Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Further Reflections on Atheism 209
supernatural acquaintance with the Platonic entities, as is needed in traditional
Platonism, going back to Plato himself.
If one is not satisfied with the minimalist account of necessity, one might
be tempted to define it in terms of possible worlds. There are two objections
to this. One thing is that the notion of possible world is elucidated in terms
of ‘the way things might be’ and ‘might’ is itself a form of ‘possibly’. Another
is that if the possible worlds are ersatz, we may wonder what they have to do
with the price of fish.
If a theologian were a traditional Platonist as (opposed to a Quinean one),
he or she might point to an unanalysed necessity apparently possessed by the
square root of 2, e, π and so on. So, as I suggested in FE p. 37, the theologian
might say that God is a necessary being in the way that the square root of 2
is. Though if we give no clear meaning to the necessity ascribed to the square
root of 2 we still have no clear meaning as to the necessity ascribed to God.
Nevertheless as I suggested in FE, a theologian would do best to think of
God as eternal, not sempiternal. (Anselm in Proslogion XIII says: ‘Only that
in which there is neither beginning nor end nor conjunction of parts, and that
thought does not discern save as a whole in every place and at every time,
cannot be thought not to exist.’ This is ambiguous between being eternal, and
like the square root of 2 in not being in time or space–time at all, and being
sempiternal, at all times, with time being infinite towards both past and future.)
It is important to prise away the commonly confused notions of temporality
and even sempiternity from that of existence. I think that even a traditional
(non-Quinean) Platonist should feel the lure of the unanswerable
question of ‘Why does anything exist at all?’ no less in relation to the atemporal
forms than about things in space and time. The theist should feel it in
relation to an atemporal God no less than in relation to a temporal God.
Those who believe in a temporal God may also need to confront recent
speculations in cosmology, such as that new space–time universes may be
spawned out of black holes. Perhaps God is super-temporal with a very
complicated branching topology. As I said in FE, my advice would be to
think of God as atemporal, eternal not sempiternal. Even so, as I have suggested,
this does not resolve the doubts about the nature of necessity, or fail
to leave us with the child’s question ‘Who made God?’ (in the form of
‘Is there a satisfactory sense of “necessary” which will get round a generalized
form of J.N. Findlay’s challenge?’).
6 The Fine-Tuning Argument Again
Some reviewers have queried my treatment in FE of the fine-tuning arguments
in which I surveyed various non-theistic ways of dealing with the fine-tuning