Richard Swinburne

Richard Swinburne

Richard Granville Swinburne (born December 26, 1934) is an English philosopher. He is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Over the last 50 years Swinburne has been a proponent of philosophical arguments for the existence of God. His philosophical contributions are primarily in the philosophy of religion and philosophy of science. He aroused much discussion with his early work in the philosophy of religion, a trilogy of books consisting of The Coherence of Theism, The Existence of God, and Faith and Reason.

Quotes

Providence and the Problem of Evil (1998)

Swinburne, R., Providence and the Problem of Evil, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1998. ISBN 9780198237983.

• I thus understand by a «theodicy» not an account of God’s actual reasons for allowing a bad state to occur, but an account of his possible reasons
  • p. 15

The Existence of God

The Existence of God, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2nd Edition. ISBN 0–19–927168–2

• A cosmological argument is an argument to the existence of God from the existence of some finite object or, more specifically, a complex physical universe. There have been many versions of the cosmological argument given over the past two-and-a-half millennia; the most quoted are the second and third of Aquinas’s five ways to show the existence of God. However, Aquinas’s ‘five ways’, or rather the first four of his five ways, seem to me to be one of his least successful pieces of philosophy. In my view the two most persuasive and interesting versions of the cosmological argument are that given by Leibniz in his paper On the Ultimate Origination of Things, and that given by his contemporary Samuel Clarke in his Boyle Lectures for 1704 and published under the title A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes to God. The former seems to be the argument criticized by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason and the latter the argument criticized by Hume in the Dialogues.
  • pp. 136-137

• The starting points of cosmological arguments are evident facets of experience. There is no doubt about the truth of statements that report that they hold. It seems to me equally evident that no argument from any of such starting points to the existence of God is deductively valid. For, if an argument from, for example, the existence of a complex physical universe to the existence of God were deductively valid, then it would be incoherent to assert that a complex physical universe exists and God does not exist. There would be a hidden contradiction buried in such co-assertions. Now, the only way to prove a proposition to be incoherent is to deduce from it an obviously incoherent proposition (for example, a self-contradictory proposition),but, notoriously, attempts to derive obviously incoherent propositions from such co-assertions have failed through the commission of some elementary logical error. Furthermore, it seems easy enough to spell out in an obviously coherent way one way in which such a co-assertion would be true. There would be a complex physical universe and no God, if there had always been matter rearranging itself in various combinations, and the only persons had been embodied persons; if there never was a person who knew everything, or could do everything, etc. Atheism does seem to be a supposition consistent with the existence of a complex physical universe, such as our universe. Of course things may not be as they seem, but, in the absence of any worthwhile argument to the contrary known to me, I shall assume that the non-existence of God is logically compatible with the existence of the universe, and so that the cosmological argument is not a valid, and so not a good, deductive argument. Our primary concern is however to investigate whether it is a good C-inductive or P-inductive argument, and just how much force it has.
  • pp. 136-137