Throughout Hume’s Dialogues, Philo takes the position of the skeptic, questioning the arguments of both Cleanthes and Demea. If it were not for his occasional approbation of God’s existence, the reader would be led to consider him an atheist. This makes it all the stranger when, in Part XII, he suddenly supports an argument for God’s existence from design. Far from criticizing the design argument, as he does a number of times earlier in the dialogues, he says that “no man can be so hardened… as… to reject [the design of the universe]” (77). This is ironic, considering the strength of his earlier objections, particularly his claim that the things of the universe are not sufficiently like those caused by human intelligence. While this is seemingly
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Without the analogy between human inventions and the material universe, the design argument falls apart. Philo first argues that analogies themselves are prone to weakness. It may follow from the knowledge that blood circulates in one human that it would circulate in another, but it follows much less that blood would circulate in a fish or a frog. Likewise, the assumption that a house has an architect does not necessarily imply that a rock formation does. Philo admits that analogies are of course often useful, and even scientific. The Copernican Model of the solar system considers the planets as analogous to the Earth, but, Philo emphasizes, also shows a sufficient level of similarity. Galileo and other scientists carefully observed that the moon and the planets share a number of common attributes with the Earth itself. Using this as his foundation, Philo turns Cleanthes’ empiricism against him. Somewhat sarcastically, he asks Cleanthes what similarity the universe has to a house, if he had witnessed the arrangement of the elements, and of which worlds he had observed the origin (22). These questions point out the absurdity of the design argument’s analogy; clearly the creation of the universe is many orders of magnitude away from the creation of a watch. Given this separation, Philo can falsify a key premise of the design argument: that sufficiently like effects imply like causes. In this case, the gulf is just too
Without the analogy between human inventions and the material universe, the design argument falls apart. Philo first argues that analogies themselves are prone to weakness. It may follow from the knowledge that blood circulates in one human that it would circulate in another, but it follows much less that blood would circulate in a fish or a frog. Likewise, the assumption that a house has an architect does not necessarily imply that a rock formation does. Philo admits that analogies are of course often useful, and even scientific. The Copernican Model of the solar system considers the planets as analogous to the Earth, but, Philo emphasizes, also shows a sufficient level of similarity. Galileo and other scientists carefully observed that the moon and the planets share a number of common attributes with the Earth itself. Using this as his foundation, Philo turns Cleanthes’ empiricism against him. Somewhat sarcastically, he asks Cleanthes what similarity the universe has to a house, if he had witnessed the arrangement of the elements, and of which worlds he had observed the origin (22). These questions point out the absurdity of the design argument’s analogy; clearly the creation of the universe is many orders of magnitude away from the creation of a watch. Given this separation, Philo can falsify a key premise of the design argument: that sufficiently like effects imply like causes. In this case, the gulf is just too