The Existence of God

The Existence of God is Richard Swinburne‘s central work, published in 1979 and substantially revised in a second edition in 2004. It assembles the standard arguments for theism, the Cosmological Argument, the Teleological Argument, the argument from consciousness, the argument from religious experience, and several others, and treats them as a cumulative case using the apparatus of Bayesian Confirmation.

The argument’s distinctive feature is its insistence on probability rather than proof. Swinburne does not claim that any single argument is decisive. He claims that, taken together, the evidence for theism makes theism more probable than not. The conclusion is contested at every step: critics dispute the prior probabilities he assigns, the formalization of the evidence, and the weight he gives to religious experience in particular. But the structural commitment, that the question of God should be approached as one of evidential probability rather than of a priori reasoning, has shaped the literature.

The book is, alongside The Miracle of Theism on the other side, one of the two systematic statements of the late-twentieth-century analytic case for and against theism written within the same university town within the same decade.