Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

230 J.J. Haldane
the stages of linguistic development, cannot account for conceptual thought
as this is instanced by, and expressed through language.
Here I should emphasize that I conceive the primary inductive causal role
of a concept-possessor not to be one impressing concepts in the mind of a
patient, but rather of occasioning in the patient the power of concept formation.
Such teaching is in the first instance, and primarily, a process of enabling-tomake-intelligible
by triggering potentialities for abstraction and by influencing
the directions of these. Language is an important but not the only vehicle
of this process. Some critics have suggested that the ability to acquire concepts
and/or language could be induced by encounter with objects falling under
the relevant ideas/terms; or that the role of intelligent language users might
be taken by baby-raising robots which (though mindless) make appropriate
noises in consequence of which the babies grow up thinkers. As I indicated,
the issues are vast; let me just say that the first hypothesis looks like a return
to the innatism or to the abstractionism I rejected; while the second fails to
engage the issue of concepts involving modes of presentation transcendent
of natural properties. Conceptually-informed language teaching is no more a
matter of making the ‘right noises’ than is weeping for a loved one, or identifying
one and the same figure as being both a triangle and a trilateral.
Wittgenstein wrote ‘in use [a sign] is alive. Is life breathed into it there? – Or
is the use its life?’. 9 He meant to commend the latter, I answer ‘both’; 10 but
either of the options he gives stand opposed to the idea that ‘noises’ might
constitute the activating condition of conceptually structured language.
Returning to the character of the overall argument, having introduced it
in the section on teleological reasoning, but then associating it with Aquinas’s
first way, and structuring things in terms of a series of language users, some
confusion arose as to whether it should be interpreted as a design or
cosmological proof, and whether the causal series was to be understood as
per accidens or per se. So far as the first issue is concerned, my point was that
insofar as the argument involves actuality and potentiality it is conformable
to a proof in terms of the coming-into-being of an antecedent possibility,
and of the necessity for this movement of a cause that is purely actual in
the relevant respect; but that at the same time the argument concerns a
phenomenon that exhibits intrinsic teleological order and hence suggests
design. Concepts give thoughts their content, making them to be about such
and such; thoughts express beliefs and desires which are directed towards the
(presumed to be) true and the good, respectively. In short, the issue has two
aspects, each of which gives rise to an argument to God. Once recognized,
this point can be extended beyond the particular case. Indeed if, as I believe,
any living thing is analysable in terms of its efficient cause, matter, form
and function, then its existence and activity will generate a range of interconnected
reasonings to God.