Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Atheism and Theism 71
16 See the title article in Isaac Asimov, The Relativity of Wrong (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989).
17 William Paley, Natural Theology (London, 1802).
18 On this topic see the perceptive methodological article by the neurophysiologist
G. Adrian Horridge, ‘Mechanistic Teleology and Explanation in Neuroethology’,
BioScience, 27 (1977), 725–32.
19 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
20 Psalm 19, Old Testament Revised Version, 1884.
21 John Leslie, Value and Existence (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), pp. 211–13.
22 F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897). C.A.
Campbell, Scepticism and Construction (London: Allen and Unwin, 1931).
23 Paul Davies, The Mind of God (London: Simon and Schuster, 1992).
24 Cf. quotation from letter from Einstein to Born on p. 176 of Born’s article in
P.A. Schilpp (ed.), Albeit Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist (New York: Harper
Torchbooks, 1959).
25 For a summary of the ‘fine tuning’, see John Leslie, Universes (London: Routledge,
1989), pp. 2–5 and 25ff.
26 Fred Hoyle, The Black Cloud (London: Heinemann, 1957).
27 G.J. Whitrow, The Structure and Evolution of the Universe, 2nd edn (London:
Hutchinson, 1959).
28 G.J. Whitrow, ‘Why Physical Space has Three Dimensions’, British Journal for
the Philosophy of Science, 6 (1955–6), 13 –31.
29 See J.J.C. Smart, ‘Explanation – Opening Address’, in Dudley Knowles (ed.),
Explanation and its Limits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
pp. 1–15. The metaphor of the web of belief is due to Quine. See W.V. Quine
and J.S. Ullian, The Web of Belief, revised edn (New York: Random House, 1978).
30 Brandon Carter, ‘Large Number Coincidence and the Anthropic Principle in
Cosmology’, in M.S. Longair (ed.), Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with
Observational Data (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974). This article is reprinted in
John Leslie (ed.), Physical Cosmology and Philosophy (New York: Macmillan
Publishing Company, 1990).
31 John Leslie, Universes, pp. 13–14.
32 See for example, J.J.C. Smart, Essays Metaphysical and Moral (Oxford: Blackwell,
1987), Essay 10 ‘Under the Form of Eternity’.
33 W.V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960).
34 Andrei Linde, ‘The Universe: Inflation out of Chaos’, New Scientist, 105 (1446),
7 March 1985, 14–18. Reprinted in John Leslie (ed.), Physical Cosmology and
Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1990). Linde has a later theory in which
universes give birth to baby universes. This does not affect the philosophical
points that I wish to make. See Andrei Linde, ‘The Self-Reproducing Inflationary
Universe’, Scientific American, 271 (November 1994), 32–9.
35 See A.H. Guth and P.J. Steinhardt, ‘The Inflationary Universe’, Scientific American,
250 (May 1984), 116–28.
36 Norman Kemp Smith, ‘Is Divine Existence Credible?’, Proceedings of the British
Academy, 17 (1931), 209–34.