{"agent_id":"mackie","agent_name":"J. L. Mackie","slug":"the-miracle-of-theism","label":"The miracle of theism: does any argument for the existence of God succeed, separately or cumulatively?","topic":"The miracle of theism","question":"Does any argument for the existence of God succeed, separately or cumulatively?","position":"No argument for theism succeeds, and the cumulative case does not repair the individual failures. The question is to be settled by argument to the best explanation, in exactly the way a detective, a historian or a court settles a question, and on that standard theism loses. The title is the conclusion: given how badly the arguments fare, the persistence and spread of the belief is the phenomenon that requires explaining.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"No argument for theism succeeds, and the cumulative case does not repair the individual failures.","n":[]},{"t":"The question is to be settled by argument to the best explanation, in exactly the way a detective, a historian or a court settles a question, and on that standard theism loses.","n":[]},{"t":"The title is the conclusion: given how badly the arguments fare, the persistence and spread of the belief is the phenomenon that requires explaining.","n":[1,2,3]}]],"texts":"*The Miracle of Theism* (1982), Introduction and chs. 1-14: the ontological arguments (ch. 3), cosmological (ch. 5), teleological, the argument from consciousness, the moral argument, miracles and testimony, religious experience, the natural histories of religion (ch. 10), Pascal, James and Kierkegaard on faith (ch. 11), and the cumulative case (ch. 14). Reception: Richard Swinburne, *The Existence of God* (1979), whose characterization of theism and whose cumulative-case method Mackie adopts as his target; Graham Oppy, *Arguing about Gods* (2006).","works":["*The Miracle of Theism* (1982), Introduction and chs. 1-14: the ontological arguments (ch. 3), cosmological (ch. 5), teleological, the argument from consciousness, the moral argument, miracles and testimony, religious experience, the natural histories of religion (ch. 10), Pascal, James and Kierkegaard on faith (ch. 11), and the cumulative case (ch. 14)"],"reception":"Richard Swinburne, *The Existence of God* (1979), whose characterization of theism and whose cumulative-case method Mackie adopts as his target; Graham Oppy, *Arguing about Gods* (2006).","status":"The standard atheist survey of the field, and disputed at nearly every point by its theistic contemporaries.","era":"1917-1981","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Miracle of Theism, Arguments For and Against the Existence of God","page":"pp. 9–10","canonical":"","quote":"It might, then, be supposed that, if we take non-deductive reasoning about God's existence to conform to this model, we are forcing theology into a 'scientistic' mould, or that we are prejudicially adopting a mode of thinking and a criterion of rationality that are peculiar to the age of modern science. But this is not so.","label":"The Miracle of Theism, Arguments For and Against the Existence of God, pp. 9–10"},{"n":2,"work":"The Miracle of Theism, Arguments For and Against the Existence of God","page":"pp. 11–12","canonical":"","quote":"This holds equally in historical and scientific contexts. (The point is well made by Swinburne in Chapter 1 of The Existence of God.) It follows that after we have taken several different non-deductive arguments for and against the existence of a god and examined them separately, we mustalso consider their cumulative effect and decide what conclusion is the better supported by the evidence as a whole.","label":"The Miracle of Theism, Arguments For and Against the Existence of God, pp. 11–12"},{"n":3,"work":"The Miracle of Theism, Arguments For and Against the Existence of God","page":"pp. 8–9","canonical":"","quote":"If the other term of the relation is not God in the traditional sense, then to go on using the traditional names and descriptions, the familiar religious language, carries at least a risk of misunderstanding, and, more importantly, it tempts the believer himself into oscillating between the views he is really prepared to assert and defend and the familiar suggestions and connotations of the language he continues to…","label":"The Miracle of Theism, Arguments For and Against the Existence of God, pp. 8–9"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-error-theory","label":"The error theory: do ordinary moral judgements assert an objective prescriptivity that nothing in the world answers to?"},{"slug":"inventing-right-and-wrong","label":"Inventing right and wrong: can a man who holds that all moral judgements are false go on to do first-order ethics?"},{"slug":"evil-and-omnipotence","label":"Evil and omnipotence: are the theist's central claims inconsistent, and did the free will defence answer the argument?"},{"slug":"causation","label":"Causation: can a regularity theory account for singular causal statements without appeal to necessary connection?"},{"slug":"faith-and-reason","label":"Faith and reason: is there any legitimate move from the failure of argument to belief anyway?"}]}