Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

88 J.J. Haldane
There is a general point of some importance here. Reductionists often
confuse formal nature and material composition. In their concern to show
that ultimately there is nothing more than ‘atoms in the void’ or ‘energy plus
space–time’, they overlook or underestimate the significance of the hierarchy
of forms within which matter is held together. I am not at all suggesting that
one go in the opposite direction and say that what individual things are made
of, and what, if anything, everything in the cosmos is made of, is unimportant
for an understanding of the natural order; but I am claiming that real science,
as contrasted with the reductionist philosopher’s ambition for it, is happy to
recognize a variety of features and levels of natural being, and can proceed
very well without progressive elimination of one sphere after another, collapsing
the structure of science down to the atomic core that is physics.
It might be conceded that the concepts of the life sciences, for example,
cannot be reduced to physics; but Smart and others will want to insist that
there is nothing in biology that is incompatible with a wholly physicalist
world view. Nothing in the higher levels of organization of matter
involves real properties or forms of causation that are non-physical or nonmechanistic.
Here more could be said about how the terms ‘physical’ and
‘mechanical’ may be interpreted but it is not in the interest of the debate
between Smart and me to be too liberal about this. We are concerned with
whether the physical and the real are one, and subject to details which he
explains (about the best interpretation of mathematics and set theory, for
example) Smart says they are, and I say they are not. So when he makes his
claim on behalf of physicalism, he denies that reality contains anything over
and above what physics recognizes.
4 ‘Old’ Teleology
The case of biology is a significant test of attitudes, for, as Smart notes,
living systems were long cited in design proofs and neo-Darwinian theory is
supposed to have put an end to this. My earlier point about actual sciences
being built around the recognition of distinctive forms of organization of
matter tells against reductionism as a general policy and applies to the relation
between chemistry and quantum mechanics as much as to that between
zoology and general physics. But the traditional teleological argument is concerned
with a special claim of irreducibility, viz. that of purpose to mechanism.
Teleologists maintain that organisms exhibit beneficial order: that is to
say both in their general organization and in the functioning of their parts
they generally operate in ways that are, in one or another way, good for them.
For example, the lungs absorb oxygen, the heart pumps blood, the kidneys
remove waste products, the genitals enable procreation and so on. Naïvely, it