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When
all is said and done, is belief in God really any better than belief in magic
spells? I think it is. Magic cannot be
understood, but if God is real then a platonic approach might help us to
understand why God is real. It could also have interesting things to suggest
about the meaning of the words “God” and “divine design”.
Let me
first introduce the Platonism of one of this century’s finest philosophers, A.
C. Ewing. In his book Value and Reality
(1973) Ewing suggested that God exists simply
because this is good. What sense could we make of that idea? In Universes,
and earlier in Value and Existence
(1979), I commented that followers of Plato think it impossible, even in
theory, to get rid of all realities. Even in a blank, an absence of all
existing things, it would still, Platonists think, be a reality that two and
two made four. It would still be real, in other words, that if there were ever
to exist two groups of two things, then there would be four things. Similarly,
it would be a reality that the blank was better than any world of people in
agony that might replace it. It would be real that the absence of such a world
of torment was ethically required.
And likewise, the presence of a good world could be ethically required despite
how there would be, in the blank, nobody to have a duty to produce such a
world. The platonic suggestion is that ethical requirements can be real
unconditionally, absolutely, eternally. And a further platonic suggestion is
that when it is sufficiently weighty an
ethical requirement - such as, perhaps, the requirement that there
exist a supremely good divine person
- can be directly responsible for the actual existence of whatever it is
that is required. Asking Platonists to point to some mechanism which made
any such requirement able to have this responsibility could be like asking them
to point to a mechanism which made misery
an evil, or to a mechanism which forced the experience of red to be nearer
to that of orange than to that of yellow. For Platonists, these are not affairs
which depend on mechanisms. Instead they are affairs of a sort which could
explain why anything at all exists, and why any mechanism ever works: why, that
is to say, there is a world that obeys causal laws which mechanisms can
exploit.
Much
more can be said about all this, but let us simply suppose that it does make
some sense, as is accepted by John Polkinghorne in his recent book The Faith of a Physicist (1994). Like
Ewing, Polkinghorne thinks Platonism could best be used to give us insight into
why there exists a benevolent divine person who selects a world among all the
worlds which are possible, and who wills that it shall exist. However, Ewing
and Polkinghorne are little inclined to believe that this person selects
anything in quite the way you and I do, with much hard effort to reach correct
evaluations, noble struggles to direct acts of will towards good results,
stiffening of arm muscles, and so forth. If God is indeed a person and a
designer, then we must recognise that he is at least not a person quite like
you and me and a designer quite like any architect apart, of course, from being
smarter and more powerful. But many people, for instance Paul Tillich among
recent theologians, have gone much further than recognising that point. There
is a long Neoplatonic tradition in which it seems to be argued (albeit obscurely) that “God” is just a name
for the fact that an ethical need for the cosmos to exist is directly
responsible for its existence. This tradition takes its inspiration from
Plato’s remark in the Republic that
the Form of the Good “is itself not existence but far beyond it in dignity”
since it is “what bestows existence upon things”.
Here
the idea of an omnipotent architect is entirely abandoned. We might still speak
of divine design, but only on the grounds that good things were selected for
existence by virtue of being good
- the word “selected” being
used, evidently, in an unusual sense because nobody would be doing the
selecting. As the Neoplatonist Plotinus expresses the matter in his Third Ennead, the cosmos exists “not as
a result of a judgement recognising its desirability, but by sheer
necessity”; “effort and search” play no
part in the creative process; yet the outcome, “even had it resulted from a
considered plan, would not have disgraced its maker”.
Contributed by: Dr. John Leslie
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