Swinburne was born in Smethwick, Staffordshire, England, on 26 December 1934. His father was a school music teacher, who was himself the son of an off-licence owner in Shoreditch. His mother was a secretary, the daughter of an optician. He is an only child. Swinburne attended a preparatory school and then Charterhouse School.
Swinburne has been an active author throughout his career, producing a major book every two to three years. He has played a role in the 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.[5]
A member of the Orthodox Church, Swinburne 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."[9] 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.[10]
Although he is best known for his vigorous 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.
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.[11]
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).[12]
Swinburne moves in his writing program from the philosophical to the theological, building his case 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.[13]
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.
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.
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. ISBN978-0-230-37128-6.
——— (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.
Philipse, Herman (2017). "Swinburne's apologetic strategy for theism evaluated". Religious Studies. 53 (Special Issue 3: In Honour of Richard Swinburne): 307–320. doi:10.1017/S0034412517000245.
^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.
^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.
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