Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Further Reflections on Atheism 205
more detail at Findlay’s argument. This will lead on to a further look at the
notions of necessity and possibility.
4 A Putative a priori Disproof of the Existence of God
Findlay in his article: ‘Can God’s Existence be Disproved?’ 8 recognises that
there are all sorts of concepts of God which a sensitive religious person would
regard as inadequate, such as that of ‘some ancient, shapeless stone’ or ‘the
bearded Father of the Sistine Ceiling’. He is concerned with the concept of
God according to which he would be ‘an adequate object of religious attitudes’. 9
He describes a worshipful attitude ‘as one in which we feel disposed to bend
the knee before some object, to defer to it wholly, and the like’. 10 Even those
who worship stones or trees suppose that they are not ordinary stones or trees
but have some magical powers. But now, Findlay asks, following many theologians,
whether it is ‘not wholly anomalous to worship anything limited in any
thinkable manner’. 11 Findlay is therefore led on to ‘demand that our religious
object should have an unsurpassable surpremacy’. (In fact we have seen that
Plantinga thought of God as a being of unsurpassable greatness and excellence.
And Anselm defined the concept of God in this way.) Findlay says that
such a being would ‘tower infinitely above all other objects’.
Such language is characteristic of proponents of the ontological argument,
but Findlay, like a ju-jitsu wrestler, is going to turn against them what the
proponents of the ontological argument think of as their strength. Findlay,
indeed, here agrees with philosophers such as Anselm and Plantinga that we
can’t help feeling that ‘the worthy object of our worship can never be a thing
that merely happens to exist’ and that we require that an adequate conception
of God should be one whose nonexistence is inconceivable. He holds that such
a conception makes no sense. Findlay says that a being that possessed all the
desirable qualities merely contingently 12 would not be the object of an appropriate
religious attitude. Moreover, worship of a being that just happened to
exist would be a case of idolatry. Such a God would be an improvement on a
magical stone, but nevertheless would not meet the theological requirements.
Such a God would be just another (albeit admirable) thing in the world.
Certainly such an in-the-end contingent God would not satisfy by constituting
an answer to the unanswerable question ‘Why does anything exist at
all?’ which arises from philosophical worry about why anything exists at all
and which I mentioned on FE p. 32. So God’s necessary existence could not
be logical necessity. It would not even be physical necessity, which i implication
by laws of nature plus boundary conditions. This is for two reasons,
namely that God would as creator antecedently (in a non-temporal sense of
‘antecedently’) fix both boundary conditions and laws. Findlay’s conception