Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Atheism and Theism 105
of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them;
and whatever the man called every living creature that was its name. (Genesis
1: 26; 2: 19)
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through
him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life,
and the life was the light of men. (John 1: 1–4)
This line of argument will provoke various objections. Some of these are
general complaints about philosophical theology (e.g. whether invoking God
as a self-explanatory cause is consistent, and whether philosophy and scripture
belong together) and are best dealt with at a later stage. At this point,
however, I want to make explicit the connection between the reflections on
conceptual thought and the issues of evolution and emergence.
Wittgenstein was a cautious thinker and held back where his reasoning
neared the limits of experience. Consequently I am not sure to what extent he
can be said to be a philosophical naturalist. He is reported to have said of
himself ‘I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem
from a religious point of view’ 17 and it is clear that he had respect for religious
sensibilities. At the same time, these attitudes can be interpreted in ways
compatible with atheism. It is difficult to say, therefore, what his attitude to
the problem I have posed might have been. Whatever Wittgenstein’s own
view about it, however, the language-learning account of concept-formation
might seem to escape the regress if it can show how at some earlier point the
sequence of concept-conferring exchanges could have arisen. Any such account
faces two difficulties: first, that arising from the dialectic between innatism
and abstractionism, and second a version of that presented earlier in connection
with Dennett’s homunculi-discharging strategy. If the linguistic view is
to be a genuine alternative to the other theories it cannot revert to them in
explaining earlier stages in our conceptual history. It cannot say, for example,
that Adam’s (and Eve’s?) concepts were innate though Alice’s were acquired.
If innatism and abstractionism are incoherent they are not made any more
intelligible by being introduced to halt a regress.
This sort of difficulty will be generally acknowledged; what is less likely
to be conceded is the second objection, namely that no history of thought or
language can be philosophically adequate if it tries to meet the genesis problem
by postulating ‘fading conceptuality’. Though it is not put in these terms, or
indeed very often discussed at all, something of this sort is presumably part of
a naturalistic version of Wittgenstein’s linguistic theory. On this account
the history of concept-formation and use is the history of language; a history
that leads back to pre-linguistic activities, back further to pre-mental life, to
pre-replicating life and ultimately to pre-animate matter. It is unnecessary for