Richard Swinburne

Background

Richard Swinburne (b. 1934) is a British philosopher of religion, emeritus professor at Oxford and the architect of the Bayesian cumulative-case program in natural theology: no single argument proves theism, but each item of evidence — the universe's existence, its order, consciousness, miracle reports — raises theism's probability, culminating in what he dubbed "ramified" natural theology, extending probabilistic reasoning to specifically Christian claims; he famously argued that Bayesian reasoning "justifies belief in the resurrection of Jesus with a probability of 97%" (Swinburne 2003, at SEP 'Natural Theology and Natural Religion' §4).

Distinctively among major theists, Swinburne holds that God is "a logically contingent being" and that deductive proofs fail — theism's case must be inductive throughout. He is also the tradition's most confident theodicist, holding both that "theism does need a theodicy" and that "the required theodicy can be provided" (Swinburne 1988, at SEP 'Problem of Evil' §6.3, §7).

Positions held in this wiki

• The Evidential Problem of Evil — names God's actual reasons: libertarian responsibility, soul-making, a law-governed world. His signature thesis is that free will's value scales with its moral range; a world without power to harm is a "toy world" (SEP §7.3).
• Divine Hiddenness — moral autonomy and responsibility goods explain God's permission of some nonbelief (Swinburne 1979, 1998, at SEP 'Hiddenness' §3).
• The Leibnizian (Contingency) Cosmological Argument — rejects the deductive argument as claiming a "hidden contradiction" that has never been demonstrated (Swinburne 2004: 136, at SEP 'Cosmological Argument' §8); substitutes a Bayesian argument grounded in theism's simplicity.
• Miracles and the Laws of Nature — a miracle as a non-repeatable counter-instance of a law rather than a "violation."

Key works in our corpus

Corpus gap: Swinburne's monographs are copyright-locked; all views are reconstructed from SEP entries. Note that the corpus file sep-swinburne.html actually contains the SEP entry 'Natural Theology and Natural Religion', not a biographical entry. Swinburne is quoted directly in the in-corpus McGrew & McGrew paper on prior probabilities of miracle reports (Swinburne 1992, 69, quoted at McGrew & McGrew 2016).

Principal critics

• J. L. Mackie — God could have created beings with virtuous dispositions directly.
• Michael Tooley — SEP author's verdict that "no theodicy that has ever been proposed has been successful in the relevant way" (SEP §6.3).
• Paul Draper — the Bayesian evidential argument from the distribution of pain and pleasure.
• J. L. Schellenberg — replies that hiddenness goods could be accommodated within relationship with God.
• Michael Martin — targets the prior-probability machinery of the inductive cosmological argument (SEP 'Cosmological Argument' §8).

See also

• William Lane Craig — fellow evidentialist; deductive (kalam) where Swinburne is inductive.
• Alvin Plantinga — the Reformed alternative: theism warranted without the cumulative case; also the in-house critic who calls most theodicies "tepid, shallow and ultimately frivolous."
• Robin Collins — the fine-tuning strand of the Bayesian program.
• Joseph Butler — the eighteenth-century ancestor of probabilistic apologetics.