Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Further Reflections on Atheism 217
that on the whole the fly has not come out of the fly bottle. Indeed, scientists
themselves engage in such clarifications, and if, as I have assumed, plausibility
in the light of total science is a necessary guide to metaphysical truth, then (as
Quine has argued) philosophy is continuous with science.
Wittgenstein had religious yearnings which Ryle did not appear to have.
This led some philosophers of religion to a lot of Wittgensteinian subterfuges
such as ‘religion is a form of life’ or ‘religious people are playing a certain language
game’, and even religious allusions to the supernatural as ‘metaphor’.
Consider the title of a book by John Hick, The Metaphor of God Incarnate. 28
Or consider the very readable book by Marcus J. Borg and N.T. Wright, The
Meaning of Jesus, 29 in which the former writer interprets everything (or nearly
everything) supernatural in the New Testament as mere metaphor. The atheist
has little with which metaphysically to disagree in such writings, and Haldane
and I have not considered them. One thing on which Haldane and I agree
is metaphysical realism, though Haldane does not agree on the continuity
between metaphysics and science.
Not all philosophers will think of plausibility in the light of total science as
so important as I do. They may stress common sense. Or the phenomenology
of our experiences. Some may hold that our awareness of sensations and other
experiences proclaims them or at any rate their properties as irreducibly nonphysical.
I hold that our experiences are brain processes, but that we are aware
of them in virtue of properties that are neutral between physicalism and dualism.
Phenomenology 30 can be illusory. The materialist thinks of so-called correlations
between conscious events and brain processes as identities. Dualism is
cut away with Ockham’s razor. Note that we don’t know all the correlations.
Maybe because of the complexities of the brain we never will. Ockham’s razor
or scientific plausibility does the trick. 31
This is relevant to the arguments for the existence of God due to Richard
Swinburne. Swinburne is a subtle philosopher who, among other virtues, is
expert in the theory of probability. He defends the argument for the fine
tuning, and his defence of mind–body dualism forms part of it. I think that
our differing views about phenomenology account a great deal for his and my
differences in metaphysics. Dualism rests on a certain trust in phenomenology,
whereas I have distrust in phenomenology. It is beyond the scope of this
essay to discuss in detail Swinburne’s ingenious defence of theism. Naturally
I admire his ingenuity and he is certainly to be commended on seeing that his
theism should be backed up by a metaphysics. 32
Another important defender of theism whose writings are too voluminous
to summarise here, but whose modal form of the ontological argument was
discussed earlier, is Alvin Plantinga. He supports his Christian theology by
his work on epistemology. That is, he has a theory of warrant. 33 When is
a belief warrantedly assertible so as to constitute knowledge? But warrant can