While his highly technical lectures may not net Christianity many fresh converts, Mr. Swinburne's efforts to bring inductive logic to bear on questions of faith have earned him a considerable reputation in the small but vibrant world of Christian academic philosophy. Thanks to the efforts of Mr. Swinburne and a handful of other nimble scholarly minds—including Alvin Plantinga at the University of Notre Dame and Nicholas Wolterstorff at Yale—religious belief no longer languishes in a state of philosophical disrepute. Deploying a range of sophisticated logical arguments developed over the last 25 years, Christian philosophers have revived faith as a subject of rigorous academic debate, steadily chipping away at the assumption—all but axiomatic in philosophy since the Enlightenment—that belief in God is logically indefensible.


The articles carefully avoids identifying the premises and the variables named as combining to provide the 97% probability, which is not assigned to the existence of God, but to the resurrection. One of the variables Swinburne does mention is estimation of witness reliabililty. I'd love to see the logic behind that parameter.


A