Posted by ⋅ August 31, 2011 ⋅ I’ve been reading through The Miracle of Theism by J.L. The book is known as one of the more powerful philosophical explications of atheism.
The Miracle Of Theism
You can read my thoughts on the introduction (along with links to the rest of the series as they appear). Chapter one thoughts: Mackie begins with a brief outline of Hume’s argument, which he first outlines in five points, and refines it further thereafter. The five points from Hume, according to Mackie (p.
14-16) are: 1) “Hume says there are no really well-attested miracles”; 2) “the human mind has a positive tendency to believe what is strange and marvelous”; 3) “reports of miracles ‘are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barborous nations’. Where they are believed by civilized peoples, these ‘will be found to have received them from ignorant and barbarous ancestors’, so that the stories will have acquired the authority of received opinions before the nations in question have developed powers of criticism and traditions of rational inquiry”; 4) “different religions are in conflict: their claims therefore undermine and destroy one another”; 5) “Hume says, the very fact that a miracle story is used to introduce a new religion or to support an existing one is an additional reason for skepticism.
Many people have an intense desire to believe in some religious object” I see very little to commend among these five points. In fact, I find them all rather horribly mistaken. In regards to 1, this is simply begging the question. This “argument” is less a premise than it is an axiomatic denial of miraculous claims. It’s a broad, sweeping claim with no reason to accept it. There is nothing to support the second claim.
I actually see it as a bit of “folk psychology of religion,” as it were. Isn’t it funny that the person, like Hume, who makes this point is believing a rather marvelous claim: that they are epistemically in a position to judge everyone else? It’s quite patronizing to make a point like 2, and given that the only evidence Mackie is willing to offer to support the claim is a vague hand wave towards people who believe in flying saucers, I don’t see any positive evidence to accept 2. Regarding 3, we have a wonderful example of the genetic fallacy. Not only that, but I think we have a decent amount of evidence to show that this claim is simply false.
While there are certainly persons who uncritically accept reports of miracles, there is a startling tradition within Christianity specifically which tells us to test such things for truth (cf. The comment to test the truth of spirits by the received Spirit in 1 John 4:1).
And, of course, we could grant the third point and still find little reason to undermine the truth of miracles. Just because we have “received opinions” doesn’t mean these opinions are false.
Mackie/Hume again just assume falsity, and apply folk psychology. It’s not a very objective method. Point 4 is interesting because Mackie grants that “4 has less force now than it had when Hume was writing.” But this is due, according to Mackie, not to the radical overvaluing of religious conflict, but because, according to him, various religions have made efforts to conform and take in aspects of each other—allowing for a broader spectrum and less internal conflict with claims of miracles from other religions. Fair enough, but I think there’s an even better reason to think the argument has little force: it doesn’t follow that because claims conflict, they are all false. Or, as I often like to put it, “Diversity of opinions does not entail the falsehood of them all.” I still struggle to see what the problem is supposed to be about miracle reports.
It’s clearly false to say that they would cancel each other out, as Hume so ineloquently assumes. Suppose we apply this to another example: a murder investigation. One expert witness comes forward and says that the DNA evidence is positive. Another expert says it is negative. According to Hume’s standards, they’re both wrong, because they have conflicting opinons! But one of them has to be correct. I see no reason to accept 4 whatsoever because it literally tells us nothing useful.
Against 5, there must be some argument to show that 5 should be true, apart from more folk psychology. What evidence does Hume have to show us what he is saying is correct? I haven’t seen any offered. Interestingly, Mackie actually grants a number of things which give credibility to the Resurrection. For example, he grants that independent witnesses increase the value of testimony (25). But, perhaps with the argument from the historicity of the resurrection in mind, he quickly modifies this account in an ad hoc way to provide himself a way out: “Not only in remote and barbarous times, but also in recent ones, we are usually justified in suspecting that what looks like distinct reports of a remarkable occurrence arise from different strands of a single tradition between which there has already been communication” (26). But of course Mackie gives no reason to accept this premise, and that is what it is: a premise.
Mackie is positing that given a “remarkable occurrence” which is testified by different sources, we are justified in believing that they aren’t really independent, but are strands of a single tradition. Why should we believe him? What justifies us (epistemically) to do this? It is a rather monumental claim made by Mackie here, because he’s literally telling us that we are justified in question-begging any independent testimonies of miraculous reports out of existence. Finally, Mackie closes the chapter with another remark similar to those he’s grown accustomed to throughout the chapter: “it is all too easy to explain a miracle/violation of a natural law immediately by the automatic communication of beliefs between persons and the familiar psychological processes of wish fulfillment, and ultimately by what Hume himself was later to call ‘the natural history of religion’” (29). Well this sounds quite impressive, but Mackie has given us no reason to think that these explanations serve as the best explanation or presented us with evidence for the supposition that a natural explanation is always preferable to a supernatural one.
I can’t say I’m very impressed with Mackie’s critique of miracles. Navionics charts. Hume’s argument fails to take into account anything but folk psychology, and Mackie’s additions really just amount to “Beg the question against the believer, and you’ve explained miracles.” SDG.
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By viewing any part of this site, you are agreeing to this usage policy. Posted by ⋅ July 13, 2011 ⋅ This post will serve as a base for links to the rest of the chapters as I read them: One reader of my blog recently challenged me to take on the heady atheists. Rather than focusing on the kind of basic fallacies found in various atheistic objections to belief, he suggested I should devote some of my philosophical energy to rebutting the claims of atheists who should actually be taken seriously. I took the advice to heart, acquired copies of J.L. Mackie’s and Graham Oppy’s. I’ve started reading Mackie’s book.
I will be posting thoughts as I continue to read through it, and tie it into an extended critique of his arguments. For today, I’ll discuss only the introduction. I found a few areas of agreement. Mackie noted that a cumulative case would not point to certainty, but could overcome objections to individual arguments. I agree with him here. I tend to favor a “cumulative case” type of argument, though I think that some theistic arguments could easily stand on their own to prove general aspects of theism (like a first cause). I find a bit of difficulty with Mackie’s rather dismissive attitude towards faith (p.
As tends to be the case when faith is discussed by non-theists, he just brought up arguments which he believes shows that reason must be the basis for belief, and then moved on. But I’m not totally convinced that faith can be tossed aside as it is so often.
First, I think of Plantinga’s proper function account and I think that while it is ultimately based on reason, it allows for one to be justified in belief through faith. Second, I’m not persuaded that faith cannot work as a kind of reason or discovery of reality. Faith, as it were, seems to account for many of our beliefs (other minds, for example?).
So I think while I tend to be an evidentialist when it comes to these things, I am skeptical of a simple dismissal of faith. If anyone could help me with these points, I’d appreciate it. Mackie discussed the possibility of naturalistic explanations of religion. I’m continually perplexed by the pervasiveness of this idea.Why should the origin of a belief undermine its truth? This would only work if the origin would serve to discredit the belief itself (as in Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism). And I’ve been similarly unconvinced when it comes to others who argue that an account of how religious came to be would undermine the belief. I know Plantinga gives the idea more credit than I: in Warranted Christian Belief, I think, I recall him arguing extensively against naturalistic accounts.
But I don’t see them as much of a threat, and I admit I groaned a bit when Mackie started going in that direction. It always seems like the kind of “hidden weapon” atheists have: “We have an evolutionary account of religion!” Of course whether that is true or not, I don’t see it as very persuasive. —— The preceding post is the property of J.W. Wartick (apart from citations, which are the property of their respective owners) and should not be reproduced in part or in whole without the expressed consent of the author. All content on this site is the property of J.W. Wartick and is made available for individual and personal usage. If you cite from these documents, whether for personal or professional purposes, please give appropriate citation with both the name of the author (J.W.
Wartick) and a link to the original URL. By viewing any part of this site, you are agreeing to this usage policy.
Author by: Richard Swinburne Language: en Publisher by: Oxford University Press Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 28 Total Download: 315 File Size: 46,6 Mb Description: This book is based on the author's Wilde Lectures delivered in the University of Oxford in 1976-7. It forms part of a trilogy which began with The Coherence of Theism (Clarendon Press, 1977, reissued in paperback, 1986) and was completed by Faith and Reason (Clarendon Press, 1981, reissued in paperback, 1983), but it does not in any way presuppose knowledge of the earlier work. For the revised fifth impression of the paperback edition, Professor Swinburne has added a new preface, and two new appendices: one a reply to Mackie and one a discussion of the argument from `fine tuning'. Author by: Jacob H. Friesenhahn Language: en Publisher by: Routledge Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 84 Total Download: 692 File Size: 53,7 Mb Description: Why does God permit the great suffering and evil that we see in our world? This basic question of human existence receives a fresh answer in this book as the mystery of evil is explored in the context of the mystery of the Trinity. God's permission of evil and the way in which suffering can lead human persons into the life of the Trinity are discussed in dialogue with the great Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar.
In the light of Balthasar's model of the Trinity as divine self-giving love, we gain a profound grasp of the nature of suffering in human life by placing our suffering in the context of the divine life of the Triune God. Author by: Michael Martin Language: en Publisher by: Temple University Press Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 84 Total Download: 165 File Size: 50,5 Mb Description: In this book Michael Martin provides logical reasons for being an atheist. Carefully examining the current debate in Anglo-American analytic philosophy regarding God's existence, Martin presents a comprehensive critique of the arguments for the existence of God and a defense of arguments against the existence of God, showing in detail their relevance to atheism. Claiming that atheism is a rational position while theistic beliefs are not, he relies both on logic and evidence and confines his efforts to showing the irrationality of belief in a personal supreme being who is omniscient, omnipotent, perfect, and the creator of heaven and earth.
The author's approach is two-fold. By presenting and criticizing arguments that have been advanced in favor of belief, he makes a case for 'negative atheism.' By offering arguments against atheism and defending it from these attacks, he presents a case for 'positive atheism.' Along the way, he confronts the views of numerous philosophers—among them Anselm, Aquinas, Plantinga, Hick, and Swinburne—and refutes both classical and contemporary arguments that have been advanced through the history of this debate.
In his conclusion, Martin considers what would and would not follow if his main arguments were widely accepted, and he defines and distinguishes atheism from other 'isms' and movements. Building on the work of religious skeptics and atheists of the past and present, he justifies his reconstruction of this philosophical dispute by citing some of the most interesting and important arguments for atheism and criticisms of arguments for the existence of God that have appeared in recent journal articles and have yet to be systematically addressed.
Author note: Michael Martin is Professor of Philosophy at Boston University and author of several books, including The Legal Philosophy of H.L.A. Hart: A Critical Appraisal and The Case Against Christianity (both from Temple). Author by: Kelly James Clark Language: en Publisher by: Broadview Press Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 21 Total Download: 151 File Size: 46,5 Mb Description: 'The recent revolution in the philosophy of religion has led to a dramatic and profound reconsideration of theistic arguments, the problem of evil, the rationality of religious belief, and the concept of God. This new anthology contains the best of both classical and contemporary sources. It includes a range of well-known selections together with a variety of pieces that are rarely anthologised; several are published here for the first time.
The collection maintains a balance between the challenging and the accessible. In all, the book includes over 50 selections in seven sections; each section opens with an introduction by the editor.' -BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Author by: Robert Merrihew Adams Language: en Publisher by: Oxford University Press Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 48 Total Download: 863 File Size: 54,6 Mb Description: Robert Merrihew Adams has been a leader in renewing philosophical respect for the idea that moral obligation may be founded on the commands of God.
This collection of Adams' essays, two of which are previously unpublished, draws from his extensive writings on philosophical theology that discuss metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical issues surrounding the concept of God-whether God exists or not, what God is or would be like, and how we ought to relate ourselves to such a being. Adams studies the relation between religion and ethics, delving into an analysis of moral arguments for theistic belief. In several essays, he applies contemporary studies in the metaphysics of individuality, possibility and necessity, and counterfactual conditionals to issues surrounding the existence of God and problems of evil. Author by: James Franklin Harris Language: en Publisher by: Springer Science & Business Media Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 39 Total Download: 924 File Size: 43,7 Mb Description: This book should prove to be an invaluable resource and reference for both scholars and students interested in any problem in the area of analytic philosophy of religion. Analytic Philosophy of Religion is a thorough examination of the major issues that have occupied twentieth-century Anglo-American, analytic philosophy of religion and the positions that have been developed by the major figures in the field.
The author also develops his own critical reactions to these positions and, in many cases, his own positions as well. Attention is focused on what have proven to be the enduring, major problems of analytic philosophy of religion: the development and nature of analytic philosophy, the problem of religious language, the nature of God, arguments for the existence of God, religious experience, religious epistemology, religion and science, the problem of evil, naturalism and humanism, religion and ethics, and religious pluralism. For contents and a free preview for all three volumes: www.new-in-philosophy.com.
Author by: David S. Clarke Language: en Publisher by: SUNY Press Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 71 Total Download: 443 File Size: 49,7 Mb Description: Human beings have thoughts, sensations, and feelings and think that at least some of this mental life is shared with domestic and wild animals. But, are there reduced degrees of mentality found in mosquitoes, bacteria, and even more primitive natural bodies? Panpsychists think so and have defended this belief throughout the history of philosophy, beginning with the ancient Greeks and continuing into the present. In this bold, challenging book, D.
Clarke outlines reasons for accepting panpsychism and defends the doctrine against its critics. He proposes it as an alternative to the mechanistic materialism and humanism that dominate present-day philosophy.
A miracle (from the Latin mirari, to wonder), at a first and very rough approximation, is an event that is not explicable by natural causes alone. A reported miracle excites wonder because it appears to require, as its cause, something beyond the reach of human action and natural causes. Historically, the appeal to miracles has formed one of the primary lines of argument in favor of specific forms of theism, the argument typically being that the event in question can best (or can only) be explained as the act of a particular deity.
Is there reason to believe in a god? Philosophers and theologians have debated this question for centuries, offering arguments and counter-arguments taking many different forms. More recently scientists and historians have joined the fray to weigh in on things from their own perspectives. Still, well over two millennia later, and in spite of a bounty of examples of religiously-inspired violence, we find the question persists.
According to some, the survival of theism – the belief in god(s) – is nothing short of miraculous; it testifies to the power and value of faith. To others, its survival is a miracle of another sort, a testament only to the continuous credulity and irrationality of humankind. Mackie’s The Miracle of Theism (1982) is a comprehensive look at a variety of answers to the question of god’s existence, from this latter sense of miracle. Mackie was a 20th century philosopher best known for his critiques of religion and meta-ethics. Like David Hume, his greatest critical work on religion was published posthumously, following his death in 1981. The Miracle of Theism is regarded today as one of the most influential and forceful analyses of religion, particularly coming from an atheistic position.
At 262 pages in length, it manages to be thorough and concise, tackling the classic arguments for god, more modern variations and arguments put forward by Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, John Leslie, and others, as well as the problem of evil and some non-traditional theistic claims. It is, without a doubt, an essential text for those interested in philosophy of religion. God, Miracles, and the Universe Mackie begins with a definition of god borrowed from Swinburne: a person without a body, creator/sustainer of the universe, all-knowing, all-powerful, omnipresent, perfectly good, a free agent, the source of moral obligation, and the necessary being worthy of worship. This seems an apt description of the monotheistic deity conceived of during the Middle Ages, which served as the focus of theological musings like those of Anselm and Aquinas, whose arguments and beliefs greatly helped to shape what is often called traditional theism. Of course, it remains in dispute to what extent (if any) the god portrayed in the Torah, the New Testament, and the Qur’an fits this traditional definition, but it is nevertheless the case that many of the philosophical arguments for god seek to establish a being possessing some or all of the attributes listed.
Interestingly, though, the first chapter takes a more down-to-earth approach, looking at miracles and testimony through the arguments of David Hume. Mackie’s elucidation of Hume is quite compelling, dividing the discourse on miracles into two parts, a central argument and five points made against miracles that underlies the central argument. A number of theistic critiques of Hume that I have come across fail to distinguish these parts, frequently even omitting the central argument, and so make the mistake of thinking that Hume intended to build an a priori case against miracles. However, as Mackie explains, Hume’s main argument seems to be that we should only accept a miracle report when it is less likely that the report is false than that the miracle occurred.
The five points Hume makes about the insufficient attestation for miracles, our propensity to believe the seemingly absurd, how miracle reports derive from comparably ignorant ancestral cultures, the conflict of diverging religious claims, and our tendency to desire objects of religious belief, must be applied to any miracle report to ascertain the likelihood of it being true or false. Hume believes, as does Mackie, that no miracle claim has survived such rigorous evaluation. Most theists will surely disagree with this conclusion, but the burden is then on them to either meet the standard of evaluation, or show that the standard is an unreasonable a posteriori judge of testimony. Chapters two and three examine some of Descartes’ meditations, including his ontological argument, as well as the ontological arguments of Anselm and Plantinga. Mackie is hesitant to accept Kant’s criticism of the argument, that it incorrectly considers existence to be a predicate, yet he endorses another of Kant’s positions, that the ontological argument makes an unwarranted leap from conceptual to metaphysical necessity. 1 In chapter four, the author addresses Berkeley’s immaterial realism (the idea that this world is like a dream in god’s mind) by noting the strangeness of the detail we perceive and the changes we appear to instigate in the world, which seem to have no explanation if they’re nothing but ideas in the mind of god. Mackie engages with the cosmological argument in chapter five, responding to the contingency arguments of Leibniz and Aquinas, as well as the Kalト[ argument defended today by William Lane Craig, and a cosmological argument made by Swinburne.
To Leibniz, Mackie objects that the principle of sufficient reason – that nothing occurs without a sufficient reason why it is so and not otherwise – has too high a demand of explanations, that satisfactory answers must be “through and through”. This is not how science works or how ordinary causal inquiry works, though. In response to Craig and Swinburne, Mackie argues, among other things, that there is no reason why a “sheer origination of things, not determined by anything” should be seen as less acceptable than god, especially when we have no experience of disembodied intentions acting directly without any materials or instruments, as is supposed to be the case with god. Morality and God The moral argument is the subject of chapter six, where Mackie’s principle objection is that of moral subjectivism. I found this to be one of the weakest chapters in the book, not because of the defense of subjectivism, but because of all that is conceded to proponents of the moral argument. Mackie claims that objective moral values that supervene on natural features must be intrinsically action-guiding, that is that they give reasons for action that are independent of an agent’s desires or purposes. But then this means that the natural features cannot themselves be intrinsically action-guiding.
My problem with this understanding of objective moral value is that it’s incredibly difficult to see what exactly is moral about it. What does it mean to suggest that god has given us obligations that are intrinsically action-guiding? As best as I can see it, it simply means that god has given us reasons to avoid certain actions and to engage in other certain actions, and these reasons are independent of what we want. This creation of supervenient value, as Mackie terms it, is indistinguishable from the creation of supervenient value undertaken by many dictators and monarchs down through human history, imposing their own codes of conduct onto their subjects. One can rightly ask what it is about god’s reasons that makes them moral reasons. If the response is that god’s nature is perfectly good, or that god is the Good in the Platonist sense, this raises the problem of evil. If there is no good grounds to think a perfectly good god exists, there is no reason to accept the moral argument.
On the other hand, if these obligations are independent of our desires and purposes, how are we motivated to observe them? Any robust ethical theory will have prescriptive or normative statements that are not just action-guiding, but action-motivating as well. It not only tells us what we should do, but gives us reasons that are of a particular sort that they stand a better chance to make us want to do what we should do. Attempting to erect a monarchical government in the United States would be very unlikely to succeed these days, in part because people recognize that one individual is not going to have all our best interests in mind. Instead, we have created a government where multiple people are elected from different areas and different walks of life, and they are held accountable by us in an effort to ensure that our interests are better represented in legal decisions.
Faith And Philosophy
Now, of course, a dictator could motivate people to obey his will by issuing threats of violence, but this would just return us to the question of why such reasons should be considered moral reasons. The idea that a single being – even a perfectly good one – is able to provide obligations that are both moral and motivating is far from established, yet it is entirely necessary to the moral argument. Design, Evil, Reason, and Experience Chapter seven addresses the argument from consciousness, noting how theism takes the physical connection between intentions and their fulfillment (i.e.
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Nerves) as unnecessary for consciousness, and how it fails to explain why consciousness is found only in matter of certain complexity. Eight discusses the argument from design, where Mackie argues, in essence, that “we have no good empirical reason for taking the ‘marks of design’ as marks of design.” 3 Since Darwin, even the appearance of order and complexity cannot be used as evidence for design, because design is itself an inference based on shaky ground, stemming from a distinction between natural objects and man-made objects, as Hume pointed out. Chapter nine shifts from theistic arguments to the atheistic argument from evil. Mackie claims that god, by any reasonable definition, has power over causal laws.
Yet if this is so, then god has no need to use any means to attain his ends. The free will defense against evil presupposes that having creatures with free will is a greater good than preventing evil. However, if god has created us with uncontrollable choices, then to control any of our choices would be logically impossible. This Mackie identifies as being the same sort of answer to the omnipotence paradox that’s rejected by theists. If god can create beings with truly free will, in that our choices are uncontrollable, then it seems like god can make some things so that he can’t control them. Nonetheless, what seems possible still is that god could make creatures that are free and always choose the right action (a humorous example of this is in NonStampCollector’s video ).
In chapter ten, Mackie covers religious experience with reference to William James, as well as the social and psychological explanations for it offered by Feuerbach, Marx, Engels, and Freud. He concludes that although religious experience cannot serve to show the existence of a being possessing any of the traditional attributes of god, neither can any of the alternative naturalistic theories of religion account for all religious experience without committing a genetic fallacy.
For chapter eleven, Mackie critiques Pascal’s wager, William James’ principle of the will to believe, and Kierkegaard’s emphasis on passion, as ideas for gaining some access to religious truths without the use of reason. For the remaining three chapters, Professor Mackie entertains the notion of religion without belief, possible replacements for god, and the conclusion and implications of atheism. On the first, the central question is: can religion be meaningful even if it’s not making empirical claims? Mackie suggests that if god is not conceived of as an object, no real sense can be made of religious sentences like ‘god is love’, ‘trust god’, or ‘worship god’. On the second, Mackie considers views like John Leslie’s axiarchism, and on the last of the three, he encourages a “fundamental trust in reality”, despite moral subjectivism, arising from the need to keep us social and peaceful with each other.
In Summation While reading through The Miracle of Theism, I was repeatedly struck by why so many philosophers and students of religious studies consider it to be such an important work of its kind. Many of the criticisms leveled by Mackie are concise and challenging, not to mention unique in the way that he systematically lays out arguments and objections that rarely appears in modern popular writings against theism. This review has necessarily been a brief exploration of some of the arguments and ideas in the book that most peaked my interest, but I will very likely be taking up excerpts of it for additional discussion in future articles and reviews on this site. In my opinion, The Miracle of Theism is more than deserving of its esteemed reputation, despite a couple of weak areas, and ought to be required reading for philosophy of religion students. For further discussion, see my article on. For further discussion, see my article on. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (Oxford, 1982), p.
John Leslie Mackie (; 25 August 1917 – 12 December 1981), usually cited as J. Mackie, was an Australian philosopher, originally from Sydney. He made significant contributions to the, and the, and is perhaps best known for his views on, especially his defence of.
He authored six books. His most widely known, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), opens by boldly stating that 'There are no objective values.'
It goes on to argue that because of this ethics must be invented, rather than discovered. Contents. Adobe audition 3.0 with crack.
Life Mackie was born 25 August 1917 in, Sydney. His mother, Annie Burnett Duncan, was a schoolteacher, and his father, Alexander Mackie, was professor of education at the as well as the principal of the, and was influential in the educational system of. He graduated from the University of Sydney in 1938 after studying under, sharing the medal in philosophy with eminent jurist. Mackie received the Wentworth Travelling Fellowship to study at, where he graduated with a in 1940.
During Mackie served with the in the Middle East and Italy, and was. He was professor of philosophy at the in New Zealand from 1955 to 1959 and succeeded Anderson as the of Philosophy at the University of Sydney from 1959 to 1963. In 1963, he moved to the United Kingdom, becoming the inaugural holder of the chair of philosophy in the, a position he held until 1967 when he was instead elected a fellow of, where he served as. In 1969, he gave a lecture entitled 'What’s Really Wrong with Phenomenalism?'
At the as part of its annual Philosophical Lectures series. In 1974, he became a fellow of the. He died in Oxford on 12 December 1981. Character and family Mackie is said to have been capable of expressing total disagreement in such a genial way that the person being addressed might mistake the comment for a compliment.
This personal style is exemplified by the following words from the preface to Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977, p. 3): I am nowhere mainly concerned to refute any individual writer. I believe that all those to whom I have referred, even those with whom I disagree most strongly, have contributed significantly to our understanding of ethics: where I have quoted their actual words, it is because they have presented views or arguments more clearly or more forcefully than I could put them myself. Mackie married Joan Meredith in 1947. One of Mackie's three daughters, also became a philosopher.
She lectured in Philosophy at the from 1994 to 2004, and was appointed Head of the Department of Philosophy at the in 2007. Mackie's younger son, David, is also a philosopher and graduated from Oxford University where he held lectureships at, and before being appointed a Fellow and Tutor. As of 2013 he teaches at, Oxford. Mackie's other daughter, Hilary, is a classicist at Rice University. Work Mackie is best known for his contributions to the fields of, and.
In meta-ethics, he took a position called, arguing against the objective existence of right and wrong as intrinsically normative entities on fundamental grounds as unsure about what kinds of things such entities would be, if they existed. His perhaps most widely known work, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, bluntly begins with the opening sentence 'There are no objective values'. He uses several arguments to support this claim that objective values are false.
He argues that some aspects of moral thought are relative, and that objective morals require an absurd intrinsic action-guiding feature. Most of all, he thinks it is very unclear how objective values could supervene on features of the natural world (see the ). Fourth, he thinks it would be difficult to justify our knowledge of 'value entities' or account for any links or consequences they would have. And, finally, he thinks it is possible to show that even without any objective values, people would still have reason to firmly believe in them (hence, he claims that it is possible for people to be mistaken or fooled into believing that objective values exist).
Called the book 'a lucid discussion of moral theory which, although aimed at the general reader, has attracted a good deal of professional attention.' Mackie was a supporter of the interpretation of. Concerning religion, he was well known for vigorously defending, and also arguing that the made untenable the main religions. His criticisms of the defence are particularly significant. He argued that the idea of human free will is no defense for those who wish to believe in an omnicompetent being in the face of evil and suffering, as such a being could have given us both free will and moral perfection, thus resulting in us choosing the good in every situation.
In 1955 he published one of his most reprinted articles, 'Evil and Omnipotence', summarizing his view that the simultaneous existence of evil and an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good God was 'positively irrational'. Mackie's views on this so-called prompted to respond with his version of the to which Mackie later responded in his The Miracle of Theism. In metaphysics, Mackie made significant contributions relating to the nature of, especially regarding conditional statements describing them (see, for example, Mackie 1974) and the notion of an condition. Upon being given a copy of ' as a Christmas present, he in 1978 wrote an article in the journal praising the book and discussing how its ideas might be applied to moral philosophy.
Philosopher responded in 1979 with 'Gene-Juggling', an article arguing that The Selfish Gene was about, rather than. This started a dispute between Mackie, Midgley, and Dawkins that was still ongoing at the time of Mackie's death.
Publications Books. Truth, Probability, and Paradox (1973),. The Cement of the Universe: A Study of Causation (1980 1974), Oxford University Press,. Problems from Locke (1976), Oxford University Press,. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), Viking Press,. Hume's Moral Theory (1980), Routledge Keegan & Paul,.
The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and against the Existence of God (1982), Oxford University Press,. Anthologies. Logic and Knowledge: Selected Papers, Volume I (1985), Oxford University Press,.
Persons and Values: Selected Papers, Volume II (1985), Oxford University Press,. References.
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