Abstract
Religious believers have often held that the spatial and temporal order that we observe in the universe, especially as manifested in the means-end adaptation exhibited by biological organisms, makes it reasonable to infer that the universe has been created or shaped by a divine mind. Moreover, in eighteenth-century Britain the prestige attached to this line of argument was such that it was often seen as a complete answer in itself to the cavils of atheists and religious sceptics. In Hume’s case, his radical epistemological scepticism means that he would deny that the inference from order to a divine designer can successfully evade Pyrrhonean objections. But he is very concerned to investigate how this inference compares with other examples of causal reasoning.
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Notes
- 1.
In the course of his unsuccessful attempts to persuade Adam Smith to supervise the post-mortem publication of the Dialogues, Hume specifically drew attention to their shrewd construction (1932, II, 334): ‘On revising them (which I have not done these 15 years) I find that nothing can be more cautiously and more artfully written. You had certainly forgotten them. Will you permit me to leave you the Property of the Copy, in case they should not be published in 5 years after my Decease?’
- 2.
It might be suggested that the interaction of a gazelle machine and a cheetah machine as the latter machine rips apart the innards of the former even as it desperately struggles to remain alive is not really an example of a harmonious process. Similarly, the solar system seems to have an ample supply of asteroids and other solid debris that can be relied upon, at some point in time, to strike the surface of the Earth with catastrophic consequences. This too might lead some people to question whether the fine-tuning of the universe in our immediate vicinity is quite as perfect as we might wish. Cleanthes, however, is apparently operating at a level of reverent generality that encourages him to disregard such recalcitrant phenomena.
- 3.
Although Cleanthes is represented as genuinely committed to arguing for God’s existence purely on the basis of experience, Philo’s own stance is more ambiguous. Philo repeatedly invokes empiricist constraints on acceptable reasoning and applies them more rigorously than Cleanthes manages to do. Nevertheless, when Demea objects to Philo’s apparent acquiescence to Cleanthes’ insistence on appealing to experience, Philo claims to be responding to Cleanthes on an ad hominem basis: ‘You seem not to apprehend, replied Philo, that I argue with Cleanthes in his own way; and by showing him the dangerous consequences of his tenets, hope at last to reduce him to our opinion’ (1779, 2.145).
- 4.
Hume’s most explicit affirmation of this point is to be found in Section 9 of the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding: ‘All our reasonings concerning matter of fact are founded on a species of analogy, which leads us to expect from any cause the same events, which we have observed to result from similar causes. Where the causes are entirely similar, the analogy is perfect, and the inference, drawn from it, is regarded as certain and conclusive…. But where the objects have not so exact a similarity, the analogy is less perfect, and the inference is less conclusive; though still it has some force, in proportion to the degree of similarity and resemblance’ (1772a, 9.1/104).
- 5.
Trajan (53–117 ce) was considered to be a wise and virtuous emperor.
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Bailey, A., O’Brien, D. (2014). The Design Argument and Empirical Evidence of God’s Existence. In: Hume's Critique of Religion: 'Sick Men's Dreams'. The New Synthese Historical Library, vol 72. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6615-0_7
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