The Miracle of Theism

J. L. Mackie‘s The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and against the Existence of God is the systematic treatment of the analytic case against theism, published in 1982 just months after Mackie’s death. The book takes each major argument for God’s existence in turn and considers them sympathetically before rejecting them: the Ontological Argument, the Cosmological Argument in its various contemporary forms, the Teleological Argument, the moral argument, the argument from religious experience.

The book’s title is meant ironically: Mackie holds that the persistence of theism in the modern world, given the failure of the arguments to support it, is itself something requiring sociological rather than philosophical explanation, the “miracle” of the title.

Mackie’s tone in the book is the analytic philosopher’s at his best: respectful, careful, never rhetorically heated, always willing to grant the strongest available form of his opponents’ arguments before showing why they fall short. It was the book Margaret Halloran read twice over the summer before her second year, and it is the book she expected, in September, to keep finding decisive.