Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

132 J.J. Haldane
lying in the bowl. In each case there is a (movable) ‘place’ in the universe that
is the location for the instantiation of these forms, and which is also the site
and range of possibilities of change in respect of them. Matter is the potentiality
for the instantiation of form, and form is the nature or characteristic
that is instantiated.
This account explains what it is to be a particular thing, and thereby
provides a basis for distinguishing between things and for identifying and
reidentifying them. As kinds of fruit, apples and pears differ with regard to
their defining properties or forms. As particular pieces of fruit, two apples may
not differ qualitatively, but necessarily they will differ with regard to matter,
i.e. each has its own ‘site’ of instantiation and transformation. And we can
conclude by implication that an apple viewed on Friday is one and the same
as that seen on Monday if and only if it is the same composite of form and
matter (or what may be equivalent, the one and only spatio-temporally continuous
organization of certain attributes).
With this analysis in mind we can now say that that which is the cause
of things cannot itself be composite and hence must be simple. It cannot
be composed of metaphysical parts such as substance and attribute, matter
and form, potentiality and actuality, and so on; for in being of necessity
unchanging it has no unrealized potentiality, and in necessarily lacking
potentiality it has no matter; and in having no matter it has no basis for
individuality; and in being devoid of individuality it cannot be a particular
substance possessed of essential and accidental attributes. In short, God is
necessarily simple. He is not a something or other, a this or that; but nor of
course is God nothing. Rather we might say, as does Meister Eckhart in
a series of fascinating philosophical reflections, that God is no-thing. 20 Or
as Wittgenstein wrote in a quite different context ‘It is not a something but
not a nothing either’. 21
In developing this sort of argument I am following the style and direction
of speculation advanced by St Thomas, his scholastic followers and
more recent analytical philosophers of religion. This speculation traces to and
fro a series of mutual implications between various conditions: impassibility,
immateriality, eternity, omnipotence, perfection, simplicity, necessary existence,
and so on, drawing out various relations of dependence, sufficiency and
equivalence. Before proceeding I want to mention a couple of these conditions
and certain ways of thinking about them which are sometimes held to
be problematic.
It is often maintained that God is identical with his essence, and that the
divine attributes are one. Such claims might seem to be at odds with my
earlier denials that God is subject to various distinctions, and in a sense that
is so. Nonetheless, although they use terminology that is more properly
attributable to natural beings these ways of speaking aim to make appropriate