ABSTRACT
Most analytic philosophers of religion pay scant attention to the history of their discipline, although many see some level of continuity between their own aims and those of their predecessors, even if the methods need drastically revamping. Richard Swinburne, for example, describes a rapid expansion of a new publicly acceptable atheism in the eighteenth century, which made it an imperative to justify the core claims of religious belief. Swinburne locates himself firmly in the tradition of inductive arguments for God’s existence, which flourished in the eighteenth century and, as he sees it, reached their peak in William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802). The subsequent abandonment of natural theology after Hume and Kant had their say was, in his view, a mistake. What he sees as part of the long and glorious past of using the ‘best available secular criteria to clarify and justify religious claims’ should, he thinks, have a long and industrious future. 1
