Richard Swinburne:
Richard Swinburne short intellectual autobiography
I began my academic life at the University of Oxford,
with undergraduate (1954-7) and graduate (1957-9) degrees in philosophy and then a diploma in
theology (1959-60). During my period as an undergraduate I developed my abiding
interest in all the central problems of philosophy, and especially in the issue
of whether there is adequate justification for belief in God, and more particularily
in the doctrines of the Christian religion. (I have been a Christian all my
life, and a member of the Orthodox church since 1995.) I saw the achievements of
the sciences as central to the modern world-view ; and so (financed by two
research fellowships - a Fereday Fellowship at St Johns College, Oxford, and a
Leverhulme Fellowship in the history and philosophy of science at the
University of Leeds) I devoted the next three
years to learning much about the history of the physical and biological
sciences and beginning to philosophise about them. In 1963 I became a lecturer
in philosophy at the University of Hull.
Almost all my work for the next nine years was concerned with the philosophy
of science. My first book Space and Time was published in 1968 and
sought to give an account of the nature of space and time in the light of the
detailed achievements of Relativity theory and cosmology. My next large-scale
book An Introduction to Confirmation Theory was concerned with the formalisation
by the calculus of probability, of what is evidence for what. My move to be Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Keele in 1972 coincided with a shift of academic focus to the
philosophy of religion on which so far I had
published only one small book, The Concept of Miracle
(1971). The next twelve years saw the
publication of my trilogy on the philosophy of theism - The Coherence of
Theism (1997, revised ed.,1993), The Existence of God (1979, 2nd
edition 2004), and Faith & Reason (1981, 2nd edition
2005). The central work, The
Existence of God, sought to reestablish natural theology , by providing
probabilistic arguments from the general features of the world to the existence
of God; and this is the achievement for which I am best known. My work in the
early 1980s on the relation of mind and body saw published form first in Personal
Identity (co-authored with Sydney Shoemaker, 1984); and more fully in The
Evolution of the Soul (1986, revised ed., 1997). In 1985 I became Nolloth Professor of the
Philosophy of Christian Religion at the University of Oxford. For the next eighteen
years my work was focused on the meaning
and justification of the doctrines which distinguish Christianity from other
religions, and this work saw published form in four books- Responsibility and Atonement, (1989), Revelation
(1992; 2nd ed, 2007), The Christian God (1994), and Providence
and the Problem of Evil (1998). Epistemic
Justification, an examination of what constitutes the justification of a
belief (and what constitutes knowledge) was published in 2001. The
Resurrection of God Incarnate was an examination with the aid of all my past
work on what is evidence for what, of the evidence for the bodily Resurrection
of Jesus, was published in 2003. As the Resurrection of Jesus provides a
substantial ground for believing many of the detailed claims of Christian
doctrine, this was a necessary final piece of my apologetic programme. Since my
retirement from the Nolloth Professorship in 2002, much of my work has been
devoted to producing 2nd editions (largely rewritten and updated) of
previous works - The Existence of God (2004), Faith & Reason
(2005), Revelation (2007), and The Coherence of Theism (2016).. I have also written two short 'popular' books
summarising my work on the philosophy of religion Is there a God? (1996), and Was
Jesus God? (2008). For the next five years I worked again on the issue of
the relation of mind and body, and I worked also on the connected issue of
whether humans have free will and the relevance to it of recent neuroscience.
This work resulted in a new book Mind,
Brain, and Free Will,
published in 2013, in which I argue that all humans consist of two
parts -soul (essential part) and body (contingent part), and that we
probably have free will (of an indeterministic kind). During the next
two years I worked mainly on the 2nd edition (largely rewritten and updated) of The
Coherence of Theism, published in 2016. This book
seeks to produce a coherent account of what 'There is a God' means (and
so
examines what it is for a being to be omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly
good
etc.), which is a prolegomenon to my arguments in favour of the
existence of
God. Since then I have written articles on various philosophical
topics, and I have written a more 'popular' book, with the title Are We Bodies or Souls?, summarizing and developing my views
on the nature of the soul and its connection with the body, which was published in 2019; a slightly revised version of this was published in 2023.James Sterba and I have written a "debate book", Could a good God permit so much suffering? which will be published in the spring of 2024; he argues that the occurrence of horrendous suffering entails the non-existence of God, while I argue that it does not entail this; and that such suffering does not make the existence of God improbable. I was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1993.Over many years I
have held visiting professorships at American and other overseas universities,
and lectured extensively for shorter periods in very many different
countries.
I have been awarded Honorary Doctorates by the Catholic Universitty of
Lublin.(2015),by Dimitrie Cantemir Christian University, Bucharest
(2016), by the International Academy of Philosophy, Liechtenstein (2017), and by the New Georgian University, Poti (2023).
Visiting Professorships and Named Special Lectureships
1969-70 Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Maryland.
1975-78 Wilde Lecturer in Natural and Comparative
Religion, University of Oxford.
1977 Forwood Lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Religion, University
of Liverpool.
1980 Marrett Memorial Lecturer, Exeter College, Oxford.
1981 Special Lecturer (in Theology), University of London.
1982 Distinguished Visiting Scholar, University of Adelaide.
1983 Theology 'Faculty' Lecturer, University College, Cardiff.
1982-84 Gifford Lecturer, University of Aberdeen.
1987 Visiting Professor of Philosophy, Syracuse University, Spring Semester.
1987 Edward Cadbury Lecturer, University of Birmingham
1990 Wade Memorial Lecturer, St Louis University.
1992 Indian Council for Philosophical Research, visiting Lecturer.
1992 Dotterer Lecturer, Penn State University.
1997 Aquinas Lecturer, Marquette University.
2002 (March )Visiting Professor of Philosophy, University of Rome (La
Sapienza).
2002 (November) Visiting Professor of Philosophy (Kaminsky Lecturer), Catholic University of Lublin.
2003 (Spring Semester) Visiting Professor, Divinity School, Yale University.
2003(Fall Semester) Visiting (Collins) Professor of Philosophy, St Louis University.
2006 Paul Holmer Lecturer, University of Minnesota
2008 Lawson Lecturer, Stetson University
2009 Forwood Lecturer , University of Liverpool
2013 Sophia /Forum Lecturer,, Azusa Paciific Uniiverslty,
2014 Gilbert Ryle Lecturer,, Trent University (Ontario)
2015 Gunning Lecturer, University of Edinburgh
2016 Edith Stein Lecturer, Franciscan University, Ohio
2016 Converse Yates Cate Lecturer, Oklahoma State University .
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