A.
J.
AVER
I think that there are three intellectual needs which the
belief in a supernatural deity may be thought to serve. It offers an
explanation of the world's existence and of its nature; an assurance
that life is worth living; and an answer to the question how one
ought to live. Considered logically, indeed, it fulfils none of these
functions. It does not fulfil the first of them, because it is no explana–
tion of anything merely to say that a god designed it; it would be
an explanation only if there were some way of testing the deity's
intentions independently of the actual course of events, for in that
case the religious hypothesis would have some predictive power; but
a hypothesis which is consistent with anything that happens, or could
conceivably happen, is altogether vacuous. It does not fulfil the
second because even if one's life did fit into some design, it would
not on this hypothesis, be a design of one's own choosing. And the
difficulty about making the purposes of the deity one's own is that
one has no means of knowing what they are. Neither does the
promise of an afterlife affect the argument; for if one does not find
one's life worth living as it is there is no good reason to wish for
it to be prolonged. It does not fulfil the third, because the theist has
to rely on his own moral sense in order to decide what it
is
that his
deity wishes him to do. God commands only what is good; but we
have independently to know what is good in order to know what
God commands. A revelation which runs counter to our morality is
not accepted as genuine. Nevertheless, the religious hypothesis is
thought to fulfil these functions, even though it does not. The question
is why intellectuals should be more inclined to think this now than
they were a generation ago.
Any general answer to this question is likely to be too simple;
but I suspect that one reason why people are now more inclined to
refer to religion for an explanation of the world is the change that
has taken place in the outlook of science. The scientific world–
picture which was current in the nineteenth century was reasonably
simple and coherent; the fundamental physical concepts were not
very far detached from those of common sense; scientific laws were
then regarded not as more or less precarious hypotheses, but as uni–
versal unconditional statements of fact. In short, science made the
