Tell us about your childhood, and your first exposure to religious ideas.

I was born in 1940, in India like a Baptist-missionary ancestor. My father worked in Calcutta as a lawyer until conscripted into the army. He soon entered the Judge Advocate General’s department, leaving it when the war ended as a colonel aged thirty-three. Our family, which had moved from city to city whenever a new set of courts-martial needed legal guidance, now travelled to England, yet I keep returning to India in dreams. Of all the world’s lands it could be the most fascinating.

Aged seven I went to Southey Hall, a boarding school in Surrey. My father and mother were atheists so I first heard of God in sermons at the local church. Asking myself whether I believed the priest’s words, I said No, for he said unbelievers (here I thought of my much loved parents) would suffer eternal loss. Since then I’ve met Christians convinced we’d all enter Heaven, some of us arriving via Purgatory; I’ve long believed in a reality I call God; but I’ve not felt enthusiasm for any faith. If I had, it might have led to priesthood for I’ve never found religious ideas trivial. In contrast, as an eight-year-old experiencing the superbly crafted pages of Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles I vowed I’d myself be a writer. Later, leaving Sutton County Grammar School, I felt I might indeed become one. I’d won a major open scholarship in English Literature at Wadham College, Oxford.

But then, not sticking to English literature, the would-be writer studied psychology and philosophy instead. Why?

Before entering Wadham I’d read C.E.M. Joad’s Guide to Philosophy. Joad told of exciting issues in Metaphysics, questions about the world’s nature which scientists could never answer, and I thought I might have solved a problem underlying all those questions, the problem of why there’s any world at all. When a thing has intrinsic value – when its existing all by itself would be better than the absence of all things – then doesn’t this provide a reason for this thing to exist? Wouldn’t the absence of all things be unfortunate even when there existed no Creator able to remedy this sad state of affairs? Couldn’t the need, the ethical requirement, for the existence of a good world be itself creatively effective? Might this be why there’s something rather than nothing?

How popular was that at Oxford?

Oxford Philosophy, 1960-style, was freezing water poured on my head. The Verification Theory of Meaning had made ‘Metaphysics’ a synonym for ‘Nonsense’. Prescriptivism, too, was rampant. Saying a thing had intrinsic value wasn’t an attempt to state a fact. Instead it prescribed actions which produced or which preserved that thing’s existence. Since only a madman would run around shouting ‘Create the world!’ or ‘Don’t let it vanish!’, only buffoons could talk of the world as having intrinsic value. Besides, folk argued, to explain the existence of a thing you’d have to point at some other existing thing or things, perhaps at a potter’s already existing hands, shaping already existing clay, to explain the existence of a pot. There’d be no way of explaining the cosmos, the totality of absolutely all things.

Getting my BA, I hurried to escape the freezing water by joining McCann-Erickson, one of London’s two largest advertising agencies. While earning daily bread as a copywriter, said I, the evenings would be devoted to learning a writer’s trade.

A couple of years later I’d found that what I most wanted to write about was why the world exists. Reading Plato’s works in my third Oxford year, from sheer curiosity since no exam question would require this, I’d discovered to my disgust that the man seemed to express, albeit obscurely, what I’d fondly believed to be my very own theory: that the world’s intrinsic value could account for its existence. Still, wouldn’t it be interesting to present Plato’s theory clearly? To develop it in detail together with a world-picture to which it could lead? I wrote to the Wadham philosopher who’d been my main tutor, Ian Crombie. With his help I returned to Oxford, starting work on a thesis entitled ‘The theory that the world is, and is as it is, because it is best that it should be so’. (In 1970 this was shortened to ‘The Theory that the World Exists Because It Should’, title of a ten-thousand word thesis-summarizing article in Nicholas Rescher’s American Philosophical Quarterly.) Before, however, I’d finished struggling with the thesis, I’d started teaching at Guelph, fifty miles from Toronto, where I’d joined a strong and friendly philosophy department.

How did things go after that?

I arrived in Canada with Jill, met in Oxford’s university mountaineering club, an ideal partner on rock climbs, in hiking (she eventually became President of Hike Ontario), and in marriage. Both of us liking the University of Guelph, it was a relief when, after eighteen months of effort to defend Creative Value against further pails of freezing water, my research thesis was deemed adequate, even by the Oxford of those days, for an MLitt degree, quite probably necessary for continuing at Guelph. Writing about philosophy of religion  and of cosmology, I came to have my ideas taken seriously, including by Brand Blanshard, Brandon Carter, Paul Davies, Peter Forrest, David Lewis, J.L. Mackie, Tim Mulgan, Derek Parfit, John Polkinghorne, Martin Rees, Nicholas Rescher, J.J.C. Smart, T.L.S. Sprigge, and Keith Ward. What a reward for a writer, to have readers like these! Their works were treasure chests to explore, together with those of Plato and Aristotle, Plotinus and Dionysius; of Maimonides, Aquinas, Spinoza and Leibniz; of later philosophers such as Hegel, F.H. Bradley, Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, A.C. Ewing, Adolf Grünbaum; and of scientists like Erwin Schrodinger, Arthur Eddington, John Archibald Wheeler, David Bohm, Steven ̈ Weinberg, Roger Penrose, Leonard Susskind, and Frank Tipler who told me of Carter’s ‘doomsday argument’ about the risk that humans will soon be extinct and showed me that my kneejerk ‘What nonsense!’ wasn’t at all obviously correct. In 1997 I became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, touring Britain in 1998 as British Academy–Royal Society of Canada Exchange Lecturer. Exploring those treasure chests had clearly been worthwhile.

Still, I’d had outrageous good luck. Luck in sending that thesis-summarizing article to Nicholas Rescher’s journal. (I’d never have guessed he was already attracted to ideas close to mine. His Axiogenesis appeared only forty years later.) Luck in how my Value and Existence caught Mackie’s eye when he was writing a book surveying philosophy of religion from Plato onwards. Luck in having a sabbatical year when cosmologists began to see evidence of ‘fine tuning’ clearly relevant to the theological Argument from Design. (After looking into this in Oxford’s Radcliffe Science Library, I became known in philosophical cosmology through articles leading to Universes and worked at the Institute for Astrophysics in Liège thanks to Belgium’s Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique.) Luck that my ideas were liked enough by that great philosopher, J.J.C. Smart, for him to suggest I apply for the research chair from which he was about to retire. (I got the consolation prize of six months at Australian National, airfares and housing paid including for Jill and for our kids.) Luck in so many further cases that it’s a safe bet that in typical worlds among those of Many Worlds Quantum Theory I’ve not seen in print the things I wanted to write.

In philosophy of religion you’re known for axiarchism. What does this involve?

AXIARCHISM was recommended by Ian Crombie as the name for the theory that the world is ruled largely or entirely by Value. Until well into the twentieth century the majority of philosophers held axiarchist beliefs. One belief is that an all-powerful divine person, eternally ‘simply there’ since nothing could have created him, created everything else. While not bright and beautiful everywhere, Earth contains signs of his creative benevolence. However, I prefer what Crombie called EXTREME AXIARCHISM: that all things exist as a direct product of the need for this. If there’s a divine person then he owes his own existence to its ethical requiredness. Not, of course, to its moral requiredness; it’s nonsense to say he’d had a moral duty to create himself. But what’s ethically needful – fortunate, required for its value – includes much more than what anyone has a duty to produce. (Think of the pleasure of a dinosaur basking in the sun. If you like, join Rescher in preferring ‘axiologically required’ to ‘ethically required’.) Now, it’s ethical requirements,I suggest, which account for the cosmos, the totality of all things, in the most straightforward, simple, philosophically defensible way. An ethical requirement is creatively effective when it’s not overruled by a stronger ethical requirement, perhaps the need for humans to make decisions freely which can result in very unbeautiful warfare. But people keep overlooking the Axiarchism versus Extreme Axiarchism distinction, so I now tend to avoid the words ‘Extreme Axiarchism’, talking of PLATONIC CREATION instead.

My Extreme Axiarchist world-picture – you’d find it on pages 13, 183 to 185, 217 of Value and Existence (Blackwell: 1979) but for its extremism in full bloom see Infinite Minds (Oxford University Press: 2001) – says that Reality consists of infinitely many minds, each infinite through eternally contemplating all that’s worth contemplating so that each has infinite value and can be called divine. This, a variant on Spinoza’s world-picture where Reality consists of a single infinite mind, strikes me as where you’d best end up if trying to take seriously the Platonic theme that The Good, itself not an existing thing, is what accounts for all existing things.

That does sound like an extremely speculative position. How does one end up there in an intuitive or at least relatively straightforward way?

Infinitely many minds, each infinite in its value, don’t frighten me. If Value is creative, anything smaller would be far too small, I think. And beyond what science can prove, all is speculation. There’s speculation even in the idea that one thing, for instance enjoying the sight of a starving girl, is ever in itself worse than another, such as feeding her. I say I ‘know’ that things are sometimes in themselves better than others, but this knowing isn’t as firm as knowing that two and two make four. Intrinsic value might perhaps be as fictitious as dragons. Today many philosophers, while by no means stupid, believe that nothing ever is in itself better than anything else. They accept doctrines like Prescriptivism, that it’s not a genuine truth, a reality, that feeding a starving girl is better than kicking her in the teeth. (Saying ‘It’s true you ought to feed the girl’ is just issuing the prescription ‘Feed her!’. Saying ‘It’s a fact you ought to accept that prescription’ just says ‘Accept it!’.) And even David Hume, awesomely intelligent, held that all ethical talk expresses only our subjective feelings instead of trying to describe facts as much ‘out there in the world’ as China’s being larger than Spain.

In The Miracle of Theism (Oxford University Press: 1982) Hume’s greatest modern defender, J.L. Mackie, gives a chapter to ‘Value and Existence’. Leslie’s Platonic creation story, says Mackie, is ‘a formidable rival’ to belief in a benevolent Creator; ‘if, with Leibniz and others, you demand an ultimate explanation, then this may well be a better one’. But, he complains, it rests on assuming ‘objectively prescriptive values’. This, he agrees, is standard among non-philosophers: ‘in calling something good we do commonly imply that it is intrinsically and objectively required or marked out for existence, irrespective of whether any person, human or divine, requires or demands or prescribes or admires it’. Furthermore he sees ‘no actual contradiction’ either here or in the Platonic answer to why the world exists. Leslie, he writes, is correct in insisting there’d be no obvious need for a wondrously clever divine mind to work out which would be best of all possible situations, then creating it, for the Platonic theory is that the ethical need for something ‘could on its own call that item into existence, without the operation of any person or mind that was aware of this need and acted so as to fulfil it’: it cannot be ‘known a priori to be impossible’, known from mere armchair reasoning pages 230 – 239.

Nevertheless he thinks we ought to treat it as impossible. He thinks we must follow Hume as he’d done earlier. In Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Penguin Books: 1977) he’d argued that when we view something as objectively required, required as a fact ‘out there in the world’, what’s really going on is that we’ve internalized the pressure of persons or social institutions, pressure which is in fact what does the requiring.

But, many say, isn’t the Hume-Mackie position plausible? How could anything in itself have ethical requiredness, a property invisible to us and mysteriously linked to the properties science can detect?

My ethical beliefs result mainly from social pressures. Eager to see myself as more than a worm succumbing to bullying, I’ve internalized the pressures. I think that most of the things which folk require of me have their very own requiredness which I cheerfully support. But why should invisible ethical requirements be hard to swallow? Why on earth must a need to feed a starving girl be visible in the way her body is visible, for us to feel a duty to feed her? That need couldn’t be visible to human eyes or detected by scientific instruments since all that’s detectable by eyes, electron microscopes, etcetera, is how objects, events, or situations are constituted – what, that’s to say, are the properties which make them what they are – and not whether anything constituted like that possesses the further property of ethical requiredness, the status of being ethically needful. That’s why intrinsic value could be as fictitious as dragons! Yet what’s so terribly mysterious in the link between the requiredness and the detectable properties? Mackie complains about its mystery, but he himself points out in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong that it would be absurd to see a thing’s intrinsic goodness as present in one situation yet absent in another virtually identical situation: present in Monday’s enjoyment of Mozart’s Exsultate Jubilate but absent from Friday’s enjoyment of the very same music. If, therefore, such goodness involves ‘no actual contradiction’ (Mackie’s words) so that it might be present in Monday’s enjoyment of that music, and if it actually is present there, then it’s present also in Friday’s enjoyment of it. Present necessarily, non-mysteriously, and fully as believably as the alternative that intrinsic value is a fiction, everywhere necessarily absent, because it couldn’t come and go crazily, present in feeding one starving girl but absent from feeding her identical-twin sister.

Similarly with the creative power of an ethical need. If such creative power ever is present instead of fictitious then it, too, is present necessarily, so that if one universe is ruled by a deity whose existence has creative ethical requiredness then another universe can’t contain a precisely similar deity who simply happens to exist.

This doesn’t say that the creative power of an ethical need ever avoids being mythical. But if real it would, as Mackie notes, be a reality no more complex than that need’s powerlessness. It wouldn’t involve intricately interlocked cogwheels or a complicated magic spell. You might almost as well think that the intrinsic goodness of enjoying fine music involved cogwheels or a spell.

Read the rest of the interview here.