Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T17:52:56.709Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Mackie on Neoplatonism's ‘Replacement for God’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

John Leslie
John Leslie
Affiliation:
University of Guelph
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

David Hume's greatness depends in large part on how his writings hint at beautiful and coherent theories which are recognizably Humean despite their divergences from the untidy originals. Now, perhaps the clearest vision of a contradiction–free Platonic Form of Hume was had by J. L. Mackie; he described it in such masterpieces as The Cement of the Universe, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, and The Miracle of Theism. How successful is this last in its attack on theism? I shall discuss Mackie's case against theism of a Platonic or Neoplatonic type which replaces ‘God as a person or mind or spirit’ by a more abstract Creative Force or Principle. Mackie sees in it a ‘a formidable rival’ to any theism treating of a divine being; ‘if you demand an ultimate explanation, then this may well be a better one’ (MT, 234–5). But, his chapter thirteen contends, it fares badly in competition with an atheistic, naturalistic approach.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 22 , Issue 3-4 , September 1986 , pp. 325 - 342
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

page 325 note 1 Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977; henceforward Ethics.

page 325 note 2 Henceforward, MT (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).Google Scholar

page 325 note 3 Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979; henceforward VE. Mackie also refers to my ‘Efforts to Explain All Existence’, Mind LXXXVII, No. 346 (04 1978), 181–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘The World's Necessary Existence’, International journal for Philosophy of Religion XI, 4 (10 1980), 207–23.Google Scholar

page 325 note 4 Book VI, 509.

page 325 note 5 VE, pp. 1 and 6.Google Scholar Compare the title of my paper in American Philosophical Quarterly VII, 4 (10 1970), 286–98:Google Scholar‘The Theory that the World Exists Because it Should’.

page 326 note 1 VE, pp. 19–20, 57–65, 80.Google Scholar

page 326 note 2 MT, p. 238;Google Scholar cf. Ethics, pp. 20–5.Google Scholar

page 328 note 1 Page 578 of ‘Observership in Cosmology: the Anthropic Principle’, Mind XCII, 368 (10 1983), 573–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 328 note 2 Page 115 of ‘The Scientific Weight of Anthropic and Teleological Principles’, pp. I11–9 of Current Issues in Teleology, Rescher, N. (ed.) (Lanham and London: University Press of America, 1986).Google Scholar

page 328 note 3 VE, pp. 132–3Google Scholar, and ‘Efforts to Explain All Existence’, cited earlier, 186–7.

page 329 note 1 VE, p. 107Google Scholar, and ‘Does Causal Regularity Defy Chance?’, Idealistic Studies III, 3 (09 1973), 277–84.Google Scholar

page 329 note 2 Ayer, , Metaphysics and Common Sense (San Francisco: Freeman Cooper, 1970), p. 109;Google ScholarLeslie, , VE, p. 113.Google Scholar

page 329 note 3 First found in ‘Counterfactuals and Causal Laws’, in Analytical Philosophy, Butler, R. J. (ed.) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), pp. 66–80.Google Scholar

page 330 note 1 See also my ‘God and Scientific Verifiability’, Philosophy LIII, 203 (01 1978), 71–9.Google Scholar

page 330 note 2 ‘Anthropic Principle, World Ensemble, Design’, American Philosophical Quarterly XIX, 2 (04 1982), 141–51Google Scholar, with some misprints corrected in XIX, 4; ‘Observership in Cosmology’, cited earlier; ‘Cosmology, Probability and the Need to Explain Life’, in Scientc Explanation and Understanding, Rescher, N. (ed.) (Lanham and London: University Press of America, 1983), pp. 53–82;Google Scholar ‘Modern Cosmology and the Creation of Life’, pp. 91–120 of Evolution and Creation, McMullin, E. (ed.) (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985);Google Scholar ‘The Scientific Weight of Anthropic and Teleological Principles’, cited earlier.

page 331 note 1 Cf. page 143 of ‘Anthropic Principle, World Ensemble, Design’.

page 332 note 1 VE, p. 37:Google Scholar ‘That ethical certainty is never possible - A fine reason, would you say, for calling it ethically certain that you had no right to interfere?’

page 334 note 1 Quotations all from MT, p. 115.Google Scholar

page 335 note 1 Quotations from Ethics, pp. 40, 35, 82.Google Scholar

page 335 note 2 Ethics, pp. 107–8;Google Scholar my italics.

page 336 note 1 ‘Mackie's Moral “Scepticism” Philosophy LVII, 220 (04 1982), 173–91.Google Scholar

page 336 note 2 In ‘The Theory that the World Exists Because it Should’, cited earlier, and at the start of ‘Ethically Required Existence’, American Philosophical Quarterly IX, 3 (07 1972), 215–24.Google Scholar

page 338 note 1 Quotations from MT, p. 236.Google Scholar

page 340 note 1 Pages 57–8 of ‘The Best World Possible’, in The Challenge of Religion Today, King–Farlow, J. (ed.) (New York: Neale Watson, 1976), pp. 43–72Google Scholar (with many misprints).

page 341 note 1 VE, chapter 11. Temporal aspects of the affair are discussed on page 181 and in ‘The Value of Time’, American Philosophical Quarterly XIII, 2 (04 1976), 109–21.Google Scholar

page 342 note 1 Quotations from MT, p. 80.Google Scholar

page 342 note 2 Though Mackie's chapter on Neoplatonism in MT is headed ‘Replacements for God’, it gives no evidence against my view that the actual history of theological writings makes this run the risk of resembling talk about Bonaparte as a replacement for Napoleon.