Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Further Reflections on Theism 227
of design is the only feasible explanation; and since the being of any contingent
designer is non-explanatory from the point of view of existence (see
the cosmological argument and below), I conclude that reflection on biology
provides a compelling case for divine Creationism.
4 The Prime Thinker
Most of those who have reviewed or otherwise written about Atheism and
Theism make reference to the argument presented first in chapter 2, which
I entitled the ‘Prime Thinker’ argument. This occurs in the context of a
section of ‘Old Teleology’ bearing the subtitle ‘Mind over Matter’ (pp. 104ff).
The pages leading up to the argument are concerned with presenting a case
against both eliminative and non-eliminative materialism, and against both
type and token versions of the latter. Of necessity this exposition was relatively
brief and it omitted explicit discussion of Davidson’s anomalous monism
and other contemporary forms of non-reductive identity theory. Also it did
not offer a positive account of the mind–body relation. These omissions led
some to suppose that I had nothing to say against anomalous monism; but
that my own favoured position was that of Cartesian substance dualism. In
fact I have addressed both matters elsewhere and here I can simply report my
positions. 6 Firstly, as many of Davidson’s critics have argued, the implication
of anomalous monism is that there is no such thing as mental causation
per se; or put another way, all agency consists of physical causation. 7 Having a
mind makes no difference so far as concerns the disposition of matter; there
are no powers of rational causation. Rather, ‘having’ a mind amounts to being
describable in certain ways. As Davidson himself has observed, in correction
of a common reading to the contrary, his position is that the irreducibility of
psychological explanations to physical ones is ‘due to our special interest in
interpreting human agents as rational agents, rather than to special powers of
those agents’. 8 Allowing that there is much scope for debate in this area I am
persuaded that the idea of non-reductive identity theory is an illusion. If
mentality is real, then materialism must identify mental properties with physical
ones. If, as I maintain, that cannot be done, then materialism is refuted.
So far as concerns my positive, non-materialist view, I reject both the idea
that human persons are material substances (possessed of non-material properties)
and the suggestion that we are immaterial objects (conjoined somehow
to physical ones). Instead, I believe that we are examples of a third kind of
irreducible metaphysical substance, namely rational animals. Certainly we
possess material properties, as we do non-material ones; but these inhere in
something distinctive. One implication of this is that when we speak of
a (living) human body, the term ‘body’ is used not in the same, but in an