It's broken down into three sections, on literary theory and the philosophy of meaning, the probability of God and how to read a complex body of literature like the bible. That makes it seem as if the book has more of a structure than it does. Swinburne is all over the place with arbitrary arguments and weak (technically) propositions and structures for positions he has taken in advance and needs to support. Argument from an a priori supposition is not ever going to convince me of a point and seems a particularly weak way of making one's case. More on this later.
The first part is excellent and lays out quite clearly a number of important points about the nature of meaning, communication and language. He carefully summarises the idea of analogy, literalness and metaphor, all of which are crucial when we are trying to think clearly about meaning. If you're familiar with my thinking at all you'll have heard me criticise logical positivists as much as other types of fundamentalist and Swinburne does lay out a useful framework for thinking about complex ideas.
However, it begins to fall apart after this. Part two, on the probability, or likelihood of God, is weak. Very weak. It mistakes being able to create a plausible story for creating a case for a probable event and crassly ignores the ideas of boundaries in consistent logical propositions and argument by inference. It's almost as bad as reading some evolutionary mumbo jumbo about why we're altruistic or mainly right handed.
It's certainly weak both technically and from the point of view of being convincing.
Part three starts out better, looking at how meaning in complex documents (and he focuses on the canonical catholic/orthodox bible - that is including the apocrypha which protestants exclude) and how as a collected work they are a genre of themselves and, more interestingly, how to read them for what they might actually say. THe application of literary theory to the bible has a long history but the freshness in Swinburne's work is how he marries this with a discussion of how one can regard literal, analogy and metaphorical aspects of the texts are complementary and layered. It's a mature view of a complex collection of works.
He also looks at how the Christian community has viewed the texts over the last couple of millennia and makes the interesting point that most communities and their thinkers have read the bible extremely richly and with much colour and it's only really the more recent, imaginatively poor English speaking protestants who have eschewed the vivid pictures and metaphors in the text for a rather crude and mean set of interpretations. Like a poor man's rationalism.
Unfortunately it all falls apart again as he tries to look at how such texts can provide moral teaching. He comes here with a clear conservative catholic slant and rather than honestly look at the texts provides weak arguments for how his own orthodoxy/praxy is correct. Some of the arguments are painful in their convoluted nature or, worse, just how flimsy and arbitrary a set of reasons is advanced to support something that by analogy is rejected in other situations. Even within this book.
Finally there's an appendix on the probability of God. Written by someone who clearly doesn't understand statistics. Dear oh dear. If he did he'd know that this category of argument is about as meaningful as arguing about the number of angels that can be fit onto a pinhead. Both a category error and completely unfruitful.
Like I said at the beginning, a very mixed bag.
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