Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

216 J.J.C. Smart
empirical test between them, physicists prefer the simplest theory. Simplicity
here is cashed out in terms of symmetries. This preference might be for
heuristic reasons only: that the search for symmetries has been rewarded in
the past. There is some inductive evidence that because the search for
symmetries has paid off in the past, the ‘ultimate theory of everything’ might
itself be based on symmetries. This would of course be a crude inductivism.
But suppose that there is such an ultimate theory. Being ultimate it cannot be
based on some more general theory. If a physicist was asked ‘Why is it so?’
what better could he say than ‘Because it is beautiful’? This is different from
answering the epistemological or psychological question ‘Why do you believe
that it is so?’ which could be answered by reference to perception and to
empirical tests or the ability to explain the approximate truth of well-tested
subordinate theories in the case of the epistemological question. ‘Because it is
beautiful’ as I want it construed harks back to the Socrates of the Phaedo and
Plato’s Form of the Good. In the Phaedo Socrates expresses disapproval of
naturalistic philosophers such as Anaxagoras who relied on causal and quasicausal
explanations. Socrates came to reject the naturalistic approaches in
favour of an explanation by reference to Mind (i.e. by reference to purpose)
but quickly moved from talk of mind and so what seems good to talk of what
is good. This ties up with Plato’s talk of the Form of the Good as the
supreme explanans.
I wonder whether Socrates’ and Plato’s preference for teleology or explanation
in terms of value may have set science back, perhaps for centuries, but as
I am not a historian of science I leave this question for the experts. However,
the synthesis (at the extreme of explanation) of Anaxagoras and the Plato of
parts of the Timaeus with the Plato of the Republic may look attractive. If this
is an olive branch to at least those of Leslie’s neo-Platonic persuasion it is a
very small twig since (for one thing) it depends on an objectivist meta-ethics
of goodness and beauty (which the Greeks did not greatly distinguish) and
which I myself reject. 26
10 Can Theists and Atheists Come to Agree?
In FE p. 6 I remarked on the paucity of knockdown arguments in philosophy.
Nor are all philosophical confusions due to our not knowing our way
about our language (though indeed some are). All of philosophy is not showing
the fly the way out of the fly bottle, to use Wittgenstein’s simile, despite
the sort of therapeutic activities enjoined by Wittgenstein, and also less pompously
by Gilbert Ryle 27 who held that philosophy was (or was at least) ‘the
detection of the sources in linguistic idioms of recurrent misconstructions and
absurd theories’. I think that such clarifications are important but nevertheless