2026-05-02 1 … the author was "the British one, the atheist who isn't shrill about it." I knew immediately that she meant J. L. Mackie, and I told her so, and we stood there with our paper bags between us trying to remember the cover of [[The…
2026-05-04 1 … table I felt some mixture of fondness and embarrassment. Past me was not wrong, exactly. The objection J. L. Mackie raises there is good, and I still think it lands. But "settles it" is a thing one says when one has read…
Alvin Plantinga 1 … off the page. Three contributions are central. First, the Free Will Defense, his response to J. L. Mackie's Logical Problem of Evil, used the modal logic of possible worlds to show that the existence of evil is…
Cosmological Argument 2 key_people: J. L. Mackie
… of the universe itself. Among contemporaries, Richard Swinburne defends a probabilistic version, while J. L. Mackie in The Miracle of Theism argues that the principle of sufficient reason is question-begging and that the…
David Hume 1 … first encounter with Hume in seminar reads, by her own admission, as recreation rather than work. She has J. L. Mackie's *Treatise* on her shelf because of Hume.
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion 1 … strategy, that natural theology rests on analogies that fail under pressure, generalizes. The arguments J. L. Mackie makes against the design argument in The Miracle of Theism two centuries later are recognizably…
Evidentialism 2 key_people: J. L. Mackie
… anything upon insufficient evidence." Most twentieth-century atheist philosophy of religion, including J. L. Mackie's The Miracle of Theism, proceeds on broadly evidentialist assumptions. The arguments for God are…
Free Will Defense 2 key_people: J. L. Mackie
… The argument is widely regarded as having succeeded against the strict version of the logical problem. J. L. Mackie himself in The Miracle of Theism conceded as much, while shifting his attack to the evidential version.…
J. L. Schellenberg 1 … canonical statement, and the argument it presents has become a fixed feature of the literature in the way J. L. Mackie's Logical Problem of Evil became fixed in the nineteen fifties. The argument, briefly: a wholly loving…
Logical Problem of Evil 3 key_people: J. L. Mackie
… inconsistent with the existence of an omnipotent and wholly good God. The canonical modern statement is J. L. Mackie's 1955 paper "Evil and Omnipotence," which argued that the propositions 1. God is omnipotent. 2. God is…
… worlds and is widely thought to have shown that strict logical inconsistency cannot be established. J. L. Mackie himself, in The Miracle of Theism in 1982, conceded the logical version while pivoting to an evidential…
Ontological Argument 2 key_people: J. L. Mackie
… weight, and Plantinga is candid that someone who denies the premise has not, by his lights, been refuted. J. L. Mackie in The Miracle of Theism regards the modal argument as question-begging at the possibility premise. Few…
Ontological Type System 1 … of Philosophy of Religion]] links to Alvin Plantinga links back through Reformed Epistemology to J. L. Mackie. A small graph of well-formed types makes a domain like this navigable in a way a flat list of pages never…
Problem of Evil 2 key_people: J. L. Mackie
… The modern literature distinguishes two versions. The Logical Problem of Evil, given canonical form by J. L. Mackie in 1955, argues that the classical theistic propositions are jointly inconsistent. The [[Evidential Problem…
Teleological Argument 2 key_people: J. L. Mackie
… than on atheism. Richard Swinburne develops a probabilistic version in his cumulative case argument. J. L. Mackie in The Miracle of Theism addresses the contemporary version and argues that the multiverse hypothesis,…
The Analytic Revival of Philosophy of Religion 2 participants: J. L. Mackie
… center on the British side. The revival was bilateral: the most influential atheist work of the period, J. L. Mackie's The Miracle of Theism, emerged from the same conversation. The pattern of the revival is what the…
The Miracle of Theism 2 creator: J. L. Mackie
J. L. Mackie's *The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and against the Existence of God* is the systematic treatment of the…
University of Oxford 1 … English-speaking world and the institutional anchor of much of the British analytic philosophy of religion. J. L. Mackie held a fellowship at University College from 1967 until his death. Richard Swinburne held the Nolloth…
William Rowe 1 William Rowe spent most of his career at Purdue and is, with J. L. Mackie and J. L. Schellenberg, one of the three figures who define the modern atheist literature in analytic…