The Theism Question

Abstract

Time to change tack. Theology cannot be dodged forever despite William James’ hopes. In the present case, I found one issue unavoidable and requiring discussion even if from a less systematically historical angle than the others, namely Theism. The existence or otherwise of God might, at first glance, strike one as an exclusively theological or philosophical issue rather than a Psychological one. Psychology surely only enters into the picture when we ask the rather different question as to the psychological reasons why people believe in God, the default assumption from an orthodox scientific view being that it is belief, rather than disbelief, which needs explaining. (Not a position which has always been held, atheism once being thought a form of insanity and, as we saw in Chap. 3, belief in God being thought by mental and moral philosophers to be the ‘normal’ outcome of healthy maturation.)

I leave aside in the chapter the most sophisticated version (or versions) of something like the Theism argument: the case proposed by some physicists that the universe is governed by an ‘anthropic principle’ which ensures both the emergence of humans and its comprehensibility by them. This is an awfully crude summary however. For those wishing to pursue the topic, J. D. Barrow and F. J. Tipler (1986) remains the most thorough review of the topic by an eminent physicist and an equally eminent astronomer. It gets very technical in places. Notably it largely leaves religious questions aside, though has some interesting discussion of the ontological argument for the existence of God.