28 J.J.C. Smart
anthropomorphic a concept of God. Plato seems to have had something like
a religious attitude to his supposed Form of the Good. Of course Christians
typically believe that God is a personwho can hear and answer prayers. Well,
‘religion’ is what Wittgenstein called a ‘family resemblance’ concept.^47 A family
resemblance concept is one that (roughly speaking) corresponds to a set of
properties, such that we take the word for the concept to apply to something
to which a fair number of the properties apply. There need be no necessary
and sufficient set of these properties.^48 Thus believing in God is not neces-
sary: consider Theravada Buddhism. Priesthood and ritual are not necessary:
consider Quakerism. Maoism is a borderline case: it had something like a
priesthood, a sacred book and a creed. Thus it had some properties that make
it not too foolish for us to count it as a religion. Perhaps ‘Christian’
is a family resemblance concept too. After all, there have been what seem to
me to be atheist Anglican clergymen and theologians who call themselves
‘Christians’.
Is it appropriate to say that a person who believes that God is an axiarchic
principle is a Christian, or even a theist? I gather that there are indeed
Catholic theologians who hold that Leslie’s sort of neo-Platonism is compat-
ible with the notion of God as a person. They can rely on the doctrine of
analogical predication which is to be found in the writings of Thomas
Aquinas.^49 The idea is that when we apply a predicate to God we do not do
so in quite the same sense as we do when we apply it to humans, but nor
do we apply it quite in a different sense. There is an analogy between the two
uses. So perhaps in an analogical sense an ethical principle can be a person.
I myself think that this must be stretching the notion of analogical predication
too far. After all it is plausible to suppose that if you stretch analogy enough
you can find analogy between any two things. Consider the number 19 and
the making of canoes. They have something in common, namely the property
of being liked by the headmaster of my school when I was a small boy.
Still, for us metaphysicians the important question is not whether Leslie’s
hypothesis of God as an ethical principle is compatible with traditional Chris-
tian theology. It is whether it is a plausible metaphysical hypothesis. Despite
its attractions of simplicity and of being nonanthropomorphic, there seem to
be three main objections to it. The first is that good though simplicity may be
in a hypothesis, extreme axiarchism is too simple to do the job. The second
has to do with the problem of evil, which I shall consider in more detail in
a later section. The third has to do with the nature of ethics.
(1) We do indeed expect fundamental physical theories to be simple,
symmetrical and beautiful. Fortunately our expectations have been satisfied to
a great extent, an extent which we had no logical right to expect. Perhaps
a simple law might connect with a simple state of the universe at the time it
came into existence but with random perturbations and symmetry breaking