Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Atheism and Theism 59
There is a common argument for the literal truth of the Biblical account
of the Resurrection of Jesus. The naturalistic metaphysician will of course
wonder about the very biological possibility of resurrection or immortality
as commonly conceived. So the argument had better be a very good one. The
argument relies on the sudden transformation of the disciples after the crucifixion
from a fearful group of people huddling in an upper room to a brave
and successful lot of evangelists and martyrs. How could this have happened,
it is asked, if they had not really seen the risen Jesus? The transformation was
indeed wonderful, but the workings of the human brain are extremely complex
and can be expected to issue in surprises. In any case the transformation
may not have been all that surprising. Experience of millennarian sects has
given us instances of how resistant their devotees can be to empirical
disconfirmation when their millennarian expectations do not eventuate.
Ad hoc excuses are made: they had got the date wrong, and so on. A sect may
be smugly sure of being the chosen few who will be saved while all others are
engulfed in a general deluge, and so will not proselytize. However, when the
prophecy fails there will be an inner doubt, despite the ad hoc excuses. Proselytizing
will suddenly become congenial because it widens the circle of
people who give reassuring agreement with the sect’s tenets. A sect which
behaved in this sort of way has indeed been studied and their behaviour
given a sophisticated psychological explanation roughly on these lines, by
the American psychologists Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken and Stanley
Schachter. 102 Another partial explanation of the spread of Christianity was
the activities of St Paul, who grafted on ideas characteristic of Greek and near
eastern philosophy, and who has been described by some scholars as the
inventor of Christianity.
13 The Problem of Evil
After this brief excursion into the philosophy of history as it applies to New
Testament theology, let us return from Christianity to theism in general.
The concept of God as it is understood in the main monotheistic religions
is that of an omnipotent, omniscient and altogether good being. Then the
problem arises: how can there be evil in the world? For the atheist there is
no problem: there is the amount of goodness and evil that we observe, and
both are explicable. We think that altruism is good and (as was suggested on
p. 31) there are sociobiological and evolutionary explanations of at least a
limited altruism, and intellectual pressures, such as analogy with scientific
law, that can push towards a universalistic altruism. Nor is evil a problem for
the atheist. As was suggested in an earlier section a biologist can talk in ‘as if ’
purposive terms. There is natural selection for various traits of character, or