Responsibility and Atonement by Richard Swinburne

It is also available on YouTube (scroll down – you can subscribe here). You can also listen t o this episode on Stitcher or iTunes (please subscribe, rate, and review us in either or both – directions here). How has he been so productive? What advice does he have for aspiring analytic theologians? How has his work influenced academic theology? In this episode, I interview Professor Swinburne about his life and work. On a warm September day-after-the-conference, Professor Swinburne and I sat outside on a bench on Purdue’s lovely campus.

The conference was called Faith and Reason: Themes from Swinburne, and it was hosted by Purdue University. You may agree or disagree, but you will think. Professor Swinburne has a manly way of taking a stand on hard issues, fashion be damned. For my part, his The Christian God was the book that inspired and provoked me to look deeply into the issue of the Trinity. Many “big guns” of philosophy of religion came out to present at the conference, and to a person they related how Swinburne had inspired them to think deeply and carefully about various philosophical and theological issues. Richard Swinburne has produced an unparalleled string of carefully argued, in many cases ground-breaking books in philosophy of religion and in analytic theology (see the links below). The initiated hold Swinburne in awe because of his writings. For the uninitiated, this is what “natural theology” is (also here). In September of 2014 I was privileged to attend a conference in honor of the greatest living natural theologian. This is now the definitive version of a classic in the philosophy of religion.Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Email | RSS

The overall structure of the discussion and its conclusion have been retained for this new edition, but much has been changed in order to strengthen the argumentation and to take account of Swinburne's subsequent work on the nature of consciousness and the problem of evil, and of the latest philosophical and scientific writing, especially in respect of the laws of nature and the argument from fine-tuning. He claims that while none of these arguments are deductively valid, they do give inductive support to theism and that, even when the argument from evil is weighed against them, taken together they offer good grounds to support the probability that there is a God. Swinburne gives a rigorous and penetrating analysis of the most important arguments for theism: the cosmological argument arguments from the existence of laws of nature and the 'fine-tuning' of the universe from the occurrence of consciousness and moral awareness and frommiracles and religious experience.

No other work has made a more powerful case for the probability of the existence of God. Richard Swinburne presents a substantially rewritten and updated edition of his most celebrated book.

Responsibility and Atonement by Richard Swinburne