Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

176 J.J. Haldane
(sections 4 and 5) and cosmological (section 6). Contemporary philosophical
theists who find merit in reasoning of the first sort generally favour arguments
from regularity. While presenting a version of these I have also claimed,
in contrast with most philosophers, 5 that the possibility of an old style design
argument from the ‘directedness’ of things is not excluded by the development
of evolutionary theory. Here it may be useful to have a ‘map’ (figure 4.1)
summarizing the various lines of reasoning presented in chapter 2.
These diagrams are intended only as reminders and I shall not attempt to
repeat the details of the arguments they abbreviate. However, a short résumé
of part of the argumentation mapped in figure 4.1A is appropriate. First,
I began with the assumption – which Smart and I share – that science is the
systematic study of a largely mind-independent world. That world contains a
plurality of kinds of things animate and inanimate. The members of these
various kinds are united by sharing qualitatively similar natures. In the case of
living things these natures include principles of organic development and
activity.
With regard to the apparent functional or vital attributes, powers and
activities of organisms one must either be a realist or an eliminativist. Realism
is the claim that such features are genuinely as they seem and are possessed by
their subjects independently of our conceptions of them. For one reason or
another eliminativism rejects this, holding instead that what appear to be real
biological and teleological attributes of such and such a sort are either reducible
to more basic properties which are real, or else are simply shadows cast by
the light of human interest. My first argument was to the effect that the
natural sciences are realist in their assumptions and that Smart faces a dilemma:
either to endorse this view, thereby giving scope for an old style ‘directedness’
design argument, or else to reject it without scientific warrant in favour of an
ideologically driven, mechanistic reductionism. The point of the latter disjunct
is that nothing in the study of nature requires that we only allow as real
what physics deals with; to suppose otherwise is a prejudice of philosophy not
a discovery of science.
In his reply Smart reaffirms his physicalism but denies that it forces him to
be a conceptual reductionist; as he writes ‘My physicalism is an ontological
one, not a translational one’ (chapter 3, p. 153). The possibility of such a
position is not in dispute; indeed I allowed for it and described an example
when discussing the difference between ontological and conceptual or explanatory
behaviourism (chapter 2, p. 84). My point was rather that while
Smart may allow the non-translatability of teleological descriptions he denies
that there is – in reality (ontologically) – any teleological behaviour. What he
has to say later about levels of organization understood ‘in a weak sense’ does
not alter this fact. On his account a tree is still ‘nothing over and above a
physical mechanism . . . even though talk of a tree is not translatable into talk