Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Atheism and Theism 111
express my thoughts; I found myself thinking about the issues because
I accepted an invitation to exchange views with Jack Smart on atheism and
theism; and I did this because it seemed fitting. Such facts explain by citing
reasons why something was brought into being and made to be as it is.
Similarly, the otherwise inexplicable regularity that surrounds and inhabits us
will have an adequate explanation if it derives from the purposes of an agent.
Ex hypothesi, no natural agent could have made the universe; so if the question
which its regularity gave rise to has an answer it can only be one that
connects natural order to a supernatural order – et hoc dicimus Deum.
This traditional argument pre-dates the physical and cosmological investigations
that have produced the evidence of ‘fine tuning’. What that evidence
involves is well described by Smart, and I take it he agrees that it adds to the
strength of the argument to the extent that it makes the existence of an
orderly universe even less likely than might have been supposed. The basic
laws of nature feature contingent ratios that the laws do not themselves
explain, and the fundamental particles whose behaviour they regulate also
exhibit apparently contingent numerical properties. If any of these ratios
and quantities had been different in the slightest degree then not only we,
and our predecessors in the history of life, but orderly matter itself would not
have existed. Crudely, the conditions necessary for the development and continued
existence of anything like the universe lie within a narrow range bounded
on one side by the possibility of ‘implosion’ and on the other by that of
‘explosion’. As before, any explanation of this fact has to look beyond the
framework of natural causation and that leads to a conclusion of purposeful
agency.
Assuming our common commitment to realism Smart and I would oppose
neo-Kantian relocations of the source of order in the minds of observers.
Whether the facts are as fundamental science now depicts them, we are not
of the view that order is always a projection, and never a detection of something
that is there independently of our conception of it. So the debate concerns
the possibility of explaining finely tuned order in non-theistic terms. As in
the discussion of organic teleology one is faced with an initial branching,
down one limb of which lies another fork. First, then, there is the issue
of whether cosmological order can be a basic unaccountable fact. To say that
it can is to maintain that functional regularity is independent of any other
kind of explanation. If one thinks that this is not a satisfactory conclusion,
and it is after all no more than a restatement of that for which an explanation
was being sought, then two courses present themselves: explanation by reference
to purposeful agency; and explanation by reference to chance.
Smart follows the latter course adopting a version of it that postulates
many universes. If there is a vast multiplicity of these differing from one
another in respect of their components and modes of interaction, some being