The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God

"After I finished high school, I enrolled in a medical degree at Melbourne. I did one year of the medical degree, spending a lot of my time writing philosophy, and I figured I was probably in the wrong place. So, I swapped to doing an undergraduate in philosophy. In the second year of my philosophy degree, I took a course in the philosophy of religion and the two textbooks were Richard Swinburne’s The Existence of God , and John Mackie’s The Miracle of Theism . When I read Mackie’s book, I was way way more impressed than I had been even when I read Russell’s. Mackie’s book is terrific. For its size, it gives you the best coverage of a very wide range of important arguments on both sides of the debate about the existence of God. It packages it all up in a way that many atheists will find quite convincing. Mackie had spent many years thinking about these questions. There’s lots of lots of really good stuff in that book. That’s why it’s the second one on my list. The primary focus is arguments about the existence of God. We get traditional stuff like ontological arguments, cosmological arguments, design arguments, Pascal’s wager, and the problem of evil, but we also get discussions of religious experience and miracles. We also get some discussion of theories of religion, including debunking theories of religion that seek to explain why it is that people have the religious beliefs that they do even though those beliefs have no connection to a reality that corresponds to them. It’s a very broad-ranging book. He’s got interesting discussions of many of the nineteenth-century critics of religion and some of the defenders as well. There’s a discussion of people like Kierkegaard but also Marx , Feuerbach, Freud, Durkheim etc. There’s a whole lot of stuff in there. While it’s not as accessible as either Russell’s book or one of the ones we’ll discuss later, it’s a really important work in philosophy of religion from the standpoint of contemporary atheistic philosophers of religion. What tends to happen is that you get repackaged versions of arguments that came before, but are improved in various ways. Sometimes they have new twists to them that are quite hard to unpack and work out what to say in response. Mackie, for example, doesn’t discuss Gödel’s ontological argument which, actually, was circulating in note-form at the time that Mackie wrote The Miracle of Theism , but he obviously didn’t encounter that argument. There’s been a big discussion of that since. With cosmological arguments, there’s been lots of developments and lots of discussion by people like Robert Koons, Alex Pruss, and Joss Rasmussen. Of course, Mackie has nothing to say about those arguments, and it’s not straightforward to take what Mackie says and figure out what he would have said about these newer forms of arguments. Similarly, for design arguments, the whole intelligent design movement had hardly started to take off — maybe it hadn’t at all — when Mackie’s book came out. There might be something about fine-tuning, but if there is then it will be from the very early days of fine-tuning design arguments. So, it’s not that there are lots of new areas —though perhaps there are some — where arguments have been developed and Mackie has said nothing about any arguments from that area. It’s just that there are new and better arguments which he couldn’t consider because they hadn’t been developed yet. But it depends. There are people who think that there are arguments from things like the existence of abstract objects to the existence to God. From memory, Mackie doesn’t even consider that kind of argument. So, there are some areas where new ground has been turned over, at least as far as Mackie’s discussion goes. But I would say it’s much more significant that there are just new better versions of arguments that belong to the families of arguments that he discusses."