Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Further Reflections on Atheism 219
Consider the Popperian maxim ‘Do not look for verifications, look for
falsifications.’ This is a good maxim, though it needs qualifications. If you
look only for falsifications you may be in danger of implying that we never
find knowledge, or of implying that contemporary astronomers know no
more than Galileo did. Still, one must suspect that religious faith goes too
much the opposite way, looking for verifications not for possible falsifications.
The sailor who is the sole survivor of a shipwreck attributes his rescue
to a divine providence, but ignores the watery fate of all his shipmates. It
is logically possible that blind faith will lead to truth, but then it is logically
possible that the sun will not rise tomorrow.
Certainly the extent (perhaps even infinite) and other wonders of the
universe as revealed by modern physics and cosmology can cause emotions of
awe and wonder in an atheist no less than those experienced by theologians,
and even more so than those experienced by religious people who have too
anthropic a conception of God.
Notes
1 I have used M.J. Charlesworth’s translation of Anselm’s Proslogion (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1965). This contains translations of Gaunilo’s reply to Anselm
and Anselm’s reply to Gaunilo, and the whole also reproduces Dom. F.S. Schmitt’s
edition of the original Latin text of Anselm’s works.
2 Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974),
Chapter 10.
3 Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978. See p. 33.
4 2nd edn. revised, New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1961.
5 Charlesworth, Proslogion, pp. 176–7.
6 Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity.
7 Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955, p. 201.
8 Mind 57 (1948), 176–83. Reprinted in Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre,
New Essays in Philosophical Theology (London: SCM Press, 1955). Further page
references to Findlay will be to the reprinting in Flew and MacIntyre.
9 Flew and MacIntyre, New Essays, p. 48.
10 Ibid., p. 51.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., p. 53.
13 But see W.V. Quine, The Roots of Reference (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1973),
pp. 98–100, and his ‘Reply to Professor Marcus’ in his The Ways of Paradox (New
York: Random House, 1966) p. 180, where he wittily contrasts the ‘Ryle’ sense of
quantification with the ‘real’ sense.
14 The important Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy was attracted to Platonism
but also to the idea of mathematics as making beautiful and wonderful constructions
in the human mind.