Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Atheism and Theism 87
‘Mary is happy because she is contented’; ‘the figure is trilateral because it is
triangular’; ‘the villain was cruel because of his selfishness’; ‘the rules were
breached, the audience was offended, the baby cried and the alarm went off
all because he started shouting’, and so on.
In some sense(s) these various claims are causal ones; certainly one can
reformulate them using the word ‘cause’ rather than ‘because’. But it is a matter
of enduring philosophical controversy how they should be understood; and
this difficulty is not resolved by insisting, as many contemporary philosophers
do, that there is only one kind of causation, namely efficient causation, the
paradigm of which is one object colliding with another and starting it in
motion. Whatever else might be said it is obvious that the number 6 is not
even because it can literally be sliced in half by the number 2, and however his
shouting caused the rules to be breached it was not, as with the setting off of
the alarm, by setting up motions of air molecules that then impacted a surface.
Uncertainty about the nature and varieties of causation is bound to affect
(itself another type of causing!) interpretations and assessments of causal
arguments, particularly if these involve more than one kind of cause. It is in
part for this reason that I entered the qualification about our ability to make
conclusive assessments of non-ontological proofs of theism. In particular
the design arguments that I am interested in here, posit an extra-natural
cause from somewhat different perspectives, and the nature of these viewpoints
bears upon the sense of the causal claim involved. The arguments in
question are from functional natures, from enabling pre-conditions and sustaining
conditions, and from intellectual understanding. The first two are discussed
by Smart.
Most forms of scientific enquiry are non-microscopic. Most of what people
study in university and pursue in non-academic fields and laboratory research
concerns categories of phenomena above the level of physics. Such studies
are generally concerned with dynamic systems. These enquiries are certainly
mindful of the fact that the entities in question are composed out of matter
but the focus of their interest is organization, in particular functional organization.
They want to know what has happened, is happening or will happen
and what the active and passive powers of the various ‘elements’ are. For
example, environmental studies may combine astronomical, meteorological,
botanical and various other sciences in the effort to understand the development
of a system. In doing this it uses a series of taxonomical and explanatory
schemes in which reference to natures and functions is extensive. It would
be a mistake to suppose that such branches of scientific study could purge
themselves of these sorts of notions, since they and the observational and theoretical
methods that go with them are constitutive of these very forms of
enquiry. Botany can no more dispense with notions of structure, function and
growth than cricket can purge itself of the ideas of innings, runs and wickets.