Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

164 J.J.C. Smart
nature but my motives have nothing to do with a desire to block cosmological
proofs. See Haldane’s remark on p. 123. I would love to have a
cosmological proof if I found it convincing. I do feel the force of the question
‘Why is there anything at all?’ even though I seem to see that it could have
no possible answer.
I worry still about the notion of God’s simplicity, the assertion of which is
an important part of the argument. Can there be a simple cause of a complex
world? Perhaps there could be if simplicity is just a matter of the ultimate
laws of nature (or for Haldane the attributes of God) hanging together in a
nice way, such as is hoped for by those physicists who search for a final theory
uniting physics and cosmology. Still, the laws or attributes must be distinct:
they cannot follow from one another as a pure matter of logic. Haldane refers
to the distinction between sense and reference. Now the words ‘is powerful’
and ‘is good’, for example, have different senses and different references. So
we might say, Platonistically, that the attributes of power and of goodness are
different attributes and indeed apply to different sets of objects. Different
sense, different reference. However, the attributes of infinite power and infinite
goodness, according to the theist, apply to one and only one object, namely
God. This still, as far as I can see, leaves the attributes distinct: as a matter of
logic the possession of one attribute does not imply the possession of any of
the others. Indeed theorists who deny the existence of God because of the
existence of evil do so by supposing an incompatibility between the conjunction
of observed evil with the simultaneous possession of the two attributes of
infinite power and infinite goodness.
This leads me to pass a few remarks on Haldane’s treatment of this problem
of evil. I do not hope to get agreement with him on this matter, any
more than on the cogency or otherwise of the Aquinas–Haldane argument
for the existence of God. The reader must weigh up the two sides of this
‘Great Debate’, and make up his or her mind, and ideally do so in the light
of further reading.
6 Theism and the Problem of Evil
I do not wish to add a great deal to the treatment of the problem of evil in my
main essay, except to take account of certain features special to John Haldane’s
interesting theodicy in his main essay. He rightly rejects suggestions that evil
is an illusion. Even the illusion of evil would be horrible. Still, he has a
reservation here. He holds that though evil is not illusory, it is not something
positive in the world but is rather a privation. It is something that impedes
something positive, the proper functioning of a thing. In chapter 1, I questioned
the intelligibility, in the light of the theory of evolution, of the notion