Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

126 J.J. Haldane
I have no wish to deny the phenomena and save ‘sufficiency’ by insisting
that, after all, there must have been determinacy. Instead I claim that a cause
need not be a sufficient condition in the sense presumed by determinism. There
is a very natural and widely exercised way of thinking according to which a
sufficient cause is a ‘cause enough’ and a sufficient explanation an ‘explanation
enough’. In these terms the quantum events do have an explanation. For
example, it may be a property of the experimental set-up that a certain percentage
of emissions follow a given pattern. To observe this is not necessarily
to confine oneself to a statistical description. Indeed, I take it that the point
of a realist interpretation is to attribute a natural propensity to the system.
Propensities are explanatory even when they are non-deterministic. If I say
that an event occurred because of a reactive tendency I have answered the
question ‘why?’ in a way that I have not if I say it just occurred. ‘Such things
happen’ can be an empty response but it need not be, and will not, where the
occurrence is attributed to well-established causal powers. A cause is a factor
that makes something to be the case; an explanation is an account of why
something is the case in terms of a cause. Where the cause is efficient and
deterministic an explanation may be inadequate if it falls short of showing
that, in the circumstances, only the event in question could have occurred; it
is certainly incomplete. But an explanation of an event is not shown to be
inadequate or incomplete if it does not cite a deterministic cause.
Given the arguments of this section, I conclude that per se efficient cause
series cannot be self-explanatory; that Hume’s conceivability argument in
support of brute contingency fails, and that quantum mechanics presents no
counter-example to the principle of sufficient reason – on the contrary it is a
useful reminder of the fact that while the search for explanations is a guiding
principle of science we do not always require them to be deterministic.
The questions of existential and causal dependency, therefore, are real ones,
unanswerable by science but answered by postulating a Prime Cause of the
existence of the universe. The ‘old’ and ‘new’ teleological arguments add to
this the hypothesis that the Cause of the world is also a source of regularity and
beneficial order; and the argument from conceptual thought and action imply
that this causal source is minded and a conceptual influence upon human
thought (et hoc dicimus Deum).
7 God and the World
And this we call ‘God’? While some philosophers have rejected the traditional
proofs outright, others have been willing to grant something to cosmological
and teleological arguments but then query the theistic interpretation of their
conclusions. Among those who reject the proofs some go so far as to argue