The Counterpunch that Rocked Philosophy

The Night Mackie Met His Match

The Furniture of Reality

There is a particular kind of intellectual fight that never quite ends, the kind where the combatants are arguing not merely about facts, but about the very furniture of reality.

The bout between J. L. Mackie and Alvin Plantinga was exactly that kind of fight.

It was conducted in footnotes and lecture halls rather than smoky back rooms, but it possessed everything a great contest demands: a devastating opening attack, a long period of assumed victory, and then – years later – a counter-punch so precise, so elegantly timed, that even the man it floored had to admit he hadn’t seen it coming.

In the Red Corner: The Oxford Surgeon

John Leslie Mackie was the kind of philosopher who made atheism seem like the only respectable intellectual option. An Australian by birth and an Oxford don by vocation, Mackie possessed a prose style of almost surgical clarity. He did not bully or bluster. He simply laid out his arguments like scalpels on a tray and invited you to see that they admitted no escape.

In 1955, he published a paper in Mind titled “Evil and Omnipotence”. It was widely considered the definitive philosophical statement on the problem of evil.

The argument was deceptively simple:

1. If God is omnipotent, He can do anything.

2. If He is perfectly good, He desires to eliminate evil.

3. If He is omniscient, He knows where evil lurks.

Yet evil exists – abundantly, grotesquely, without apparent redemption.

Therefore, Mackie concluded, the traditional God of theism is a logical contradiction. He cannot exist for the same reason a square circle cannot exist: the very concept collapses under its own weight.

This was not merely the village atheist’s complaint dressed up in academic robes. This was a formal logical argument. For nearly two decades, theologians offered comfort, but philosophers could offer only silence – or worse, equivocation.

Mackie had, or so it seemed, scored a first-round knockout.

Enter the Challenger

Where Mackie was the patrician Oxford sceptic, Alvin Plantinga was the earnest mid-westerner who happened to have a mind like a steel trap. He did not fight with rhetorical brilliance. He fought with logic, using the very same weapon Mackie had used, but turning it back upon him.

In 1974, Plantinga published The Nature of Necessity and God, Freedom, and Evil. Together, they constituted one of the most remarkable counter-attacks in the history of analytic philosophy.

The Counter-Punch

Plantinga’s move was as elegant as it was devastating. He did not argue that evil has a “purpose” or that suffering “builds character”. Instead, he attacked Mackie’s argument on its own turf: logic.

Mackie had claimed that an omnipotent God could have created free beings who nevertheless always chose the good. Plantinga’s response was simple: No, He couldn’t.

This is not a limitation on God’s power, but a logical impossibility.

The moment you create a being who is genuinely free, you have, by definition, created a being whose choices are not yours to determine.

A God who creates “free” beings and then ensures they always choose good has not created free beings at all. He has created very sophisticated puppets. Freedom and guaranteed goodness are not two things God declined to combine. They are two things that cannot be combined, like asking for a married bachelor or a colourless red.

But Plantinga didn’t stop there. He introduced a concept that became one of the most discussed ideas in modern philosophy of religion: Transworld Depravity.

The idea runs roughly like this:

• Imagine God, before creation, surveying every possible human being he might bring into existence.

• It is at least conceivable that every single one of those possible people shares a common flaw: given the right circumstances, each of them would, sooner or later, freely choose to do something wrong.

• Not because God made them bad, but because that is simply the kind of creatures they are.

If that is even a possibility, then God faces a genuine dilemma. He can have a world with free creatures, knowing that some evil will follow, or he can have a world with no evil, populated entirely by automata.

What he cannot have, because the very concepts won’t permit it, is a world full of genuinely free people who are also guaranteed never to sin. That world may simply not exist. Freedom and guaranteed goodness are like a flame that doesn’t burn: the moment you remove the burning, you no longer have a flame.

The “Free Will Defence” proved something narrow but philosophically decisive: The logical problem of evil fails. You cannot prove God does not exist simply by pointing to suffering, any more than you can prove there are no architects by pointing to ugly buildings.

The Concession

What makes this intellectual drama genuinely moving, rather than merely interesting, is what happened next.

Mackie did not slink away or pretend the counter-punch had not landed. In 1982, he published The Miracle of Theism, a new defence of atheism. But in its pages, he made a concession that must have cost him something to write.

The Free Will Defence, Mackie acknowledged, succeeds. Plantinga had, in Mackie’s own judgement, demonstrated that God and evil are not straightforwardly contradictory.

It was the philosophical equivalent of a champion holding out his glove at the end of a fight to acknowledge that his opponent had, in this round at least, beaten him fair and square.

The Aftermath

The consensus in analytic philosophy since 1974 has been remarkably stable: Plantinga won.

He didn’t prove God exists, that wasn’t his aim. He won in the sense that he dismantled what had seemed the most airtight philosophical argument against theism. The logical problem of evil is now widely regarded, even by atheist philosophers, as a dead end.

The fight moved on, as great intellectual contests always do. But the 1974 bout belongs to Plantinga.

It was one of those rare moments, like Wittgenstein brandishing a poker at Karl Popper, where philosophy stops being merely academic and becomes high drama. Two men, one question older than writing, and a knock-down that nobody who was paying attention could honestly deny.

Even God, one suspects, might have smiled.