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J. L Mackie God's Existence Summary

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J.L Mackie was an Australian philosopher who spent most of his life making significant contributions to the philosophy of religion and metaphysics. Despite his several publications, Mackie is known best for his work regarding the problem of evil. As we know, evil can be considered a wide range of different things, but when philosophers encounter evil, it poses major problems for them, especially regarding the topic of God’s existence. Theist and Atheist both acknowledge the existence of evil, but they differ in the fact that theist believe in an omnibenevolent (all-good), omnipotent (all-powerful), and omniscient (all-knowing) God. To Atheist, this poses a contradiction because this is a set of beliefs that can’t be all true all the time, …show more content…
He did so by targeting the idea that there is a God who is omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient. To show that God does not exist, Mackie used three strategies: the first was to show that one of the attributes is incoherent, the second was to show that one of the attributes is inconsistent with another, and the last one was to show that one of God’s attributes is inconsistent with some features of the world, in this case, Mackie chose evil. To better understand Mackie’s position, we have to understand the types of arguments philosophers use, logical and evidential. The logical argument is based on proving how two things, in this case God and evil, are logically contradictory and therefore impossible. The second argument is evidential which aims to prove that God is improbable if evil exist. For his paper, Mackie constructed his argument and stated that there is the idea of a God that is omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient, and if such a God does exist evil cannot, but evil does exist; therefore, God does not …show more content…
Throughout his paper, Mackie details adequate solutions that can explain how these two contradictory things may exist, and that that there must be the rejection of one of his claims. Mackie believes that the only possible solution to the problem of evil is the rejection of one of God’s premises (all-knowing or all-powerful) or denying the existence of god. Besides this, Mackie describes various of the solutions he considers to be fallacious that have been presented by several theists. Each of these solutions can be considered a theodicy because they are an attempt to show that the existence of evil does not rule out the possibility of God’s

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