Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Further Reflections on Theism 235
writing after Hegel but before Heidegger, described as ‘teutonic’ philosophy, 12
but the language takes the form it does because of the unique character
of the case. The entities with which we are acquainted, or of which we have
descriptive knowledge, have natures that are characterizable independently of
the fact of their existing. In every case, save that of God, we may speak of the
being of a cat, or of a neutron, or whatever; or of the cat’s, or the neutron’s
existing. Since that which is the ultimate cause of existence in every existing
entity (whose nature is not ‘to-be’) cannot be other than being itself, or else
its existence would call for explanation, we find ourselves speaking in
odd-sounding terms of the ‘being of being’, or of ‘existence’s existing’. More
simply we might say (hearing this both substantively and verbally) that God is
Being, or to return to Aquinas’s formulation, God is subsistent being itself.
As with the five ways it is clear that in putting forward the essence and
existence analysis, and in using it to argue to a cause of being in which they
are necessarily coincident, the intended starting point is observation of
independently existing sensible beings. I am suggesting, however, that the
argument need not be so restricted. Moreover, in its metaphysical purity – in
not invoking evidence of change, causality, orders of perfection, or teleology
– it may lay claim to enjoying a special status, since it is available whatever
one’s position in the debates between realism and anti-realism. Suppose, for
example, one takes the view that sensible particulars and/or intelligible general
natures have no mind-independent being but that their existence consists in
their being entertained as intentional objects of experience and of intellection,
respectively. This is the position advanced in full generality by Berkeley; but
one finds partial instances of it in certain interpretations of the scholastic
doctrines that the sensible ‘in act’ is the sense ‘in act’, and that the intelligible
in act is the intellect in act. For Aquinas while the being-sensed of a sensible
is one and the same reality as the sensing of it, there is nevertheless an
objective mind-independent foundation for the sensible itself. 13 In the eyes of
the Berkeleian, however, this latter insistence is no more than a prejudice,
and one which is at best without significant content, rather like Locke’s
postulation of substrata or Kant’s of noumena, and is at worst incoherent.
Here there is no need to resolve the issue of the ultimate referents of
cognition, for no party is disputing the existence of intentional states whose
formal objects (what they are ‘about’) may or may not have mind-independent
correlates. Between the realist and anti-realist there is agreement that
thoughts are cognitive beings (existing things) with particular intentional
contents. Their esse may be intentionale but it is no less actual; and similarly
they are characterized by specific natures expressed by general or singular
concepts. And so the existential proof can begin. While for the anti-realist
the being of an object of cognition consists in its being cognized, on pain of
regress the same cannot be true of the being of the act of cognition itself. In