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." 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. 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. According to an interview Swinburne did with
Foma magazine, he converted from
Anglicanism (
Church of England) to
Eastern Orthodoxy around 1996: 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. 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). In his 2003 book The Resurrection of God Incarnate, Richard Swinburne presents a
probabilistic argument concluding that the evidence makes it highly likely that
Jesus was
God incarnate who
rose from the dead. In an interview with
Veery journal, Swinburne summed up his place in philosophy: "I'm very much in the modern Anglo-American tradition of philosophy which I believe is basically the tradition of philosophy since Plato." 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.
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. == Major books ==