Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Atheism and Theism 135
the concepts in question, viz. change, causation, contingency, necessity, purpose,
thought, action and so on, are not specific to natural theology and nor is the
manner of their use in the proofs unique to that context.
Consider briefly the following supposedly troublesome examples: causation,
necessity, thought and action. It has often been argued that our only idea of
causation is that of the link between efficient causes and their effects, and
that this is a form of law-governed relationship between contingent and
independent entities. If this were so, then indeed the proofs would be fallacious;
for given what the theist claims about God and the dependency of the
world on his creative activity, they would involve equivocation in the use of
the central terms. For example, ‘cause’ when predicated of God simply could
not mean what it means when predicated of a material object. However, as
I have argued above, the core notion of a cause is simply that of a productive
factor – that which makes something to be the case – and there is nothing in
this idea alone that implies laws, contingency and independence. Of course, if
the world is caused to be by that which we call God, this relationship is not
to be assimilated to the mechanical operation of one object upon another; but
why should the theist, or anyone else for that matter, want to circumscribe
the idea of causation in this way?
Likewise, there has been an inadequate constraining of possibilities in
discussions of necessity and contingency. Happily, since the late 1960s the
old idea that the only necessities are linguistic or logical has fallen under
suspicion and come to be widely abandoned in favour of the view that there
can be existential or de re necessities. In chapter 1 Smart raises worries about
how the idea of God’s existence can be fitted into any of the various categories
of necessity he discusses, but I think he gives insufficient attention to the
way in which the idea of necessity arises in the argument from contingency.
What we are led to is the existence of something which exists eternally,
which does not owe its being to anything else and which cannot not exist.
One might well ask ‘Is there any such thing?’; but this notion of necessary
existence is not incoherent, and if I am right then reason will require us to
apply it once we begin to ask about how to explain the existence of anything
that is contingent, i.e. not necessary in this sense.
Causation and necessity are not obviously person-involving features as are
thought and action; and it may be conceded that while the former can be
deployed intelligibly in the direction of the transcendent, any such use of the
latter must lead to incoherence. As before, my illustration and response will
be brief. The upshot of the reasoning from effect to cause in the case of
teleological or design proofs, particularly in their ‘old’ versions, and of the
‘Prime Thinker’ argument, is the conclusion that the operation of the world
and of human beings within it depends upon the purposeful agency of a
transcendent mind. To this we could now add the sort of reasoning given