Swinburne received an open scholarship to study classics at Exeter College, Oxford, but in fact graduated with a first-classBachelor of Arts degree in philosophy, politics, and economics. Swinburne has held various professorships through his career in academia. From 1972 to 1985 he taught at Keele University. During part of this time, he gave the Gifford lectures at Aberdeen from 1982 to 1984, resulting in the book The Evolution of the Soul. From 1985 until his retirement in 2002 he was Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at the University of Oxford. He has continued to publish regularly since his retirement. Swinburne has been an active author throughout his career, producing a major book every two to three years. He has played an important role in recent debate over the mind–body problem, defending a substance dualism that recalls the work of René Descartes in important respects. His books are primarily very technical works of academic philosophy, but he has written at the popular level as well. Of the non-technical works, his Is There a God?, summarising for a non-specialist audience many of his arguments for the existence of God and plausibility in the belief of that existence, is probably the most popular, and is available in 22 languages.
Christian apologetics
A member of the Orthodox Church, he 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, but metaphysically necessary in a way he defines in his The Christian God. Other subjects on which Swinburne writes include personal identity, and epistemic justification. He has written in defence of Cartesian dualism and libertarian free will. Although he is best known for his vigorous rational 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 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, to more specific Christian beliefs. Swinburne moves in his writing program from the philosophical to the theological, building his case rigorously, 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 with Richard Swinburne in 2015–2016 for its Science and Religion collection held by the British Library.
