J. L. Mackie

Background

John Leslie Mackie (1917–1981) was an Australian-born philosopher who spent his mature career as a Fellow of University College, Oxford. He is the twentieth century's most influential philosophical atheist: his 1955 paper "Evil and Omnipotence" set the terms of the modern problem-of-evil debate, his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977) founded moral error theory, and The Miracle of Theism (1982), published in the year after his death, made Hume's critiques of natural theology rigorous for a new generation. This wiki treats Mackie as a primary steelman source: his objections are presented at full strength wherever they bear.

Positions held in this wiki

• The Logical Problem of Evil — the canonical incompatibility argument: omnipotence, perfect goodness, and evil form a jointly inconsistent set. The SEP records that Mackie, with H. J. McCloskey and H. D. Aiken, "had defended incompatibility versions of the argument from evil," and that Plantinga's famous discussions take Mackie's 1955 essay as their point of departure (SEP PoE §1.3).
• The Moral Argument for God — error theory: objective values would be metaphysically "queer." Yet Mackie concedes the theist's conditional: like the theist Mavrodes, he holds that "if there is a God, then the normativity of morality can be understood in theistic terms; otherwise, the normativity of morality is unintelligible" (Mackie 1977, p. 48, reported at SEP Theological Voluntarism §2.1).
• Miracles and the Laws of Nature — his non-violationist definition is the standard formulation even among theists: "A miracle occurs when the world is not left to itself, when something distinct from the natural order as a whole intrudes into it" (Mackie 1982, 19–20, quoted at SEP Miracles §1.2).
• Aquinas' Five Ways and The Leibnizian (Contingency) Cosmological Argument — the bridging figure between Hume and Oppy: the PSR has at best methodological standing, and "we can simply work with brute facts" (SEP Cosmological Argument §4.4).

Key works in our corpus

Corpus gap: all of Mackie's works are copyright-locked; none is in raw/. His positions are represented via the SEP entries above — chiefly SEP 'The Problem of Evil', SEP 'Miracles', and SEP 'Cosmological Argument'. Logged in meta/gap-report.md.

Principal critics

• Alvin Plantinga — the free-will defense answered the 1955 incompatibility argument; the abstract logical version is now widely regarded as under pressure even among atheist philosophers.
• Richard Swinburne — Bayesian cumulative-case natural theology developed largely in answer to The Miracle of Theism.
• Robert Merrihew Adams — modified divine-command theory replying to the Euthyphro/arbitrariness objections Mackie pressed.

See also

• David Hume — Mackie's acknowledged master; The Miracle of Theism is in effect the Dialogues made formal.
• William L. Rowe and Paul Draper — the evidential successors after the logical argument's retreat.
• Graham Oppy — the current generation's systematic naturalist critic, continuing Mackie's program.