Richard Swinburne is a Fellow of the British Academy. He was Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at the University of Oxford from 1985 until 2002, and before that was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Keele from 1972 until 1984. 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 the traditional arguments of natural theology can be rephrased as cumulative probabilistic arguments, which together make it significantly more probable than not that there is a God.

Professor Swinburne concentrates in particular on arguments from the existence of laws of nature, those laws as being such as to lead to the evolution of human bodies, and humans being conscious. He has written a tetralogy of books on the meaning and justification of central Christian doctrines (including Providence and the Problem of Evil, Oxford University Press, 1998). He is also well known for his defence of substance dualism about mind and body, especially in his book The Evolution of The Soul. 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.