Richard Swinburne

Richard Swinburne is a British philosopher of religion who has constructed the most systematic probabilistic defence of Christian theism in contemporary analytic philosophy. His trilogy—The Coherence of Theism, The Existence of God, and Faith and Reason—applies Bayesian probability theory to the existence of God, arguing that theism is simpler than any naturalistic alternative and is therefore prior on grounds of probability.

Swinburne argues that the simplicity of theism—positing one infinite being—gives it a high prior probability, and that the fine-tuning of the universe, the existence of consciousness, and the occurrence of religious experience all raise the posterior probability of God's existence to greater than one half. His framework has defined the field of analytic philosophy of religion for four decades, providing a rigorous target for atheist philosophers and a systematic defence for Christian thinkers.