Richard Swinburne

Richard Granville Swinburne[lower-alpha 1] FBA (born 1934) is an English 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.

Richard Swinburne

FBA
Swinburne in 2009
Born
Richard Granville Swinburne

(1934-12-26) 26 December 1934
Smethwick, England
Academic background
Alma materExeter College, Oxford
Influences
Academic work
Discipline
Sub-discipline
School or traditionAnalytic philosophy
Institutions
Doctoral students
Main interestsChristian apologetics
Influenced
Websiteusers.ox.ac.uk/~orie0087

Early life

Swinburne was born in Smethwick, Staffordshire, England, on 26 December 1934.[4] His father was a school music teacher, who was himself the son of an off-licence owner in Shoreditch.[4] His mother was a secretary, the daughter of an optician.[5] He is an only child.[6] Swinburne attended a preparatory school and then Charterhouse.[7]

Academic career

Swinburne received an open scholarship to study classics at Exeter College, Oxford,[8] but in fact graduated with a first-class Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy, politics, and economics.[9] 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,[9] 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 (his successor in this chair is Brian Leftow). He has continued to publish regularly since his retirement.

Swinburne has been an 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 René 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? (1996), 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."[10] 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 dualism and libertarian free will.[11]

Although 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 (Church of England) 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.[12]

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 (for example, the question of the possibility that God may exist in Swinburne's The Coherence of Theism), to more specific Christian beliefs (for example, the claim in Swinburne's Revelation that God has communicated to human beings propositionally in Jesus Christ).

Swinburne moves in his writing program from the philosophical to the theological, building his case rigorously, and relying on his previous arguments as he defends particular Christian beliefs. He 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.

National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview (C1672/15) with Richard Swinburne in 2015–2016 for its Science and Religion collection held by the British Library.[13]

Major books
  • Space and Time, 1968
  • The Concept of Miracle, 1970,
  • The Coherence of Theism, 1977 (new edition 2016) (part 1 of his trilogy on Theism)
  • The Existence of God, 1979 (new edition 2004). (part 2 of his trilogy on Theism)
  • Faith and Reason, 1981 (new edition 2005). (part 3 of his trilogy on Theism)
  • The Evolution of the Soul, 1986, ISBN 0-19-823698-0. (1997 edition online)
  • Miracles, 1989
  • Responsibility and Atonement, 1989 (part 1 of his tetralogy on Christian Doctrines)
  • Revelation, 1991 (part 2 of his tetralogy on Christian Doctrines)
  • The Christian God, 1994 (part 3 of his tetralogy on Christian Doctrines)
  • 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 (part 4 of his tetralogy on Christian Doctrines)
  • 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
  • Are We Bodies or Souls?, 2019, ISBN 978-0-19-883149-5

Spiritual autobiography
  • Richard Swinburne, "Natural Theology and Orthodoxy," in Turning East: Contemporary Philosophers and the Ancient Christian Faith, Rico Vitz, ed. (St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2012), pp. 47–78.
  • Richard Swinburne, "The Vocation of a Natural Theologian," in Philosophers Who Believe, Kelly James Clark, ed. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1993), pp. 179–202.
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See also

Notes
  1. Pronounced /ˈswɪnbɜːrn/.

References

Footnotes
  1. Kai-man 2011, p. ix.
  2. Schellenberg 2016, p. 26.
  3. "Professor Mark Wynn". Faculty of Theology and Religion. Oxford: University of Oxford. Retrieved 23 July 2020.
  4. Swinburne 2016, p. 1.
  5. Swinburne 2016, pp. 1–2.
  6. Swinburne 2016, p. 3.
  7. Swinburne 2016, p. 7.
  8. Gotobed 2007.
  9. Chartier 2013, p. 522.
  10. Hasker 2002, p. 253.
  11. Swinburne 2013.
  12. "БЕЗОТВЕТСТВЕННОЕ ПРИГЛАШЕНИЕ К СЕРЬЕЗНОМУ РАЗГОВОРУ". Foma (in Russian). Archived from the original on 22 February 2014. Retrieved 17 February 2012.
  13. Swinburne 2016.

Works cited
Chartier, Gary (2013). "Richard Swinburne". In Markham, Ian S. (ed.). The Student's Companion to the Theologians. Chichester, England: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 522–526. doi:10.1002/9781118427170.ch75. ISBN 978-1-118-42717-0.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
Gotobed, Julian (2007). "Richard Swinburne (1934– )". Boston Collaborative Encyclopedia of Western Theology. Boston: Boston University. Retrieved 22 July 2020.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
Hasker, William (2002). "Is Christianity Probable? Swinburne's Apologetic Programme". Religious Studies. 38: 253–264. doi:10.1017/S0034412502006078. ISSN 1469-901X. JSTOR 20008419.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
Kai-man Kwan (2011). Rainbow of Experiences, Critical Trust, and God: A Defense of Holistic Empiricism. New York: Continuum. ISBN 978-1-4411-7401-7.
Schellenberg, J. L. (2016). "Working with Swinburne: Belief, Value, and Religious Life". In Bergmann, Michael; Brower, Jeffrey E. (eds.). Reason and Faith: Themes from Richard Swinburne. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 26–45. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198732648.003.0002. ISBN 978-0-19-873264-8.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
Swinburne, Richard (2013). Mind, Brain, and Free Will.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
 ———  (2016). "Richard Swinburne" (PDF). "Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum" Life Story Interviews (transcript). Interviewed by Merchant, Paul. London: British Library. Retrieved 22 July 2020.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
Vardy, Peter (1990). The Puzzle of God. Collins Sons and Co. pp. 99–106.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Further reading
Brown, Colin (1984). Miracles and the Critical Mind. Exeter, England: Paternoster. pp. 180–184.
Hick, John (1989). "The Religious Ambiguity of the Universe". An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-230-37128-6.
 ———  (1993). "Salvation Through the Blood of Jesus". The Metaphor of God Incarnate. London: SCM Press.
Ozioko, Johnson Uchenna (2019). Rationality of the Christian Faith in Richard Swinburne. Rome: Urbaniana University Press.
Parks, D. Mark (1995). Expecting the Christian Revelation: An Analysis and Critique of Richard Swinburne's Philosophical Defense of Propositional Revelation (PhD dissertation). Fort Worth, Texas: Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Parsons, Keith M. (1989). God and the Burden of Proof: Plantinga, Swinburne, and the Analytic Defense of Theism. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas (1995). Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511598074. ISBN 978-0-511-59807-4.
Academic offices
Preceded by
Basil Mitchell		 Nolloth Professor of the
Philosophy of the Christian Religion
1985–2003		 Succeeded by
Brian Leftow
Preceded by
 Gifford Lecturer at the
University of Aberdeen
1982–1984		 Succeeded by
Freeman Dyson
Professional and academic associations
Preceded by
 President of the British Society
for the Philosophy of Religion		 Succeeded by
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