Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

104 J.J. Haldane
wood . . . what is changing can’t be the very same thing that is causing the same
change, can’t be changing itself, but must be being changed by something
else . . . But this can’t go on for ever, since then there would be no first cause of
the change, and as a result no subsequent causes . . . So we are forced eventually
to come to a first cause of change not itself being changed by anything, and this
is what everyone understands by God (et hoc omnes intelligunt Deum). 16
This is a cosmological proof, that is to say it argues to God-as-Cause from
the mere fact of existence – here the existence of change or motion. I shall be
returning to this general style of argument in section 6. For the present,
though, note that while the coming-to-be of a conceptual power in the mind
of a child is certainly a change, and hence qualifies as a starting point for the
first way, the particular change in question suggests a more specific proof.
To bring this out consider the regress arising within the ‘Wittgensteinian–
Thomistic’ account of concept-formation.
Alice possesses a power that parrots lack, for while a bird may pick up a
sound and repeat it – quicker and more accurately than the child – no amount
of ‘instruction’ will teach the parrot the meaning of a term. Alice’s innate
power is in fact a second-order one; it is a power to acquire a (conceptual)
power. Another human being – James already has the first-order power; he
uses the term meaningfully and thinks thoughts with the same conceptual
content. Through instruction, Alice’s hitherto unrealized potentiality is made
actual through the activity of James. But as Aquinas says, this cannot go on
for ever. James’s conceptual ability calls for explanation, and the same considerations
as before lead to the idea of his instruction by an already active
thinker/language user, Kirsty, say, whose ability is itself the product of an
innate potentiality and an external actualizing cause. The Wittgensteinian
proposal that concepts are inculcated through membership of a linguistic
community suggests an interesting escape from the dilemma posed by the
innatist/abstractionist dispute, but it is not itself ultimately explanatory
because for any natural language user it requires us to postulate a prior
one. This regress will be halted if there is an actualizing source whose own
conceptual power is intrinsic; and that, of course, is precisely what God is
traditionally taken to be.
The cosmological argument itself is often described as the argument to a
‘Prime Mover’; but the particular adaptation I have been concerned with
might better be termed the argument to a ‘Prime Thinker’ or even, though
metaphorically, to a ‘Prime Sayer’. Here, one may be reminded of two wellknown
Hebrew and Christian reflections on ‘beginnings’ – those of the first
chapters of Genesis and of the Gospel of John:
Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness . . .’ [then]
out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird