J.L. Mackie

John Leslie Mackie lived from 25 August 1917 to 12 December 1981 and was an Australian philosopher who made significant contributions to ethics, the philosophy of religion, metaphysics and the philosophy of language, with influential views on metaethics including his defence of moral scepticism and his sophisticated defence of atheism. He wrote six books, his most widely known being Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong of 1977, which opens by stating there are no objective values and argues 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 of 1982 has been called a tour de force in contemporary analytic philosophy, described by the atheist philosopher Kai Nielsen as one of the most distinguished articulations of an atheistic point of view given in the twentieth century, and Time magazine described Mackie in 1980 as perhaps the ablest of today's atheistic philosophers.