Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

110 J.J. Haldane
The real interest of the issues introduced by the question of the conditions
necessary for the world to be as it is, complete with beings able to investigate
its structure and to ask this very question, lies in the fact that those conditions
seem to call for some explanation. What we know about the observable
universe and that which we can infer about what lies over the ‘visible’ horizon
indicates that it is composed out of a number of types of microphysical
entities whose members exhibit common properties and are subject to a small
number of simple laws. There is nothing obviously inevitable about this fact.
It seems perfectly intelligible to suppose that the universe could have been
spatially and temporally chaotic. There might have been little or no regularity
in the nature of its parts and the flow of events might have been entirely
haphazard. Yet it is not so. Chemistry tells us that there are elements whose
instances share well-defined structural properties in virtue of which they can
and do enter into systematic combinations; and physics tells us that these
elements are themselves constructed out of more basic items whose properties
are if anything purer and simpler. A stock of components with regular modes
of combination subject to perfectly general laws is not the only possibility,
and it invites speculation as to why there is order rather than chaos. One
might say that if there had been chaos then we would not exist and the
question would not have arisen. In a sense that is true – no actual inquirers,
no actual inquiry; but it leaves untouched the central theme which is that of
the preconditions of the possibility of order. Cosmic regularity makes our
existence possible; the underlying issue concerns the enabling conditions of
this order itself, and that issue ‘arises’ even if no one exists to raise it.
Some teleological proofs argue from spatio-temporal regularity alone.
They reason that while events in nature can be explained by reference to the
fundamental particles and the laws under which they operate, these explanatory
factors cannot themselves be accounted for by natural science. Since
scientific explanations presuppose them as first principles, they cannot derive
them as conclusions from more general facts about the universe. Natural
explanations having reached their logical limits we are then forced to say that
either the orderliness of the universe has no explanation or that it has an
‘extra-natural’ one.
The latter course cannot plausibly take the form of embedding the facts of
nature within the laws and initial conditions of a SuperNature. That would
amount to retracting the previous claim that one had specified the ultimate
facts of the material universe; and ‘nature’ would then be regarded as a spatial
and/or temporal part of SuperNature. The search for the source of order must
reach a dead end if scientific explanation is the only sort there is. However, as
I have emphasized in earlier sections, there is more than one kind of ‘because’.
In particular, explanations sometimes proceed by tracing events to rational
agency. These words are on the page before you because I chose them to