Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Reply to Smart 189
New Testament scripture reports the Incarnation of the Son of God, the
second person of the Trinity, is not something that can be ruled out on
grounds of scriptural criticism. What is wearisome, therefore, is that it is
often sceptically disposed biblical scholars rather than philosophers who tend
to make question-begging metaphysical assumptions as to what could and
what could not be true. Such are the ironies of life.
5 A Religious Conclusion
My themes have been the reasonableness of belief in a creative Divinity and
the merit of the claims of Christianity to provide answers to questions about
the nature of God and his purposes in creating us. At one point Jack Smart
remarks that the history of the universe suggests a very roundabout route to
the creation of thinking things. I suppose the idea is that an efficient Deity
would just create such beings, and that this not having been done a reductio ad
absurdum on the assumption of creation is in the offing.
I fear that Smart may have been encouraged in his thinking about this
issue by world-bound theologians. My reply is simple: do not underestimate
the extent of the Divine economy or its glory. Why suppose that God did not
also create thinking things straight off? Given the assumption of a creator
God I find it entirely plausible that we are not alone as rational beings; and
scripture and the writings of the saints offer evidence for the existence of
angels – pure spiritual beings, not the androgynous chorus line of popular
culture.
Furthermore, I conceive an expansive and multi-layered creation in which
we enter in only at a certain stage in the movement of the universe back
towards God. Earlier I sketched an account of how the harmony of cognition
between thought and thing might be explained. When I think of a cat, the
organizing principle which makes it to be what it is also structures my mental
activity. There is a formal identity of thought and object. Another way
of describing this is to say that a nature has come to be in another mode –
intellectually. Generalizing, my suggestion is that creation is purposely dynamic.
God has so ordained things that by stages the world comes to understand
itself. The process of historical development leads from materially embodied
natures to their assimilation into thought as Homo sapiens appears on the
scene. In us the world of cats and dogs, water and gold, comes to be again
cognitively. And as that happens we more adequately realize our status as
beings created in the image of God, for it is in God that all natures exist
‘eminently’. Aquinas relates this communication of form to the idea of
truth defined, following Isaac Israeli (855–955), as the conformity of mind
and thing.