Richard Swinburne
British philosopher of religion, for many years at Oxford, and a founder of the modern analytic case for theism. His argument that perfect love requires exactly three divine persons is a descendant of Richard of St Victor's, and has been criticised in print for stopping at three without a reason.
Swinburne is the central figure in the late-twentieth-century revival of natural theology in the analytic style: cumulative-case argument for the existence of God, worked out with probability and stated in premises.
On the Trinity he argues that a perfectly loving God must share love, that shared love requires a third to be loved by two, and so that there are three divine persons. It is Richard of St Victor's argument in modern dress.
Its published critique, in the *Journal of Analytic Theology*, presses two charges: that singletons are not of conceptual necessity worse than couples, so the ascent does not run; and that the stop at three is not defended, only asserted. The first charge transfers back to Richard. The second does not, because Richard wrote a book against exactly that objection.
Where this comes up
Sources
- T. J. Mawson, “Swinburne's A Priori Argument for Social Trinitarianism”, Journal of Analytic Theology 13.1 (2025)