support conscious moral agents — with the cumulative case from cosmological, design, and religious-experience considerations rendering theism more probable than not. The framework, developed across a long Oxford career, shaped the contemporary analytic philosophy of religion alongside Plantinga’s Reformed epistemology and the broader revival of natural theology in English-language philosophy.
Quotes
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Attributed to Richard Swinburne:
“On balance, the existence of God is more probable than not.”
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Attributed to Richard Swinburne:
“The simplicity of theism counts in its evidential favor.”
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Attributed to Richard Swinburne:
“Religious experience is evidence for what it appears to be experience of.”
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Attributed to Richard Swinburne:
“Christian doctrine is to be defended by the same canons of evidence that govern any historical inquiry.”
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Attributed to Richard Swinburne:
“Reason is not the enemy of faith; it is its proper guardian.”
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“I thus understand by a «theodicy» not an account of God’s actual reasons for allowing a bad state to occur, but an account of his possible reasons”
p. 15