Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Reply to Smart 191
One step enough. Yet the ambition of philosophy has traditionally been
to comprehend the whole. How then are faith and thought related? If there
is any merit in the arguments I have presented, there is reason to believe
that we are part of a created order and that our role in it involves achieving
understanding. By means of thought we come to mirror the structure of
reality and thereby reflect in small and imperfect images something of the
grandeur of God. But to realize our potential as images of the Divine we also
need to engage and direct the will, the imagination and the passions. God is
active in sustaining creation and we need to find how our actions can be
aligned with his purpose. To help us in that we have been given a revelation
and a Divinely instituted and protected community of faith: Holy Scripture
and Holy Church – so I believe. All the same, the route to salvation is not so
clear that only those who wilfully ignore it lose their way, and to take it
involves sacrificing the little we seem to have secured by our own efforts.
Even Christ entered in a plea to be excused before saying ‘not my will, but
thine, be done’ (Luke 22: 42). So though it may be plausible in the light of
total understanding to suppose that there is a transcendent order, and though
we may hope one day to see the distant scene, for now we need much grace
to take each step towards it. 19
Notes
1 For further discussion of these issues see my essays ‘Mind–World Identity Theory
and the Anti-Realist Challenge’, in J. Haldane and C. Wright (eds), Reality,
Representation and Projection (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), and
‘Forms of Thought’, in L. Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of Roderick Chisholm, Library
of Living Philosophers Volume XXV (Chicago: Open Court, 1997).
2 See ‘The Construction of the Historical World in the Human Studies’, in
H.P. Rickman (ed.), Dilthey, Selected Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1976).
3 The locus classicus for this approach is Paul Grice’s essay ‘Meaning’, Philosophical
Review, 66 (1957). The theory of meaning has been one of the most
productive fields of analytical philosophy since the 1960s. There are many
anthologies, surveys and introductory texts. Readers might begin with
R.M. Martin, The Meaning of Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987) and
for authoritative treatments of individual issues see the essays in B. Hale and
C. Wright (eds), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language (Oxford: Blackwell,
1996).
4 For Davidson’s own writings see the essays in the third section of Inquiries into
Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). Davidson has developed
his views in subsequent articles. For an overview see Simon Evnine, Donald
Davidson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). Further development of a broadly