Richard Swinburne

He is a Fellow of the British Academy. He was Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at the University of Oxford from 1985 until 2002. He is best known for his trilogy on the philosophy of theism (The Coherence of Theism, The Existence of God, and Faith and Reason). The central book of this trilogy, The Existence of God (2nd edition, 2004, Oxford University Press) claims that arguments from the existence of laws of nature, those laws as being such as to lead to the evolution of human bodies, and humans being conscious, make it probable that there is a God. He has written a tetralology of books on the meaning and justification of central Christian doctrines (including Providence and the Problem of Evil, Oxford University Press, 1998). He has written at various lengths on many of the other major issues of philosophy (including epistemology, the study of what makes a belief rational or justified, in his book Epistemic Justification); and he has applied his views about what is made probable by what evidence to the evidence about the Resurrection of Jesus in The Resurrection of God Incarnate. He is also well known for his defence of ‘substance dualism’ (the view that humans consist of two parts–soul and body), especially in his book The evolution of the Soul. His new book Mind, Brain, and Free Will claims that substance dualism has the consequence that humans have free will to choose between good and evil. It argues that neuroscience cannot now and could not ever show this claim to be false. He lectures frequently in many different countries.

Email: richard.swinburne@oriel.ox.ac.uk

Issue: 3:1 (The ninth issue)

Although Gregory wrote very little about this, he acknowledged that natural reason can lead us from the orderliness of the physical world to the existence of God; in this, he followed the tradition of Athanasius and other Greek fathers. Unlike Aquinas, he did not seek to present the argument as deductive; in fact his argument is inductive, and of the same kind as – we now realize – scientists and historians use when they argue from phenomena to their explanatory cause. Gregory wrote hardly anything about how one could obtain knowledge of the truths of the Christian revelation by arguments from non-question-begging premises; but in his conversations with the Turks he showed that he believed that there are good arguments of this kind. Almost all of Gregory`s writing about knowledge of God concerned how one could obtain this by direct access in prayer; this access, he held, is open especially to monks, but to a considerable degree also to all Christians who follow the divine commandments.