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Professor Mackie and the KalĀm cosmological argument

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

William Lane Craig
William Lane Craig
Affiliation:
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Illinois
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Extract

Like David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, J. L. Mackie's most potent blast against the rationality of belief in God, his The Miracle of Theism, appeared after his death. The book is a broadside against not only the traditional arguments for God's existence, such as the onto-, cosmo-, and teleological arguments, but also against proofs from consciousness, miracles, the idea of God, and so forth, and against the validity of religious experience and faith without reason, and it presents as well negative arguments against divine existence. The book will no doubt supply much grist for the mill of future discussions, but in this piece I should like to focus on Mackie's analysis of one particular argument, the kalām cosmological argument. For his discussion at this point seems to me to be superficial, and I think it can be shown that he has failed to provide any compelling or even intuitively appealing objection against the argument.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , September 1984 , pp. 367 - 375
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

page 367 note 1 Mackie, J. L., The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982)Google Scholar. The title is a clever allusion to Hume's remark in the tenth chapter of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding that it is a miracle that anyone assents to the Christian religion.

page 368 note 1 Mackie, , Theism, p. 93.Google Scholar

page 368 note 2 Ibid.

page 369 note 1 Ibid. p. 94.

page 370 note 1 Whitrow, G. J., critical notice in British journal for the Philosophy of Science XXXI (1980), 409Google Scholar. See also idem., The Natural Philosophy of Time, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 198), pp. 28–32.

page 370 note 2 This same rejoinder was used unsuccessfully by Aquinas against Bonaventure (Scg 2.38; St 1.46.2 ad 6). For a discussion see Kovach, Francis J., ‘The question of the eternity of the world in St Bonaventure and St Thomas – a critical analysis’, Southwestern journal of Philosophy V (1974), 141–72.Google Scholar

page 370 note 3 It may not even be true. Some modern defenders of the kalām argument have argued that an infinite past would entail the existence of moments infinitely removed from the present. For an analysis see Craig, William Lane, ‘The finitude of the past’, Aletheia II (1981), 235–42.Google Scholar

page 371 note 1 Mackie, , Theism, p. 89.Google Scholar

page 371 note 2 Anscombe, G. E. M., ‘“Whatever has a beginning of existence must have a cause”: Hume's argument exposed’, Analysis XXXIV (1974), 150.Google Scholar

page 371 note 3 For example, Jonathan Edward's argument in his On the Freedom of the Will 2.3 that something cannot come into existence uncaused because it then becomes inexplicable why just any and everything cannot or does not come to exist uncaused. It cannot be said that only things of a certain nature come into existence uncaused because prior to their existence they have no nature which could control their coming to be. For a discussion see Prior, Arthur N.,' ‘Limited indeterminism,’ in Papers on Time and Tense (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 65.Google Scholar

page 372 note 1 Hume, David to Stewart, John, February 1754, in The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols., ed. Grieg, J. Y. T. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 1, 187.Google Scholar

page 373 note 1 Hume, David, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Selby-Bigge, L. A., 3rd ed., ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), xii.III.130.Google Scholar

page 373 note 2 Mackie, , Theism, p. 89.Google Scholar

page 373 note 3 Craig, William Lane, ‘God, time, and eternity’, Religious Studies XIV (1978), 497–503.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 373 note 4 Note that whereas for the theist creation lacks a material cause but has an efficient cause, for Mackie the universe lacks both a material and an efficient cause (as well as any other sort of cause, such as final, formal or whatever).

page 373 note 5 Mackie, , Theism, pp. 84, 94.Google Scholar

page 374 note 1 Hoyle, Fred, From Stonehenge to Modern Cosmology (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1972), p. 36Google Scholar; Idem, Astronomy and Cosmology: A Modern Course (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1975), p. 658.

page 375 note 1 Mackie, , Theism, pp. 94–5.Google Scholar