As the British biologist and philosopher J. B. S. Haldane once said, “If mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I [would] have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true . . . and hence no reason for supposing my brain to be made of atoms.”23 Thus, theism posits the one kind of entity—a free personal agent—that can initiate new sequences of cause and effect without itself being caused to do so and without, at the same time, undermining confidence in either human rationality or the intelligibility of the physical world. In so doing, it resolves the explanatory
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