J. L. Mackie sUsre Miracle Oe Theism Arguments for and against the existence of GodPreface My aim in this book is to examine the arguments for and against the existence of God carefully and in some detail, taking account both of the traditional concept of God and of the traditional ‘proofs’ of his existence and of more recent interpretations and approaches. While my own view is atheist, I have tried to give a full and fair hearing to the opposing case. In particular, I have tried to present as well as to answer the philosophical arguments for theism given recently by Richard Swinburne in The Existence of God and the very different case developed by Hans Kiing in Does God Exist? I have discussed this question over many years in various lectures and seminars, but not much of what appears here has been published previously. Chapter 6 is an expanded version of ‘Die Ohnmacht moralischer Gottesbeweise’, which appeared in Glaube und Vernunft, edited by Norbert Hoerster (Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1979), and Chapter 9 incorporates and develops the arguments of ‘Evil and Omnipotence’, published in Mind 64 (1955) and of replies to several critics of that article. I am grateful to the editors and publishers for permission to use these materials again. I am particularly grateful to Norbert Hoerster, who has read the whole typescript and has suggested many improvements, and also to Michael Ayers, Robert Gay, John Lucas, Derek Parfit, Gerhard Streminger, Timothy Stroup, and David Wiggins for a number of corrections and suggestions. J.L.M. September 1981Contents Introduction . Miracles and Testimony (a) Hume’s Argument—Exposition (b) Hume’s Argument—Discussion . Descartes and the Idea of God (a) The Argument of the Third Meditation—Exposition (b) The Argument of the Third Meditation—Discussion . Ontological Arguments (a) Descartes’s Proof and Kant’s Criticism (b) Anselm’s Ontological Proof and Gaunilo’s Reply (c) Plantinga’s Ontological Proof . Berkeley’s God and Immaterial Realism (a) Berkeley’s Theism—Exposition (b) Berkeley’s Theism—Discussion . Cosmological Arguments (a) Contingency and Sufficient Reason (b) The Regress of Causes (c) Finite Past Time and Creation (d) Swinburne’s Inductive Cosmological Argument . Moral Arguments for the Existence of a God (a) A Popular Line of Thought (b) Newman: Conscience as the Creative Principle of Religion (c) Kant: God as a Presupposition of Morality (d) Sidgwick: The Duality of Practical Reason (e) God and the Objectivity of Value . The Argument from Consciousness 13 13 18 30 37 41 4 49 55 64 64 7 81 87 g2 95 102 102 103 106 ur 114 11g10. Ii. 12. 13. 14. . Arguments for Design (a) Hume’s Dialogues—Exposition (b) Hume’s Dialogues—Discussion (c) Swinburne’s Restatement . The Problem of Evil (a) Survey of the Problem (b) Attempts to Sidestep the Problem (c) The Paradox of Omnipotence (d) The Free Will Defence (e) Digression: the Nature of Free Will (f) The Free Will Defence—continued Religious Experience and Natural Histories of Religion (a) The Varieties of Religious Experience (b) Natural Histories of Religion Belief without Reason (a) Pascal’s Wager (b) William James and the Will to Believe (c) Kierkegaard and the Primacy of Commitment Religion without Belief? Replacements for God Conclusions and Implications (a) The Challenge of Nihilism (b) The Balance of Probabilities (c) The Moral Consequences of Atheism Index 133 133 137 146 150 150 156 160 162 166 172 177 177 187 199 200 204 210 217 230 240 240 251 254 263Introduction Tue topic of this book is theism, the doctrine that there is a god, and in particular a god as conceived in the central tradition of the main monotheistic religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is my view that the question whether there is or is not a god can and should be. discussed rationally and reasonably, and that such discussion can be rewarding, in that it can yield definite results. This is a genuine, meaningful, question, and an important one—too im- portant for us to take sides about it casually or arbitrarily. Neither the affirmative nor the negative answer is obviously right, but the issue is not so obscure that relevant considerations of argument and evidence cannot be brought to bear upon it. The central doctrines of this traditional theism are well summed up by Richard Swinburne: there is a god who is ‘a person without a body (i.e. a spirit), present everywhere, the creator and sustainer of the universe, a free agent, able to do everything (i.e. omnipotent), knowing all things, perfectly good, a source of moral obligation, immutable, eternal, a necessary being, holy, and worthy of worship’. In general, I shall follow Swinburne in taking these descriptions fairly literally, though in some places I shall allow reasonable qualifications and flexibilities in interpretation. It is sometimes doubted whether such descriptions can be literally meaningful. But there is really no problem about this. We know, from our acquaintance with ourselves and other human beings, what a person is—a person, as Swinburne explains, in the ordinary modern sense. Although all the persons we are acquainted with have bodies, there is no great difficulty in conceiving what it would be for there to 'R. Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism (Oxford University Press, 1977), P- 2- References to Swinburne are either to this book or to The Existence of God (Oxford University Press, 1979).2 Introduction be a person without a body: for example, one can imagine oneself surviving without a body, and while at present one can act and produce results only by using one’s limbs or one’s speech organs, one can imagine having one’s intentions fulfilled directly, without such physical means. Knowing what it is to be present in one place, we can form the concept of a spirit who is present everywhere. Similarly we can form the concept of creating something where there was nothing. The notion of sustaining something in existence can be spelled out in causal and conditional or hypothetical statements. God is thought to sustain the universe in that it continues to exist only because he so wills; if he did not so will, it would cease to exist. And so on. The notion of a necessary being is more difficult, but we shall be considering it in Chapters 3 and 5, and the notion of a source of moral obligation will be considered in Chapter 6. Holiness, too, may be a somewhat obscure notion; but we can say roughly that to be holy is to be the appropriate object of feel- ings of awe or attitudes of worship of which we have introspective experience. The main reason why it has been thought that religious language cannot be literally meaningful is that some philosophers—parti- cularly the logical positivists—have embraced a strongly verification- ist theory of meaning, supposing that the meaning of any statement is given or constituted by the method or methods by which that statement itself could be verified or confirmed. Then, since it is not easy to say how the existence of a god with such attributes as those listed could be verified or confirmed, or falsified either, doubt is cast on the meaningfulness of the statement that there is such a god, or some different, less literal, meaning is sought for it. But this theory of meaning is itself highly implausible. It is well known that the adoption of it would similarly create serious difficulties for the mean- ing of many ordinary statements, including all those about past, historical, events, or about the minds, thoughts, and feelings of persons other than oneself. Rejecting it, we can still retain an empi- ricist or weak verificationist view, that all our terms have to be given meaning by their use in some statements that are verifiable or con- firmable in our experience; but such terms can then be used to build up further statements for which, perhaps, no direct experiental test is possible. For example, once we are aware of the passage of time, and understand the sentence ‘It is raining now’, we can derive from these materials an understanding of the sentence ‘It was raining an hour ago’; and this understanding, and the meaning thus given to