2.29 Hell, the Soul, and Evil with Richard Swinburne

Why believe in hell? What about the soul? This week I interview the one and only Professor Richard Swinburne! He is one of the foremost philosophers of religion in the world and one of the most cited and researched scholars in the world. Swinburne is a Fellow of the British Academy and was Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at the University of Oxford from 1985 until 2002. He is best known for his trilogy on the philosophy of theism (The Coherence of Theism, The Existence of God, and Faith and Reason). The central book of this trilogy, The Existence of God (2nd edition, 2004, Oxford University Press), claims that arguments from the existence of (1) laws of nature, (2) those laws being such as to lead to the evolution of human bodies, and (3) humans being conscious, make it probable that there is a God.

He has written a tetralogy on the meaning and justification of central Christian doctrines (including Providence and the Problem of Evil, Oxford University Press, 1998). He has written at various lengths on many of the other major issues of philosophy (including epistemology, the study of what makes a belief rational or justified, in his book Epistemic Justification); and he has applied his views about what is made probable by what evidence to the evidence about the Resurrection of Jesus in The Resurrection of God Incarnate. He is also well known for his defense of ‘substance dualism’ (the view that humans consist of two parts–soul and body), especially in his book The Evolution of the Soul and most recently Mind, Brain, and Free Will, Oxford University Press, 2013. Arabic and German editions, forthcoming.

Finally, Professor Swinburne has a new book out, Are We Bodies or Souls?, (Oxford University Press, 2019). This is simpler but in some ways more fully developed version of the part of Mind, Brain, and Free Will which defends substance dualism.