Richard Swinburne

Richard Swinburne is the canonical analytic theist of the second half of the twentieth century. He held the Nolloth Chair at Oxford from 1985 to 2002, and across a long career has produced the most systematic defense of theism in the analytic tradition since the medieval scholastics. Where Alvin Plantinga‘s strategy is to argue that theistic belief can be rationally held without inference from other beliefs, Swinburne’s strategy is the opposite: he argues that theism is the more probable hypothesis given the totality of the evidence.

His central work, The Existence of God (1979, second edition 2004), assembles the Cosmological Argument, the Teleological Argument, the argument from religious experience, and several others, and treats them as cumulative confirmation of the theistic hypothesis using the apparatus of Bayesian Confirmation. The conclusion he draws is that the existence of God is, on the evidence, more probable than not. The conclusion is contested. The structure of the argument is harder to dismiss than its conclusion is to accept.

Swinburne is largely off-stage in Margaret Halloran’s seminars, which are oriented toward Reformed Epistemology and the Problem of Evil rather than toward Bayesian natural theology. But he is a presence in the literature, and any complete picture of the analytic philosophy of religion has to account for the cumulative case approach he made canonical.