Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

136 J.J. Haldane
above to show that such a mind is simple, unique, unchanging, and so on.
Yet, precisely this addition may seem to create the sort of problem that the
objector envisaged. For if I wish to say that God is unchanging, this raises
the prospect that he is not in time (assuming as many have done that change
and time are correlative); and if I also want to claim that temporal effects are
due to his agency, I then seem to have advanced a contradiction: that God’s
activity is both inside and outside of time. Or it may be supposed that even to
attribute thought to God is to ascribe a temporal and complex process incompatible
with his eternity and impassibility.
The issue of divine eternity is an intricately structured one and for present
purposes I am happy to adopt the view that God is timeless in the sense
(whatever exactly that is) of being ‘outside’ time. How then can he act in it?
I do not think it is an option for the theist to deny divine agency in the world,
not least because I have endorsed the view that the only way to reason to
God’s existence is from his (or here one might better say ‘its’) effects. But the
claim that God produces effects ‘in time’ is ambiguous, since the temporal
reference may either be to God’s effects or to his agency. So far as mundane
action is concerned both the causing and the being effected are temporal, but
once again this is not something that is implied by the idea of agency as such.
To hold that A caused B is only to maintain that B is due to A, and it is a
further step, therefore, to claim that if B occurred at t then A must also have
occurred at some time t′ (presumably prior to or simultaneous with t). Of
course, someone may reply that such agency as we are familiar with, i.e. our
own, is temporally situated. That, however, is beside the point. For what
would have to be demonstrated is that if the effects of an action are temporal
then so must be the action.
A similar rejoinder is available in response to the claim that thought
involves time and complexity. Human thinking takes time and makes use
of ‘separate pieces’ – for example as we fashion a chain of reasoning out of
initially unconnected symbols. But it is possible to assign these facts to what
are plausibly contingent features of human mental processes. The defining
characteristics of reasoning, as contrasted with mere psychological activity,
are atemporal features, for example entailment and contradiction. Consider
the following elementary modus ponens proof:
If you are reading this then you must be awake
You are reading this
∴ You must be awake
What makes this a valid piece of logic are certain abstract features and not
any empirical relations between a series of marks on paper. In acknowledging
this fact we see the need to distinguish between the (logical) content of a