Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

134 J.J. Haldane
From Creature to Creator
In the introduction to the present section, I mentioned that some who reject
the traditional proofs also maintain that there can be no reasoning from the
world to God. Various accounts of this impossibility are offered but I shall
only address what I take to be the general form of the objection. It is usually
attributed to Kant but it certainly pre-dates his writings and is probably as old
as systematic arguments for the existence of God. The basic idea is that as a
matter of logic we cannot reason from the conditions of the empirical world
to the conditions of a transcendent super-empirical reality. Sometimes this is
taken to establish a mere limitation deriving from the fact that our concepts
are acquired from, or are otherwise keyed to the empirical world and so can
be presumed to fail of meaning when we try to apply them beyond this. At
other times it is argued that any attempt to apply them ‘transcendentally’ will
yield contradictions.
As regards the first of these contentions I would only observe that, as was
seen earlier, it rests on a series of controversial assumptions about the source
and scope of meaning. First, it may be contested that all our concepts derive
from empirical experience; but even if this were granted it is a further question
whether this implies any confinement of their scope. Consider the terms
‘planet’, ‘distant’ and ‘travelled to’. Each might be held to derive ultimately
from experience, but it is clear that we can easily construct a complex term
‘planet more distant than has been travelled to’ and apply it out of the range
of our actual and perhaps even our possible experience. This is not a rare
linguistic or conceptual phenomenon. We are forever talking and thinking
about entities that we do not and could not experience, for example, unrealized
hypothetical situations, unobservable (but presumed to be actual) objects
and events, infinitely large domains, and so on. We talk and think about
the unrecoverable past and the as yet non-existent future; about the spatially
distant and about the non-spatial and abstract realms of mathematics and
philosophy.
Of course, someone might want to argue that all of these efforts are in
vain, or contend that while some are legitimate nonetheless the particular
ways of thinking presumed upon by proofs for the existence of God are
unavailable to us. It is difficult to see how anything sensible could be made of
the former claim, since it would exclude vast tracts of what we otherwise take
to be perfectly sensible, explanatory and truth-detecting forms of thought,
including, let it be clearly noted, much and perhaps most fundamental science.
So far as the second contention is concerned, it supposes that the
concepts deployed in the proofs, or the ways in which they are used, can be
separated off from other unproblematic notions or uses. But again it is hard
to imagine this being done in any coherent and convincing way. Moreover,