Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Reply to Smart 175
metaphysical answer involves acknowledging the existence of intensional entities
– concepts and senses – which organize the realms of thought and meaning
in a manner analogous to that in which natural forms organize the material
world. The concept ‘cat’ stands to a thought of a cat, as the form cat stands to
a cat. In each case a structuring principle makes something to be of a certain
sort; and the question of how thought can relate us to things is answered by
the fact that concepts and forms are isomorphic. More directly and intimately
they are two ways of being of one and the same nature. This has an interesting
theological implication to which I shall return.
So far as epistemology is concerned the only possibility for a theory of
meaning is that of an interpretative one. This brings us to the second broad
camp in the philosophy of language. The effort to understand what someone
means is an effort to make sense of what they are saying, to construe it in one
way or another by assigning a content to it. Practically this is something we
do without much, if any, thought about guiding principles; but theoretically it
is no easy task to say what the constraints on interpretation are. Donald
Davidson, who follows Quine in regarding the theory of meaning as the
theory of interpretative translation, has proposed various principles the common
core of which is that if we are to understand a speaker we must be able
to see him or her as saying things that we might reasonably say were we in his
or her circumstances. 4
Interpretation of the sort in question is making human sense of human
words and deeds. In doing this we cannot appeal to behavioural laws or
reduce the task to the application of other causal regularities, like observers
on the beach watching the motion of the waves. Instead we have to enter into
the ocean of meanings and values and find our bearings there. To do so, all
we have to rely on is our considered judgement as to what seems plausible,
significant or compelling. If Smart is willing to allow cultural studies the
status of knowledge then he will have to countenance meanings and nonscientific
modes of understanding. But once this is conceded there is no
longer any good reason (if there ever was one) not to allow emotional and
intuitive responses, as well as scientific enquiry and philosophical reasoning, to
inform our opinions about the nature of reality. With this further broadening
in mind let me recommend the following reformulation of the methodological
principle: an important guide to metaphysical truth is plausibility in the light
of total understanding.
2 The Existence of God
How does theism fare given this principle? In my essay (chapter 2) I offered
arguments to the existence of God that fall under two broad patterns: teleological