Justified True Belief

(●) The atheist philosopher Christian thinkers most wanted to answer, because he told them exactly what the question was. + Walk into a seminar on the philosophy of religion at a Christian college and there is a fair chance the book on the table is by an atheist. It will be The Miracle of Theism, and its author died the year before it was published. John Leslie Mackie spent his working life arguing that there is no God, and he did it in a way that Christian philosophers found they could work with. He thought the question was a real question. He thought it could be settled by argument rather than by mood, and he thought both sides owed each other their best reasoning. So he gave his opponents his best, took theirs seriously enough to quote it accurately, and told them plainly where he thought they had gone wrong. That is why his name turns up in Christian footnotes more often than the name of almost any other unbeliever of his century. Here is the fact about him worth remembering. The argument that made him famous, a thirteen-page article of 1955 claiming that the existence of evil makes belief in God not merely unsupported but self-contradictory, is now widely reckoned to have failed, and some of the philosophers who say so are atheists. Mackie lived to see the answer, weighed it in print, and gave ground on part of it while holding his position on the rest. The whole exchange, objection and answer and reply, is one of the cleanest pieces of argument the twentieth century produced about God.

(●) 1917 AD: Born in a Sydney suburb to the man who trained the state’s schoolteachers. + He was born at Killara, on the leafy north shore of Sydney, on 25 August 1917, the younger of two children. His father, Alexander Mackie, was a Scot who had come out to New South Wales to run Sydney Teachers College and to hold the chair of education at the university. A chair, in the British and Australian system, is not one professorship among many but the single senior post in a subject, so the man who holds it largely sets what that subject looks like in that city. His mother, Annie Burnett Duncan, was a schoolteacher. The household was Presbyterian, and it was a household where children were taught at home before they were taught anywhere else. Both children ended up as academics: his sister Margaret, and John. Think what that upbringing does to a boy. His father’s working life was spent deciding how other people’s children should be taught to think, and his mother had stood in front of a classroom herself. Argument at the dinner table would not have been rudeness. It would have been the family trade. He went on to Knox Grammar School in Sydney and left it at the top of his year.

(●) 1938 AD: John Anderson’s lecture room turned a classicist into a philosopher. + At the University of Sydney he read Greek and Latin and took first-class honours in them, and he shared the university’s medal in philosophy. The philosophy came from John Anderson, another Scot, who held the Challis chair and who was the most argued-about man in Australian intellectual life. Anderson was a realist and an atheist, and he was famously unwilling to soften either. A realist, in his sense, is someone who holds that there is one world, that it is there whether we like it or not, and that the job of philosophy is to describe it rather than to console us about it. Anderson pressed that line into every corner, including religion and the schools, and it kept him in public trouble. What his students carried away was not a set of conclusions so much as a discipline: take the argument as it actually stands, follow it where it goes, and never mind whose side the result helps. Mackie kept that discipline for forty years, and used it on Anderson too. One of the papers he left behind is a study of Anderson’s own philosophy, admiring and unsparing at once.

(●) 1940 AD: A First in Greats at Oxford, and then the war took the next six years. + A travelling fellowship took him to Oriel College, Oxford, to read Literae Humaniores, the Oxford course in classics, ancient history and philosophy that everyone there calls Greats. He took a First in 1940, which was a poor year to be a young man with a degree. He began a doctorate and gave it up for war work, and in January 1942 he was commissioned in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, moving with his branch into the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers when that corps was formed later the same year. He was in the Middle East through 1942 and 1943 and in Italy from 1943 to 1945, the desert first and then the long grind up the Italian peninsula, and he was mentioned in dispatches, which is the army’s formal way of saying that a commander named a man in an official report for something worth recording. Demobilised in 1946 with the temporary rank of captain, he came back to Sydney that year to lecture in moral and political philosophy, married Joan Meredith in 1947, and had five children with her, two sons and three daughters. Nothing in his later writing on evil reads like a man discussing an abstraction he has only met in books.

(●) 1955 AD: Thirteen pages in a journal put the problem of evil back at the center of philosophy. + In April 1955 the journal Mind printed an article called "Evil and Omnipotence," signed from the University of Sydney. It was thirteen pages long, it used no technical apparatus at all, and it changed the shape of a two-thousand-year-old conversation. Everybody had always known that suffering is a difficulty for faith. Mackie’s claim was sharper and more dangerous than that. He was not saying that evil counts as evidence against God, the way a missing alibi counts against a suspect. He was saying that the believer’s own commitments contradict each other, so that holding all of them at once is like insisting that a figure is a square and also a circle (T2). Belief in God, on this showing, is not underfunded. It is incoherent. That same year he left Australia for New Zealand and the chair of philosophy and psychology at the University of Otago in Dunedin, where he stayed four years.

(●) 1959 AD: He came home to fill his teacher’s chair, then left Australia for good to build a new department in England. + In 1959 Sydney called him back to the Challis chair, the seat Anderson had held while Mackie sat in his lectures. He kept it four years and then, in his mid-forties, left Australia permanently for England. The move was to something brand new. The University of York had just been founded, and Mackie went as its first professor of philosophy, which meant a department with no staff, no students, no reading lists and no habits. Anyone who has watched a school or a business started from an empty room knows the kind of work this is, and it is not the work of a man who wanted a quiet study. He did it for four years.

(●) 1967 AD: Oxford at fifty, and then six books in nine years from a man who had written almost none. + In 1967 he became a Fellow of University College, Oxford, where he served as praelector, the college’s own title for the fellow who teaches its undergraduates in a subject, and in 1978 the university made him a Reader in philosophy, the senior Oxford rank just below professor, given for a body of published work rather than for running anything. The British Academy, the national academy for the humanities and the social sciences, elected him a Fellow in 1974. Then came the strange part of the story. Mackie had been a professor for a dozen years and had published almost no books at all. Between 1973 and 1982, in nine years, six appeared: on logic and paradox, on causation, on Locke, on ethics, on Hume, and finally on God. Two of them, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (T3) and The Miracle of Theism, are still argued over line by line in university courses half a century later. Colleagues described his manner in the same words over and over: dispassionate, exact, entirely without side. He argued to find out, and he did not much care who won.

(●) 1981 AD: He died at sixty-four, with his book on God still in proof. + Cancer killed him at Oxford on 12 December 1981, at sixty-four. The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God came out the following year, so one of the most careful cases against God written in his century was in the hands of readers before its author could answer anyone who reviewed it. His family kept the work going. His widow Joan and his daughter Penelope, herself a philosopher, edited two volumes of his papers, which appeared in 1985. Another daughter, Hilary, became a classicist, and his son David a philosopher. The last chapter of his last book is an assessment of what the world would lose, and gain, if belief in God were abandoned. He wrote it as a man who expected the loss to be real and thought it worth paying, which is a more serious thing to read than a victory lap.

What He Taught

(T1) Whether there is a God is a real question, and it deserves an argument rather than a mood. + A man says he believes in God. A friend asks him what he means, and he answers that he is not making any claim about how things are, exactly; he is expressing a way of seeing the world, an attitude toward life. In the middle of the twentieth century a good deal of theology talked like that, partly out of conviction and partly out of fear. A school of philosophers called the logical positivists had spent a generation insisting that a sentence means something only if you can say what observation would test it. On that rule "there is a God" is not false; it is empty, in the way that "Wednesday is heavier than blue" is empty, and a great many theologians decided the safest thing was to agree that they had never been making a claim about the furniture of the world in the first place. Mackie would have none of it, from either side. He held that the sentence "there is a God" is a plain statement about what exists and that we understand it perfectly well, since its terms are built out of what we already know from our acquaintance with ourselves and with other people. Every one of us knows from the inside what it is to know a thing, to want a thing, and to bring a thing about. Stretch those three as far as they will go, take away the body and the limits, and you have the idea people have always had in mind when they say God, which is why the sentence is worth arguing about rather than dissolving. He opened his last book by adopting Richard Swinburne’s definition of God, word for word, and arguing against that, and he sent readers who still doubted that such talk means anything to Swinburne’s own treatment of the question rather than making the charge of meaninglessness his own. He was equally hard on theologians who tried to move religion out of the line of fire by making it non-factual. If God is not an objective reality but only an object of the believer’s thought, he wrote in the same introduction, then it is misleading to speak of a relationship with him at all. Those who are dissatisfied with the old creeds, he added, should change them rather than try to do without credal statements. Orthodox Christians and this atheist stood on the same ground there, and against the same opponent.

(Q) "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." + Source: J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism, Introduction. The opening page of the book. He goes on to call the question a genuine and important one, too important to take sides about casually, and to say that neither answer is obviously right.

(T2) An all-powerful and wholly good God is not merely unproved by the evil in the world but contradicted by it. + Suppose a neighbor tells you his dog is perfectly gentle, that he never leaves it unattended, and that the child next door was bitten by his dog yesterday afternoon. You do not need more evidence to know something is wrong. You already have too much, because the three things he says cannot all be true together. That is the shape of Mackie’s 1955 argument, and philosophers call it the logical problem of evil to distinguish it from the evidential problem, which claims only that suffering makes God unlikely. Mackie wanted more. He set out the three propositions he took the believer to hold, all of them at once: - God is omnipotent. - God is wholly good. - Evil exists. Then he added two rules that he thought were simply part of what the words already mean, so that the believer cannot object to them without changing the subject: - A good thing eliminates evil as far as it can. - An omnipotent thing has no limits on what it can do. Put the five together and the set contradicts itself, he argued, in just the way the neighbor’s three sentences do. Give up any one of them and the problem disappears at once, which sounds like an easy way out until you look at the price: every escape costs something the believer wanted to keep. He then worked through the standard answers one by one, and saved most of his effort for the strongest: that God gave human beings genuine freedom, and that the evil is ours. Mackie’s reply to it is the single most quoted sentence of the article. If a free person can choose well on Tuesday, he asked, then there is no contradiction in a free person choosing well always, so why did God not make people like that? The theist, he thought, is left saying that God passed up an option that was open to him and obviously better.

(Q) "In its simplest form the problem is this: God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; and yet evil exists." + Source: J. L. Mackie, "Evil and Omnipotence," Mind, new series 64 (April 1955), page 200. The sentence that set the terms. Mackie adds at once that there seems to be a contradiction between the three propositions, so that if any two were true the third would be false, and that all three are essential parts of most theological positions. Nine pages later, on page 209, comes the question that Christian philosophers spent the next twenty years answering: "if God has made men such that in their free choices they sometimes prefer what is good and sometimes what is evil, why could he not have made men such that they always freely choose the good?"

(T3) There are no objective values, and every moral judgment that claims otherwise is false. + Imagine a village where everyone agrees that the old mill is haunted. They are not lying, they are not speaking in metaphors, and they disagree honestly about which room the ghost prefers. If there is no ghost, then every one of their sincere reports is false, including the careful ones. Mackie called a view of this shape an error theory, and he held one about morality. His point was not the tired one that people disagree about right and wrong. It was that ordinary moral talk claims something very strong. When we say cruelty is wrong we do not mean that we dislike it, or that our society forbids it; we mean that its wrongness is a feature of the thing itself, and that this feature gives anyone a reason to refrain whatever he happens to want. Mackie thought the claim built into our language was exactly that, and that nothing in the world answers to it, so the claim fails. Two arguments carried the weight. The first, the argument from relativity, is that the sheer variety of moral codes is better explained by different ways of life than by different degrees of insight into one moral truth. The second, the argument from queerness, is the famous one: such values would have to be a kind of thing unlike anything else there is, and knowing them would take a faculty unlike any other way we know anything. What is left, on his account, is not nothing. Morality is a human invention, and a good one, a device we build to hold a society together against the narrowness of our sympathies. He meant the subtitle of his book quite literally.

(Q) "There are no objective values." + Source: J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, chapter 1, section 1. The first sentence of the book, which he immediately calls a bald statement of the thesis of the chapter. He expects three reactions to it: that it is pernicious, that it is too obvious to be worth saying, and that it is empty; and he says that precisely because all three are possible, much more needs to be said. The queerness argument, section 9 of the same chapter, runs: "If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe." And what he puts in their place, at the head of chapter 5 on page 106: "morality is not to be discovered but to be made: we have to decide what moral views to adopt, what moral stands to take."

(T4) If objective values did exist, they would be evidence for God. + This is the concession that made him useful to his opponents, and he made it with his eyes open. Start with the puzzle he saw. Moral features ride on ordinary ones: cruelty is wrong because of the pain and the contempt, kindness is good because of what it does for someone. Philosophers call that riding-on relation supervenience, and the everyday test of it is this. Film two afternoons that are alike in every ordinary detail, the same acts, the same words, the same effects on the same people, and you cannot have one of them come out cruel and the other kind. The moral quality has nowhere to come from except the details, so where the details match, it matches. Now push on that. If the wrongness really is out there in the world, and really does give everyone a reason to refrain whatever he wants, then the link between the ordinary features and the moral ones is a further fact about reality. It is not something you could work out by thinking about what the words mean, the way you can work out that a bachelor is unmarried. It is a connection that had to be put there. Mackie was candid about what follows. Such a connection would be an odd thing to find lying about in a universe of atoms, and he said so in the strongest terms he had: moral values, their objectivity and their supervenience, "would be a continuing miracle in the sense explained in Chapter 1, a constant intrusion into the natural world." That is the same sense of miracle his title runs on (T5), turned for once against his own side of the argument. And a being with the power to create what nature could not throw up on its own would be exactly the sort of explanation such a fact would call for. So he granted, in print, that objective moral values would raise the probability that there is a God, and called it a defensible inductive argument from morality to God, meaning an argument that does not prove its conclusion outright but makes it more likely than it was before, the way a wet umbrella in the hallway makes rain more likely without settling it. Then he blocked the door, and it is worth watching how. An if-then sentence is called a conditional, and the part that follows the "if" is called its antecedent. Mackie accepted the whole conditional, that if there are objective values then there is probably a God, and denied the antecedent: there are no such values (T3), so there is nothing here for God to explain, and moral thinking has a perfectly good natural history in biology and society. The whole disagreement between Mackie and the Christian moral argument comes down to one question, and both sides know it. Which are we more sure of, that some things really are wrong, or that the world contains nothing but nature?

(Q) "If, then, there are such intrinsically prescriptive objective values, they make the existence of a god more probable than it would have been without them. Thus we have, after all, a defensible inductive argument from morality to the existence of a god." + Source: J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism, chapter 6, pages 115 to 116. The sentence Christian philosophers quote most often against him, and it is quoted fairly: he means it. "Intrinsically prescriptive" is his name for the thing he does not believe in, a feature of an act that tells you what to do all on its own, without first checking what you happen to want. He adds that the popular line of thought that morality points to God "has regularly included some inkling of this truth," and a few lines earlier he has said that objective values would be "so odd a cluster of qualities and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the ordinary course of events, without an all-powerful god to create them."

(T5) Anyone who reports a miracle takes on a double burden, and testimony rarely carries it. + David Hume had argued in the eighteenth century that no testimony can establish a miracle, because the evidence that a law of nature holds is always stronger than the evidence that somebody saw it broken. Mackie thought Hume’s version was loose in places, and he tightened it. His improvement was to notice a trap in the miracle claim itself. To call an event a miracle you must say two things at once: that it happened, and that it broke a law of nature. But the second half of that is a claim you are making about how firmly the law holds, and the firmer you make it, the more you have argued that the event was maximally unlikely to happen. Think of a factory foreman with a safety catch that has never once slipped in forty years of use. It is the forty-year record that makes Tuesday’s slip worth reporting at all; a catch that slips now and then would be a maintenance note rather than news. And it is the same forty-year record that makes the report of Tuesday’s slip hard to believe. The better the case for the rule, the worse the case for the exception, and the two cases are made out of exactly the same evidence. The believer cannot loosen the law to make room for the event, because a loosened law gives him an anomaly rather than a miracle. Hence the double burden, and hence, Mackie thought, the standing advantage of the two ordinary explanations: that the event happened for reasons we do not yet understand, or that the report is mistaken. He was fair enough to add the improvement that cuts the other way. Independent witnesses are not merely additive; two of them are worth much more than twice one, because collusion and coincidence both become hard to arrange. His caution was that reports which look independent often turn out to be branches of a single tradition that had already been talking to itself.

(Q) "Where there is some plausible testimony about the occurrence of what would appear to be a miracle, those who accept this as a miracle have the double burden of showing both that the event took place and that it violated the laws of nature. But it will be very hard to sustain this double burden." + Source: J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism, chapter 1, "Miracles and Testimony." The words come at the close of the chapter, where he puts the parts of his argument together. He explains the trap in the sentence that follows: whatever tends to show that an event would have been a violation of natural law tends for that very reason to make it most unlikely that it actually happened. The book’s title works the same seam, and the introduction says so. "Miracle" once meant only something surprising or marvellous, and Mackie is echoing Hume’s ironic parting shot that the Christian religion cannot be believed without a miracle by any reasonable person. Theistic belief in general is no miracle, he grants, if there is an adequate natural history of religion. But he hopes to show that its continuing hold on the minds of many reasonable people is surprising enough to count as a miracle in at least the original sense.

(Q) "Since this defence is formally possible, and its principle involves no real abandonment of our ordinary view of the opposition between good and evil, we can concede that the problem of evil does not, after all, show that the central doctrines of theism are logically inconsistent with one another. But whether this offers a real solution of the problem is another question." + Source: J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism, chapter 9, page 154. Twenty-seven years after the article that made his name, Mackie gave ground, and it is worth being exact about how much. "This defence" is the one he has just been describing, that certain evils are absorbed into greater wholes that are good and could not be good without them. Courage is the standard example: there is no such thing as courage in a world with nothing to fear, so a world containing both the danger and the courage may be better than a safe world containing neither. Mackie grants that an answer of that shape is formally possible, meaning it involves no contradiction, and that it gives up nothing of the ordinary opposition between good and evil. He is not conceding the free will defense here, which is the different reply that the evil is ours because God made us genuinely free. That comes on the next page as the best known answer of them all, and he spends the rest of the chapter arguing against it, down to the flat verdict that all its forms fail. Nor did he think the concession settled much. There are surplus evils, he says, suffering that no good absorbs, and the theist has no plausible account of them. His final verdict on the chapter is that we cannot take evil as a conclusive disproof of traditional theism, but that there is a strong presumption that theism cannot be made coherent without a serious change in at least one of its central doctrines.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Plantinga answered the 1955 article, and the argument that made Mackie famous is now generally reckoned to have failed. + Alvin Plantinga, an American philosopher at Calvin College and later Notre Dame, took up Mackie’s challenge in the early 1970s and answered it in God, Freedom, and Evil and in The Nature of Necessity, both published in 1974. He quotes Mackie at length and by name, because the argument he is answering is Mackie’s. His reply is called the free will defense, and the word "defense" is doing real work. Plantinga was not offering a theodicy, an account of God’s actual reasons for permitting the evils we see. He was answering a charge of contradiction, and to answer that charge you need only show that the propositions can both be true, however unlikely the story that makes them so. A man accused of being in two cities at once does not have to say where he actually was; he has to show that one consistent account of his day exists. Plantinga’s account turns on this: God can make a person free, but he cannot make a free person’s choices for him, since a choice God determines is not the person’s free choice. So it is at least possible that every person God could have created would have gone wrong at some point had he been created and left free. Plantinga gave the defect behind that possibility a name, transworld depravity, and set it out using possible worlds, the philosopher’s device of laying out all the complete ways the world might have been and asking which of them God could have brought about. Improbable, perhaps. But possible is all the argument needs, because Mackie had claimed a contradiction, and one coherent story is enough to show there is none. The judgment of the field went to Plantinga, and not only from Christians. William Rowe, an atheist philosopher who spent his career pressing the evidential problem of evil, wrote in a footnote to his 1979 paper "The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism" that "granted incompatibilism, there is a fairly compelling argument for the view that the existence of evil is logically consistent with the existence of the theistic God," and sent his readers to Plantinga for it. Incompatibilism is the view that a choice cannot be both free and already fixed by the causes that ran before it, so Rowe is conceding the case to Plantinga on the understanding of freedom Plantinga was working with, which is the concession that matters. Mackie himself did not surrender the point. In his last book he attacked Plantinga’s possible-worlds machinery and concluded that all forms of the free will defense fail. What almost nobody now defends is the strong claim of 1955, that the believer is contradicting himself; the argument from evil that remains live is the evidential one, that the amount and distribution of suffering counts as evidence against God.

(†) He argued natural theology on its own terms, and made its Christian defenders sharper than they had been. + Natural theology is the attempt to argue from the world itself to God, using only what anyone can see and reason about, with no appeal to Scripture or to revelation. A man looking at the fine adjustments that make life possible and concluding that somebody set them is doing natural theology; a man reading Isaiah is not. Richard Swinburne, then professor of philosophy at Keele and among the leading Christian philosophers of religion of the day, had just published The Coherence of Theism and The Existence of God, arguing that the traditional proofs work best not as proofs at all but as evidence, each raising the probability of God a little, the way separate strands make a rope. Mackie took that framework seriously enough to adopt Swinburne’s own definition of God and to go through the arguments one at a time in Swinburne’s terms, agreeing that the method is the right one and denying that the sums come out his way. He worked the same way with everyone. His chapter on the ontological argument, which tries to reach God from the concept of God alone without looking at the world at all, works through Descartes and Anselm and then gives a section of its own to Plantinga’s modal version, the form that argues from what is possible to what must be so. His chapter on the cosmological argument, the family of arguments that reason from the existence of the universe back to a cause of it, takes up the version William Lane Craig had recovered from medieval Islamic theology, the kalam argument, which claims the universe had a beginning and so must have had a cause; Mackie engaged Craig’s history and his mathematics, and Craig replied in Religious Studies in 1985. His chapter on Pascal’s wager, on religious experience, on Hume’s natural history of religion, each does the same. The effect on the Christian side of the conversation was to raise the standard of proof. After Mackie you could not defend a design argument without saying what would count as evidence against it, or invoke a necessary being without saying what kind of necessity you meant. Christian philosophy of religion in the English-speaking world grew more technical, more careful with probability, and much less content with slogans, and Mackie is one of the reasons.

(†) His case against objective values became, in Christian hands, an argument for God. + Mackie handed Christian philosophers the first half of an argument and expected them not to be able to use it. They used it. The moral argument in its modern form, associated above all with William Lane Craig, runs in two steps. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist. Objective moral values and duties do exist. Therefore God exists. The interesting thing is who is cited for the first step, and it is regularly Mackie, on the ground that no atheist made the case better: values of that sort would be metaphysically queer, unlikely to arise in the ordinary course of events, a standing miracle in a natural world (T4). Craig’s standard move is to say that Mackie is right about the conditional and wrong about which end to give up. Mackie saw the move coming and had his answer ready, which is why this is a real disagreement rather than a trick. He held that our confidence in objective values is exactly what an error theory predicts we would feel, since the claim to objectivity is built into the language we learned as children, and that a naturalistic account of moral thinking explains the feeling without the values. The Christian replies that the torture of a child is not made wrong by a human convention we might have adopted differently, and that a theory requiring us to say all our moral convictions are literally false is paying too much (Romans 2:14–15). It is a clean disagreement, and both sides state it in nearly the same words. That is Mackie’s doing.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a moral law that is found rather than made, a God who acts in history, and a world that is not finished yet. + Mackie gave his opponents straight answers, and he was owed the same, so the disagreements are worth stating at their full strength rather than softened for comfort. - Invented or discovered. On Mackie’s account we decide what moral views to adopt, and any claim that we are answering to something already there is a mistake. Scripture takes the opposite view of the same evidence. The reason people who never received the law still know that treachery is treachery is that the law is already written where they live: "For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them" (Romans 2:14–15). On the Christian account the moral sense is not a device we built but a witness we did not install. - Miracles and the closed world. Mackie’s double burden (T5) makes any reported violation of natural law maximally improbable before the testimony is heard. But that maximal figure is only correct if there is nobody there who might act, so the argument settles the question of God’s existence by assuming it. Christians reply that the resurrection is offered not as a private conviction but as a public claim open to examination, staked on witnesses and on falsifiable consequences: "if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17). Paul says as much to a hostile king: "this has not been done in a corner" (Acts 26:26). Mackie would have rejected the claim. He would not have called it evasive, and by his own standard for religious language (T1) that matters. - Why not make people who always choose well. This is his hardest question and it deserves no softening, especially since he pressed it in the sharpest possible form: Christians themselves hope for a world where the redeemed sin no more, so if that state is coherent enough to hope for, why is it not simply the world we were given? The Christian answer is that the two states are not the same thing. A character formed through real choices, real failure and real mercy is not the same object as a character issued complete at the factory, and the God of Scripture is after the first. What Mackie asked for arrives, but at the end of a history rather than instead of one: "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away" (Revelation 21:4). Whether that answer is adequate is exactly what the argument is about, and Mackie did not think so. - Whether God’s commands could corrupt morality. He held that grounding morality in divine commands turns virtue into self-interest, obedience for the sake of reward, the way a child is honest only while the treat is on the table, and that it can license rules with no connection to anyone’s good. The Christian answer is that God’s commands are not arbitrary decrees but expressions of what God is, so goodness is neither a standard above God nor a matter of his preference; and the commands themselves keep pointing back at the neighbor: "what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6:8). He was wrong, and he was worth answering, and those two facts belong in the same sentence. Christian philosophy is in better condition for having had to face him.