Atheism and Theism 25was created in order for there to be consciousness and intelligence. Bertrand
Russell held that vanity is a prime motive for religious belief. Even the
horrible view that there is a hell to which the infinite God will consign us for
our sins may give us an admittedly miserable sense of importance. Belief in
highly superior beings on distant planets may be a blow to our hubris. Of
course religious belief in the existence of angels may have had a similar
effect,^44 even though in the nineteenth century angels came to be thought of
as rather pale creatures, whose main talent was playing the harp. (There did
not seem to be reports of super-Einsteins among them.)
Still we should not put too high a value on intelligence. Nor should we
forget the sufferings of the non-human animals on earth. As Jeremy Bentham
said, ‘The question is not “Can they reason?” or “Can they talk?” but “Can
they suffer?” ’.^45 To see suffering is a corrective to disparagement of a possible
‘psychocentrism’. It would be inconsistent of me to object to psychocentrism
while at the same time taking seriously – as surely one must – the importance
of human and animal suffering when I come to discuss the problem of evil.
Even so, the hypothesis that God designed this huge material universe so
as to produce consciousness seems to be ad hoc. What a long-winded and
chancy way of creating conscious beings. Surely an omnipotent being could
have created happy spirits directly, rather than a universe which might
produce entities like us, or higher than us, as a result of long and chancy
evolutionary processes (see p. 29).
The possibility that the universe contains vast numbers of (and if the
universe is infinite, which is of course questionable, infinitely many) stars like
our sun, with planets suitable for evolution of life and ultimately intelligent
beings, raises interesting theological problems, which have, with some excep-
tions, been neglected by theologians. Christianity appears to be anthropocen-
tric in its doctrine of the incarnation, that God became man. To avoid this
anthropocentrism we should envisage the possibility of incarnations on other
worlds throughout the universe, a question to which, with a few exceptions,
theologians seem to me to have given insufficient attention.
The new teleology, as I have said, is quite different from that associated
with such as Paley. It concentrates on the awe and wonder at the beauties of
the laws of physics and the starry heavens above. In its most recent form it
focuses on the apparent ‘fine tuning’, the happy coincidences of the value of
the fundamental constants. The ontological extravagance of postulating ‘a
Designer’ could be outweighed by its value in explaining these coincidences.
However, in assessing the plausibility of such a hypothesis we might also
consider the possibility of there being an as yet unknown physical or
cosmological hypothesis which might have as its consequence these arbitrary
looking values. This would also provide an alternative to the ‘many universes’
hypotheses.