Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

240 J.J. Haldane
rests on implausible and avoidable claims about the objects of cognition being
mental items. Berkeley’s arguments for these claims are effectively refuted by
invoking the distinctions drawn earlier (between concepts as id quo and as
id quod, and between cognitive and contiguous presence). But this leaves the
thought, inspired by Berkeley and developed by Dummett, that the only way
we can give sense to the anti-Protagorean belief that things are measured not
by us but by the real is to define reality in terms of what is known by God.
While it certainly maintains that the idea of the real is (implicitly) epistemically
constrained, this variety of ‘anti-realism’ is far removed from anything that
would encourage the sorts of ontological relativism, or social constructivism
to which Smart and I are opposed.
Moreover, there is perhaps an anticipation of this position in Aquinas. At
the end of my reply to Smart (pp. 189–90) I suggested that God has so
ordered creation that there is a progression from materially embodied forms
(the natures of individual things) to their assimilation in the minds of created
intellects (where they exist as universal concepts). I then added that as this is
achieved we come to be more fully images of the creator, and quoted Aquinas
to the effect that while things in nature are expressions of ideas in the mind
of God, ideas in the minds of men are expressions of things in nature.
Aquinas gives another expression of this idea when he writes:
the Divine intellect is the explanation for the nature considered both in itself
and as it exists singularly in particular things; and the nature considered in itself
and in singular things is the explanation for our human understanding, as in a
certain sense its ‘measure’. 20
In this sense, at least, Mind makes the world in the act of knowing it. Yet
since God’s knowledge of the structure of the world is practical, and not
observational or speculative (as is ours), it should properly be said that God
knows the world in making it.
6 The Nature of God
God is the originating and sustaining cause of everything other than God;
both of its being and of its nature. Considered from a finite perspective this is
an inconceivably vast and complex production and management responsibility,
and it may suggest to some that God’s mind must itself be complex
and his activities many and multifarious. Yet I claimed that God is perfectly
simple: without parts and unchanging. I agree with Smart and others that if
God were complex then the order of his mind and operations would itself call
for an explanation; however, whereas he sees that as a reductio ad absurdum on