Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

72 J.J.C. Smart
37 Norman Kemp Smith (ed.), Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Edinburgh:
Nelson, 1947).
38 Antony Flew, ‘Arguments to Design’, Cogito, 6 (1992), 93–6.
39 Cf. title of book by Paul Davies, The Cosmic Blueprint (London: Heinemann,
1987).
40 John Leslie, Value and Existence and John Leslie, Universes.
41 Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time (London and New York: Bantam,
1988).
42 F. Hoyle, The Black Cloud.
43 René Descartes, Meditation III.
44 On changes in our beliefs about angels, see Enid Gauldie, ‘Flights of Angels’,
History Today, 42, December 1992, 13–20.
45 Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. 17,
section 1, sub-section 2, footnote. In Wilfrid Harrison (ed.), A Fragment
on Government and an Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1948).
46 John Leslie, Universes and in his earlier metaphysical treatise Value and Existence.
47 See note 8.
48 See Ninian Smart, Reasons and Faiths (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1958).
49 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I p. 13.
50 Leslie, Universes, p. 166.
51 For my own views on this matter, see J.J.C. Smart, Ethics, Persuasion and Truth
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).
52 G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903).
53 W.D. Ross, Foundations of Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939).
54 David Wiggins, Needs, Values, Truth, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991),
p. 137. The theory that Wiggins canvasses here contains subtleties that I here
ignore as not germane to the present problem. For a discussion of the theory as
I understand it (which may not be very well) see J.J.C. Smart ‘Value, Truth and
Action’, Ethics, 100 (1990), 628–40, especially pp. 632–3.
55 Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).
56 See W.V. Quine, Methods of Logic, revised edn (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1959), p. 97.
57 See for example, M. Heidegger, ‘What is Metaphysics?’ (last sentence), in
D.F. Krell (ed.), Basic Writings of Martin Heidegger (New York: Harper and
Row, 1977).
58 As reported in Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 20.
59 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961). See also Nicholas Rescher, The
Riddle of Existence (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), pp. 4ff.
60 Jonathan Barnes, The Ontological Argument (London: Macmillan, 1972).
61 Thus W.V. Quine parses names as predicates in order to put language into the
canonical notation of his Word and Object.