C. J. Mackie

John Leslie Mackie was an Australian philosopher. He made significant contributions to the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language, and is perhaps best known for his views on metaethics, especially his defence of moral scepticism as well as his sophisticated defence of atheism. He wrote six books. His most widely known, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), opens by boldly stating, "There are no objective values." It goes on to argue that because of this, ethics must be invented rather than discovered. His posthumously published The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God (1982) has been called a tour de force in contemporary analytic philosophy. The atheist philosopher Kai Nielsen described it as "one of the most, probably the most, distinguished articulation of an atheistic point of view given in the twentieth century." In 1980 Time magazine described him as "perhaps the ablest of today's atheistic philosophers."