Justified True Belief

(●) The philosopher who set out to show that Christianity is not a leap in the dark but the best-supported explanation of everything there is. + Suppose a safe has been emptied overnight. John’s fingerprints are on the handle, a neighbour says she saw him on the street outside at the right hour, and a bag of cash turns up in his garage. Nobody watched the theft. Nobody ever will. Yet a jury can be asked to say what probably happened, and a good jury can answer, because three separate things all point the same way and it would be a remarkable coincidence if they did so and John were innocent. That is the shape of Richard Swinburne’s life work, and the safe is his own example. He has spent sixty years arguing that the question of whether there is a God is settled the way any large question outside mathematics is settled: not by a proof that leaves no room to wriggle, but by weighing how likely the world is to look the way it does on one account rather than another. He put natural theology, the attempt to reason toward God from evidence anyone can see, back into professional philosophy at a time when most philosophers thought talk about God was not even false, merely meaningless. And having argued for God, he did not stop. He went on to argue that a God like that would probably be a Trinity, would probably become incarnate, and would probably rise from the dead, and to put a number on the last one. Here is the fact worth remembering about him. He is the son of parents who did not go to church, he cannot remember a time before he prayed, and he has written that he sometimes catches himself praying, "O God, if you do not exist, help me to see that fact"!

(●) 1934 AD: Born in Smethwick to a family that did not go to church, and praying before he can remember being taught how. + Richard Granville Swinburne was born on 26 December 1934 in Smethwick, in the industrial sprawl west of Birmingham. His father taught music in a school and was the son of a man who kept an off-licence in Shoreditch, one of the small shops licensed to sell drink for people to carry home; his mother had been a secretary and was an optician’s daughter. He was an only child. Neither parent was a Christian, which makes the next sentence odd. "As far back as my memory stretches," he wrote much later, "I recall having thought in Christian terms; and from early years I recall having prayed." He credits his schooling, since there is nowhere else to put it. He was sent to Charterhouse, one of the old English boarding schools, and was baptized into the Church of England at fifteen. Then came national service, which every young British man of his generation owed the state. The Royal Navy trained him as a Russian interpreter, on the assumption that Russian would be the language of the next enemy. It was an odd gift to give a philosopher, and forty years later it would put him in front of Russian audiences that had spent their lives being taught there was no God.

(●) 1954 AD: He came up to Oxford meaning to be a priest, and decided his calling was philosophy instead. + He arrived at Exeter College in 1954 on an open scholarship in classics and promptly changed course, reading philosophy, politics and economics with the weight on philosophy, and taking a first. By his own account he had come up believing that being a Christian was the most important thing in his life, and he also loved an argument, which turned out to matter. What he found appalled him, and not in the way one might guess. The philosophy on offer at Oxford was hostile to Christianity, but that did not trouble him much; he rather enjoyed having clever opponents. What troubled him was the church. Preachers preached sermons that never touched modern science or philosophy at all, and when somebody asked the obvious questions, why believe the Bible, why suppose there is a God, the answer came back that religion is a matter of faith. But nobody would say why one should leap, or in which direction. "The church’s lazy indifference to modern knowledge appalled me," he wrote. He had meant to be ordained. He went as far as St Stephen’s House, the Anglican theological college in Oxford, and took the university’s diploma in theology with distinction, having first taken the two-year B.Phil. in philosophy in 1959, the usual training for a professional philosopher. Somewhere in those years the plan changed. He decided that the tools Oxford had given him, its habits of clarity and rigour, could be turned to making Christian belief intellectually respectable again, and that doing so was his Christian vocation. He became a philosopher instead of a priest. In 1960 he married Monica Holmstrom; they had two daughters.

(●) 1963 AD: He spent nine years at Hull writing about science and almost nothing about God, on purpose. + Before Hull came three years of paid freedom, on his own account: a Fereday Fellowship at St John’s College, Oxford, and then a Leverhulme Fellowship in the history and philosophy of science at Leeds, running from 1960 to 1963. He used them to learn science, because he had studied almost none at school and because he had worked out where the modern world actually kept its confidence. It was not in professional philosophy. It was in relativity, quantum theory, evolution, and DNA. What he learned there decided everything afterwards. Suppose you spend an afternoon taking measurements and marking them on graph paper, and six times running the second number matches the first: 1 and 1, 2 and 2, and so on up to 6. Anybody would draw the straight line. But here is the awkward thing about that line. An infinite number of formulas fit those six points exactly, every one of them as faithful to the marks on the paper as any other, and they disagree wildly about what the seventh measurement will be. Scientists draw the straight line anyway, and they are right to, and the only reason they can give for it is that it is simpler. Swinburne concluded that simplicity is not a preference or a convenience, a tidy habit we have picked up because our brains like tidiness. It is part of what makes a theory likely to be true, and an old Latin tag had it right: simplex sigillum veri, the simple is the sign of the true. In 1963 he became a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Hull, and for nine years he wrote about space, time and evidence rather than about God. This was deliberate. He wanted credentials in the field the modern world respected, so that when he did turn to religion the people he most wanted to reach could not dismiss him as an amateur. Space and Time came out in 1968 and An Introduction to Confirmation Theory in 1973, the second of them a study of what counts as evidence for what, worked out in the mathematics of probability. Only one small book on religion appeared in all that time, The Concept of Miracle, in 1971.

(●) 1972 AD: At Keele he changed gear, and the trilogy he wrote there put the existence of God back on the philosophers’ table. + He became professor of philosophy at the University of Keele in 1972 and stayed thirteen years. The tools were ready, and he turned them on the thing he had wanted to do since he was an undergraduate. The result was three books that have to be taken together, because each one clears the ground for the next. The Coherence of Theism (1977) asked the question that has to come first. Does the sentence "there is a God" even manage to say something? Philosophers of the day were fond of pointing out that a claim which rules nothing out is not a claim at all, so before arguing that theism is true, meaning the claim that there is a God, he had to show that there was something there to be true. He worked through omnipotence, omniscience, perfect freedom and perfect goodness one at a time, and showed that the claim can be stated without contradicting itself. Only then does the famous book arrive. The Existence of God (1979) is the central one and the one he is known for, and its method is the whole of him in miniature: it runs the traditional arguments not as proofs but as evidence, each one adding something to the pile, and concludes that on the whole of it theism is more probable than not. Then, having got that far, he asked the question a reader in a pew would ask next. What has any of this to do with kneeling down on a Sunday? Faith and Reason (1981) answered it, and drew a distinction that has stuck: faith is trust in God, belief is thinking it true that there is a God, and rational faith needs the second only at the level of a significant probability, not certainty. Recognition followed. He gave the Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen from 1982 to 1984, the most prestigious series in the English-speaking world on natural theology, and turned them into a book on the soul.

(●) 1985 AD: Oxford gave him the Nolloth chair, and he spent the next seventeen years arguing the Christian doctrines one at a time. + In 1985 he returned to Oxford as Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion and a fellow of Oriel College, succeeding Basil Mitchell. He held the chair until he retired in 2002, and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1992. The trilogy had argued only for bare theism, God and nothing further about him. Now he took on the doctrines that make Christianity Christian, and his method stayed exactly what it had been: work out what a perfectly good God would be likely to do, then turn to history and ask whether it shows any sign of having been done. Take the Trinity first. Think of a couple so wrapped up in each other that nobody else can get near them; we do not admire that, and we are right not to, because love that hoards itself has stopped being generous. A solitary divine person who is perfectly good would want to share everything he has, and perfect love is not two keeping each other to themselves but two cooperating in loving a third. So one would expect three persons rather than one. Then the Incarnation, which is God taking on a human life: if God allows us to suffer for good reasons, one would expect him to come and suffer alongside us rather than watch from a safe distance. And then the Atonement, the making right of what we have broken. Human beings have wronged God badly and cannot make it up to him, and there is an ordinary human remedy for exactly that difficulty, since when a wrongdoer has nothing to pay with, a friend may provide him with something to offer. That is the argument of Responsibility and Atonement (1989) and The Christian God (1994), with Revelation (1992) sitting between them and asking how a God like that would make himself known and by what marks his church could be recognised. The fourth book of the set gave his theodicy, his account of why a good God permits evil, in what he judged its fullest and most satisfactory form. Providence and the Problem of Evil (1998) faced the objection he has always called the strongest one going, that a world with this much suffering in it is not the world a good and all-powerful God would run. Before any of that, though, came a detour he judged necessary, and the reason for it is worth sitting with. If a human being is simply a very complicated machine, then Christian claims about life after death have nothing left to survive; a machine that stops has not gone anywhere. So he turned aside to argue that a person is a soul with a body rather than a body that thinks, and published the case in The Evolution of the Soul in 1986.

(●) 1995 AD: He left the Church of England for the Orthodox Church, and said that what he believed had not changed. + He had been an Anglican since his baptism at fifteen and had never been quite comfortable. He held, and had argued at length in Revelation, that a body counts as part of the church Christ founded by two marks: its order, meaning bishops consecrated by bishops in an unbroken line back to the apostles, and its doctrine, meaning something like the Nicene Creed actually believed. He thought the Church of England had once just managed both. By the second half of the twentieth century he thought its bishops would tolerate a priest teaching almost anything, and that it had "lost its sense that it was a vehicle of revealed truth." That left two doors, Rome and Orthodoxy, and he judged that the Orthodox Church met his two requirements better. He was received in 1995. Asked afterwards what had changed, he told the Russian magazine Foma that very little had: "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." What he says he gained was not doctrine but practice. Orthodox worship is communal, its prayers worn smooth by centuries, and it does not hurry. Most Orthodox parishes expect regular confession to a priest, and he had been making his confession every couple of months for most of his life already, an unusual habit for an Anglican. His own private prayer, he admits, is often dry, and he is glad to have it taken up into something richer. His colleagues were baffled. Orthodox writing dwells on the mystery and incomprehensibility of God, which sits oddly beside a man who calculates probabilities. Swinburne’s answer was that the suspicion of natural theology in Orthodox countries is recent and borrowed, and that older Orthodoxy knew better: Gregory of Nyssa and John of Damascus, two of the fathers the East most reveres, both held that there are good arguments for the existence of God.

(●) 2002 AD: Retirement meant only that Oxford stopped paying him, and the books kept coming. + His own summary of retirement is that Oxford no longer paid him a salary and he no longer had to lecture on a timetable. The writing did not slow. The Resurrection of God Incarnate (2003) turned everything he had worked out about evidence onto the empty tomb. Was Jesus God? (2008) put the whole case into under two hundred readable pages. He then went back to the mind and produced Mind, Brain, and Free Will (2013) and Are We Bodies or Souls? (2019). In 2024, at eighty-nine, he published a debate book with the philosopher James Sterba, who argues that horrendous suffering rules God out and who gets his replies printed alongside. He also went east. After the Cold War ended, the Society of Christian Philosophers, an American body, set up a committee for outreach to Russia, and Swinburne chaired it for some years: a man with fluent Russian, an Orthodox membership card, and a case for God, arriving in a country that had spent seventy years teaching schoolchildren there was none. Joint conferences followed with the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences and with the theological commission of the Russian Orthodox Church, along with summer schools and translations. Honorary doctorates came from Lublin in 2015, Bucharest in 2016, Liechtenstein in 2017 and Poti in Georgia in 2023. He has not avoided a fight in old age either. In 2016 he gave a keynote lecture to the Midwest regional meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers defending traditional Christian teaching on sex, family and life, and argued in the course of it that having a homosexual orientation is a disability. The society’s president, Michael Rea, posted his regret at the hurt the meeting had caused and said the views were not the society’s own; other Christian philosophers answered that the apology was itself an injustice to a man who had simply argued for a position; and the row ran for weeks across the philosophy blogs and drew a statement from a committee of the American Philosophical Association. Asked whether he doubts, he answers yes, in the sense that he is certain of very little, and yes again in the sense that examining the objections is his job and everybody’s duty. He recommends the second kind: "Doubt (in the second sense) is good for belief." Near the end of his autobiography, he writes that his family life has not been fully satisfactory, that in every other respect he has led a blessed life, and that it cannot be too long before he is called to give an account of it. He asks that God have mercy on his soul.

What He Taught

(T1) God is the simplest explanation there could be, and simplicity is what makes any explanation likely to be true. + Empty every coin out of your pocket and find that each one carries the same markings. You do not shrug. You look for a mint. Find a room where every sheet of paper is in the same handwriting, and you look for the person who wrote them. A coincidence that large is exactly the kind of thing that has a common source, and looking for one is not superstition; it is how anybody thinks. Swinburne’s cosmological and design arguments run on that instinct. There is a universe rather than nothing. Every electron in it, at every moment of endless time and in every corner of endless space, behaves in precisely the same way as every other. Science can explain a small regularity by a wider one, but it cannot by its nature explain why there are any laws at all, or why there is any matter for the laws to get hold of, because a scientific explanation always works by citing an earlier state of affairs and a law. Run the chain back as far as you like and you are still standing in front of the same question. So there are two options and no third: either the whole thing is a brute fact that stops the conversation, or the explanation is of the other kind we use constantly, personal explanation, where something happens because somebody wanted it to and had the power to bring it about, as your hand moves because you meant to pick up the glass. Then comes the move that is distinctively his, and the reason he spent ten years on philosophy of science first. The objection everyone reaches for is the obvious one, and it is a good objection. You might put it this way: "Fine, but God is an enormously complicated thing to postulate, and explaining something complicated by postulating something even more complicated is not an explanation. It is a bigger bill." Swinburne’s answer is that God is the simplest thing that could be postulated at all. A person, on his account, is a being with power, knowledge and freedom. God is a person with no limits on any of the three except the limits of logic, and infinite is a simpler value to write down than 0.32147. That is not a piece of theological special pleading. Scientists have always reached for the limitless value first when they could get away with it, and Newton is the standard case: he assigned gravity an infinite speed of propagation, so that its pull is felt everywhere the instant it acts, rather than picking some vast particular figure out of the air, and the infinite value was given up only when a finite one bought a wider explanation. The reason is not hard to see once it is said. A limit is the sort of thing that demands an account of why it falls just there, at that number rather than the one next to it. Limitlessness demands nothing of the kind. Christians who prefer the older proofs will notice what this is not. Swinburne does not claim to have demonstrated God the way Euclid demonstrated a theorem, and he thinks Aquinas’s five ways do not quite work in detail. What he claims is that the hypothesis is simple, that it leads us to expect a universe like this one, and that nothing else does both.

(Q) "The hypothesis that there is a God is the hypothesis of the existence of the simplest kind of person that there could be." + Source: Richard Swinburne, "Natural Theology and Orthodoxy: Spiritual Autobiography or the Vocation of a Natural Theologian," section VII, in Rico Vitz, editor, Turning East: Contemporary Philosophers and the Ancient Christian Faith (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012). The essay is an updated version of "The Vocation of a Natural Theologian," published in Kelly Clark, editor, Philosophers Who Believe (InterVarsity, 1993). He is summarising the argument of The Existence of God in the shortest form he ever put it. The whole of his natural theology is packed into the sentence: not that God is a large and impressive being, which would help nothing, but that God is the least complicated stopping place an explanation could have (T1).

(T2) An apparent experience of God is evidence that God is there, for the same reason an apparent table is evidence of a table. + Look up from reading. There is a table in front of you, or a wall, or a window. Now try to justify believing it. You cannot step outside your own eyes to check them against the world, and any test you run will itself be something that seems a certain way to you. Everyone believes there is a table anyway, and everyone is right to, and the reason is a rule so basic that we almost never say it out loud: what seems to be there probably is there, unless something specific gives us reason to doubt it. Swinburne named that rule the Principle of Credulity, and pushed it where it hurts. If a man says he was aware of God’s presence, and no particular reason has been given to distrust him, then his experience counts as evidence that God was present. Not proof. Evidence, which can be outweighed. Special considerations are allowed to do the outweighing: he agrees that a report from someone on drugs, or a report of something we have independent reason to think impossible, or a report from a person whose track record is bad, all lose force. What he refuses is a rule applied to religious experience alone, stricter than the one we use for every other kind of perception, and adopted for no better reason than that the conclusion is unwelcome. Alongside it he sets a companion rule, the Principle of Testimony: other people’s reports are probably true unless there is reason to think otherwise, which is how anyone knows anything about a country they have not visited. The upshot is a curious kind of democracy. Swinburne’s books are hard going, full of probability notation, and the arguments in them are not available to most people. This principle is. The woman who has prayed for forty years and is sure she has been answered does not have to wait for a philosopher’s permission; on Swinburne’s account she is already holding evidence, and the burden lies with anyone who wants to take it off her.

(Q) "I suggest that it is a principle of rationality that (in the absence of special considerations), if it seems (epistemically) to a subject that x is present (and has some characteristic), then probably x is present (and has that characteristic); what one seems to perceive is probably so." + Source: Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God, second edition (Oxford, 2004), pages 303 to 304. "Epistemically" is doing real work in the sentence and is worth unpacking. Swinburne is not talking about how something looks to the eye, which can be a trick of light, but about how the world strikes you as being, what you would say if asked. He states the rule for ordinary perception first and then turns it on religious experience, concluding in the same chapter that in the absence of special considerations such experiences ought to be taken by their subjects as genuine (T2).

(T3) A human being is a soul, and the body is what the soul has been given to work with. + Surgeons sometimes cut the corpus callosum, the thick bundle of nerve fibres joining the two halves of the brain, to control severe epilepsy. Patients who have had it done behave strangely under laboratory conditions. Information shown to one side of the eyes can be acted on by one hand and not the other, as though two separate knowers were sharing a skull. And here is the question Swinburne says nobody can answer by looking harder at the brain: is that one person who has become oddly compartmented, or two people where there was one? You could know the entire physical history of that brain, every fibre and every discharge, and still not know how many people are in the room. If a fact can be missing after you know all the physical facts, then the fact was not a physical fact. That is the argument for what philosophers call substance dualism: the view that a person is made of two parts, a body and a soul, and that the soul is the part that makes you you. Swinburne distinguishes this from the weaker claim that people merely have two kinds of property, physical ones like the electrochemical state of a neuron and mental ones like a toothache. He thinks the weaker claim is obviously true and does not go far enough. Christian readers should notice the exact size of the claim and the exact size of the caution. What Swinburne needs it for is straightforward: if a person simply is his body, then whatever is raised on the last day, it is not him, and Christian hope has nothing to hold. What Scripture will not license is the further step, the one Plato took, of treating the body as a prison to be escaped. The promise is not that the soul flies free but that the dead are raised bodily, and Swinburne holds this too; his soul is made for a body and is given one. He also thinks every conscious animal has a soul of its own kind, which is an old medieval view and startles people who expect dualism to be a way of putting humans in a separate box.

(Q) "But you could know the whole history of a person’s body (and which properties, physical or mental, are connected with that body), and still not know how many persons have these properties." + Source: Richard Swinburne, a 2006 interview on mind-body dualism, posted in his own papers at Oxford under the heading "Interview with Science and Religion News." The full case is in The Evolution of the Soul (1986) and, more recently, Mind, Brain, and Free Will (2013). The split-brain patient comes in the very next breath of his answer, as the case that makes the claim good. The point is not that the science is mysterious but that the question of how many people there are is a further question, and no amount of neurology answers it (T3).

(T4) God allows suffering because certain goods are not available on any other terms. + A parent takes a child to the dentist knowing there will be a needle and twenty unpleasant minutes. Nobody thinks the parent has done wrong. Four things make it right: the pain is the only way to the good, the good actually follows, the parent stands in a relationship that gives him the right to decide this, and the good is worth the pain. Change any one of them and the judgment changes. A stranger who marched your child into a surgery would be committing an assault. Swinburne’s theodicy is those four conditions applied to God. Notice how much he is taking on in calling it that. Some Christian philosophers argue only that God might have reasons we cannot see, which is enough to answer the charge that God and suffering cannot both be real. Swinburne wants to say what the reasons actually are. Take the first condition, that the pain is the only way to the good. He argues that God wants more for us than contentment; he wants us to become good, and to become good by our own choosing, which means real responsibility for ourselves and for one another. Real responsibility has a price that cannot be waived. If I can genuinely help you, I can genuinely fail you, and God cannot do the logically impossible, which includes handing us the power to hurt each other while quietly ensuring we never do. Add that character forms by repetition, each honest answer making the next one easier, and you have an account of why a world fit for making people would have to be a world where the choices bite. Then the harder half. Much suffering is nobody’s fault: disease, earthquake, the failures of an ageing body. Swinburne argues that without it most of us would never face the choices that matter most, whether to be patient or bitter under what we cannot change, whether to spend our time and money on somebody else’s pain. He goes further than most Christian writers dare, and holds that being of use to others is itself a good for the person who suffers, so that the sufferer is not merely a means to somebody else’s virtue but a participant in it. He adds a condition that is easy to miss and that carries a great deal of weight: if any life on earth is on balance bad, God has a duty to make it up to that person afterwards, and being omnipotent, he can. He knows exactly how this reads. His own text stops to say so, and of the objection that God has overdone it he writes that he feels considerable initial sympathy. Whether the four conditions really are met is the argument, and a great many readers, Christian ones included, think they are not.

(Q) "And when I now proceed to justify God allowing these things, I hope that you will not think me callous. These are horrible things, and when they happen to people we must weep." + Source: Richard Swinburne, "The Problem of Evil," the lecture he gave at Münster in 2007, published in Nicola Mössner, Sebastian Schmoranzer and Christian Weidemann, editors, Richard Swinburne: Christian Philosophy in a Modern World (Ontos Verlag, 2008), and posted in his own papers at Oxford. The full version of the theodicy is Providence and the Problem of Evil (1998). "These things" are the ones he has just listed: Hiroshima, the slave trade, the Lisbon earthquake, the Black Death. The sentence sits between an admission that the objector may well feel there is simply too much suffering for the good it buys, and the argument he then gives anyway (T4).

(T5) The evidence makes the resurrection of Jesus probable, not merely possible. + Go back to the emptied safe. A detective weighs two kinds of thing. There are the clues at the scene, the fingerprints and the testimony, and there is what he knew before he arrived: whether this man has a record, whether he had a motive, whether anyone else was even in a position to do it. The second kind is called prior evidence, and it does real work. Fingerprints on a safe mean one thing if the suspect is the bank’s own locksmith and quite another if he has three convictions for burglary. Swinburne argues that discussions of the resurrection have almost always been conducted on the clues alone, and that this is a mistake in method rather than a mistake about the first century. Suppose, first, that the arguments of natural theology make it as likely as not that there is a God (T1). Suppose, second, that such a God has reason to become incarnate: to share our suffering, to make available a life good enough to offer back for the ones we have wasted, to found something that would carry his teaching forward. Then look at history and ask who fits. The requirements are specific and awkward: a holy life, deep moral teaching, a man who believed himself to be God, who taught that his death made atonement, who founded a church that taught these things, and whose life was capped by a miracle nobody else could work. Swinburne’s claim is not that Jesus is the best candidate. It is that there is no other candidate at all. The Buddha and Muhammad lived good lives and founded great faiths, and neither claimed divinity or atonement. The last move is the one that does the arithmetic, and it is worth taking slowly, because everything turns on it. Two quite separate things have now landed on the same man. On one side, an expectation worked out in advance from what a good God would have reason to do, which was reached without opening a Gospel. On the other, a first-century life and an empty tomb, reached without doing any philosophy at all. Ask how likely it is that those two should meet on one person by accident, and the answer is: not very. So one of two things is true. Either God arranged the meeting, which is to say the resurrection happened, or God allowed the evidence to pile up around a man who did not rise, in which case he has permitted the whole world to be pointed at the wrong person and given it no way of telling. That second option is not a live one for a God who is perfectly good. Swinburne’s God does not plant fingerprints. So the coincidence itself becomes part of the evidence, and this is why he can say what he says while granting what he grants: the conclusion is not that the historical record is overwhelming, which he never claims, but that it does not have to be. This is the argument that produces the figure he is famous for, and it is a startling one to find in a work of philosophy: a probability of 97 in 100 that Jesus was God incarnate and rose from the dead. Be clear about what such a number is and is not. It is not a measurement. It is the output of assumptions he states openly and defends at length, and he says himself that if his estimate of the natural theology is badly wrong, the conclusion goes with it. Critics have pressed exactly there, and so have friends.

(Q) "I conclude that unless my assessment of how probable the evidence of natural theology makes the existence of God is very badly mistaken, it is very probable that Jesus was God Incarnate and that he rose from the dead." + Source: Richard Swinburne, "The Probability of the Resurrection of Jesus," Philosophia Christi 15 (2013), pages 239 to 252. The book-length version is The Resurrection of God Incarnate (2003). The famous number sits in the paragraph just before this one, and he arrives at it by naming his assumptions rather than hiding them: a probability of one half that there is a God, one half that such a God would become incarnate, a modest one tenth that the historical evidence would look as it does if the resurrection happened, and one in a thousand that the whole combination of prior and historical evidence would occur if it did not. On those figures, he writes, "the total evidence gives a probability of 97/100 that Jesus was God Incarnate who rose from the dead" (T5).

(Q) "I have no wish to worship a God who does not exist, and in consequence I have sometimes found myself beginning to pray, ‘O God, if you do not exist, help me to see that fact’!" + Source: Richard Swinburne, "Natural Theology and Orthodoxy: Spiritual Autobiography or the Vocation of a Natural Theologian," section X, in Rico Vitz, editor, Turning East: Contemporary Philosophers and the Ancient Christian Faith (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012). He is answering, in his own final reflections, the suspicion that a man who has defended the same worldview for sixty years is simply too stubborn to change his mind. His defence is not that he is unbiased but that the truth of the matter is what he actually cares about, and he offers the prayer as evidence.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) He made "probably" a respectable word in theology, and a generation of apologists learned the method from him. + For most of the twentieth century a Christian arguing for his faith had two respectable options and a lot of quiet embarrassment. He could try to prove God, in which case philosophers picked the proof apart and he was left with nothing. Or he could say that faith is not that sort of thing, which sounded pious and conceded the whole field. Swinburne offered a third way that had been sitting in plain sight in every laboratory and every courtroom: argue that the claim is more likely true than not, the way anyone argues about anything real. The machinery he brought with him has a name. Bayes’s theorem, worked out by an eighteenth-century English clergyman, is the piece of arithmetic that tells you how much a new fact should shift your confidence in an explanation, given how expected that fact would be if the explanation were true and how surprising it would be otherwise. Swinburne had spent a decade on it before he ever pointed it at God, and he insists that the qualitative judgment, very probable or not very probable, comes first and matters more than any figure. The method took. Timothy and Lydia McGrew argue the resurrection in the same idiom in a long chapter of the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, though they rest far more of the weight on the historical testimony itself than he does, and their work is where many readers meet the approach first. William Lane Craig argues the existence of God in public debate in recognisably this shape, a set of independent arguments each adding weight. A festschrift in his honour, meaning a volume of essays that other scholars write to mark what a colleague has done, appeared in 1994 under the title Reason and the Christian Religion, and Purdue held a conference on his themes in 2014. Swinburne himself has said he thinks he has "already had a small influence in edging Christianity a bit further towards intellectual respectability," which for a man of his precision is a considerable claim rather than a modest one. Behind it all lies an old and thoroughly biblical conviction, that the world itself testifies: "For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse." (Romans 1:20) Swinburne quotes that verse when he explains what natural theology is for, and points out that Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus all had their paragraph or two of argument from the world to its maker. What was new in him was not the project but the tools.

(†) Plantinga answered that the probabilities dwindle away, and the argument between them is still running. + The most interesting objection to Swinburne came from the other great Christian philosopher of his generation, and it is not that his arguments fail but that his method leaks. Alvin Plantinga called it the problem of dwindling probabilities, and the trouble it points at is the sort anyone meets who has ever planned a journey with four legs to it. Each leg is likely enough on its own. The whole trip is another matter. Follow the chain Swinburne builds. There is a God, probably. Such a God would probably reveal himself. The revelation would probably be found in the teaching of Jesus. That teaching is probably true, because he probably rose. Each link may be generously strong, say nine chances in ten, and a reader nodding along at every step may feel the case getting stronger as it goes. It is doing the opposite. Probabilities multiply along a chain rather than adding, so four links at nine in ten leave you at about two in three, and two more links after that bring you down to a coin toss. Plantinga’s worry is that a believer who reaches the great truths of the gospel this way ends up holding them at a confidence that would embarrass a weather forecaster, and that is not what Christian faith has ever looked like from the inside. Swinburne’s reply is technical and fair. Plantinga has calculated the probability of one route to the conclusion, and the conclusion may be reached by several. If it might be true that God endorsed the church without endorsing every extrapolation of Jesus’s teaching, then that path adds its own probability to the total, and the honest sum is larger than any single chain. He grants that the probability still shrinks. He denies that it shrinks as fast as the long argument suggests. Under this lies a real disagreement about what Christian belief is, and each man pressed the other on it. Plantinga holds that a believer can be entirely within his rights with no argument at all, because belief in God can be properly basic, believed directly rather than inferred. Swinburne answered him in a paper called "Plantinga on Warrant" in 2001: an account of knowledge that never asks whether a belief is likely to be true on the evidence has left out the question most people are actually asking. Christians of both temperaments have taken sides ever since, and the argument has been good for both positions. Nor is the criticism only from that quarter. In 2018 three Christians in the sciences and philosophy, Andrew Briggs, Andrew Steane and Hans Halvorson, published a wide-ranging book that stopped for a few pages to doubt whether the probabilistic project can be carried through at all, on the grounds that nobody knows what numbers to put in. It is the complaint a reader is likeliest to arrive with, and it deserves the hearing it gets. Swinburne answered them objection by objection, in public, in his own words, which is how he has handled criticism for sixty years. A great deal of why the field looks the way it does now comes down to that habit.

(†) His theodicy gives every suffering a job to do, and Christians as much as atheists have refused to follow him there. + The criticism that has followed Swinburne longest is aimed at something he actually wrote, and it comes from Christians as much as from atheists. It is not that he defends God against the problem of evil. It is how. His argument requires that every instance of suffering be doing some work, because a good God does not permit what serves no purpose. That commits him to some hard sentences, and he does not flinch from writing them. Fewer people maimed in the Lisbon earthquake would have meant fewer people with the opportunity to show courage and fewer with the opportunity to show compassion. The starving, the persecuted and the abused, he writes, are of use to the wealthy on whose doorstep they appear, because but for them the wealthy would have no opportunity to be of use at all. Three objections press hardest. - It proves too much. If suffering is valuable because of the responses it makes possible, the argument seems to license leaving it in place, and Swinburne has to work hard to explain why we should ever relieve any of it. His answer is that God’s reasons for permitting an evil are not our reasons for allowing it, since our obligation to help is one of the very goods at stake. It is a real answer, and readers differ on whether it is enough. - It makes people instruments. The charge is that a victim becomes a device for producing virtue in somebody else. Swinburne meets it directly by arguing that being of use is a good for the sufferer too, and he says the thought lies very near the surface of the New Testament, citing for it the words of Christ that Paul recalled in his farewell to the elders of the church at Ephesus, "It is more blessed to give than to receive." (Acts 20:35) That is a serious answer and it is also the point at which most of his critics get off the train, because it asks a person in agony to accept a good he did not choose. - Scripture does less explaining than he does. When God finally answers Job, he does not supply the reasons. He asks where Job was when he laid the foundation of the earth (Job 38:4). The New Testament weighs present suffering against future glory (Romans 8:18) and tells Christians to weep with those who weep (Romans 12:15), and the shortest verse in the Bible is not an argument but a reaction: "Jesus wept." (John 11:35) A theodicy that accounts for every pain is not obviously the posture Scripture takes toward pain. To his credit, none of this is news to him. His own lecture stops mid-argument to say that these are horrible things and that we must weep when they happen (T4), and he holds that God owes compensation to anyone whose life on earth was on balance bad. The question his readers have to settle is whether a theodicy this complete is the right kind of answer, and Christians who admire everything else he has done are found on both sides of it.