Episode 167: Hume on Intelligent Design (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: All right, so we should turn our eyes more directly on to the design argument, which actually takes the bulk of this work up.

0:09 Stephen: Let me speak up and say something right off the bat. Hume uses the example of a house. Generally speaking, this is what he's getting at. We see, say, a construction worker build a house designed in a particular way for a purpose. And where you see that from a certain privileged perspective. Now, think of the house as the universe, and think of the construction worker as God. What is our perspective of the universe like? We are essentially this subspecies of primate that is hurling around this giant ball of gas in the middle of our solar system on a blue speck of dust and a completely uninspiring solar system, galaxy, galactic cluster.

Like something like 90, 95% of the entire universe is not dark matter or dark energy. We have no idea what that is. Who are we to be making inferences about the nature of this universe and beyond that, the nature of the creator of the universe? Now go back to the house example. If the house is the universe and the construction worker is God, we're kind of like a termite that's living in the basement in the drywall. Who are we to look at the house and make inferences about what it was designed for or about the construction workers that made it and why they did it, or that they resemble us as termites or anything like that?

Who are we to even say that the construction workers are not multiple construction workers? After all? Usually it's multiple people making a house. And from there, it's so easy to make the logical leap that as a termite, oh, look around me. There's wood, and I eat wood. How convenient. Obviously, this house was made for me. Look, there's. There's dirt over there. I can roll around in there, whatever termites do. You know, it's so easy to look at your environment around you and make inferences about the nature of things based on empirically what you're observing and just make that leap, right?

1:45 Wes: Yeah. So normally we have lots of cases in the case of the house, right? And it's something that happens with regularity. We can observe actual designers designing the house and builders making the house. And we see that happen more than once. So in a case where we haven't seen the building, we haven't seen the builders, we haven't seen the designer, we can look at a house and then make that inference to the fact that A designer and a builder must exist.

2:15 Mark: And importantly, we have the internal evidence that when we plan and design something and create it, we have this mind creating matter experience that he thinks we're also drawing on, right?

2:28 Wes: In the case of God, of course, we don't sit around watching universes get created by gods and say, oh well, if we see that with other universes, it must be that this universe was created by, by a God. It's not like we're making the sort of, same sort of inductive leap that we do with a house. And if we do want to make the inductive leap, it really depends on how strong the analogy is between a house and a universe. And that's where Hume is going to basically say, well, the analogy is much weaker than you think it is. The principle behind all of this, right, is that if you have similar effects, you can infer similar causes.

So paragraph seven of part two. So the exact similarity of the cases gives us a perfect assurance of a similar event. And a stronger evidence is never desired nor sought after. But wherever you depart in the least from the similarity of the cases, you diminish proportionably the evidence and may at last bring it to a very weak analogy, which is confessedly liable to error and uncertainty. So after having experienced the circulation of the blood in human creatures, we make no doubt that it takes place in Titius and Maevius. But from its circulation in frogs and fishes, it is only presumption, though strong one from analogy that it takes place in men and other animals.

Analogical reasoning is much weaker when we infer the circulation of the SAP in vegetables from our experience that the blood circulates in animals and so on. So the strength of that inference, the strength of the design inference, depends on how good your analogy is. It depends on the strength of the analogy. And it's really hard to know the strength of the analogy when you're talking at such a grand level about a universe and a God. He's not saying that we can definitely say that it's not a strong analogy. It's just we could never know that it's something with frogs and vegetables and things like that.

It's something we can investigate. We can find out if those two things are analogous or not. In this case, we're trying to compare something which in some ways are. Obviously they're very, very far apart from each other. And I think as he goes on, he's going to try to show us how far apart the two supposedly analogous things are. The universe and a house and a God. And a designer, right.

4:48 Stephen: He's saying we're short changing God in a way, by comparing him to these human qualities or human inventions, we're not actually understanding the true extent of the majesty of our Lord. He has a quote. God is a being so remote and incomprehensible who bears much less analogy to any other being in the universe than the sun. To a waxen taper, it's like a candle. And who discovers himself only by some faint traces or outlines beyond which we have no authority to ascribe to him any attribute or perfection. End quote. Which apparently doesn't include gender.

5:18 Wes: Yeah, the immediate thing. After he says it's a weak analogy, he basically says the universe doesn't really look like a house.

5:26 Stephen: Right.

5:27 Wes: Simple criticism as that is. And then Cleanthes responds, look, we're not saying the universe looks like a house literally. We're just saying it looks like it in terms of teleology. So this is about order, order and arrangement and things which seem to allow us to infer purpose. So the order, proportion and arrangement of every part steps of its stair, or plainly contrived that human legs may use them in mounting. And this inference is certain and infallible. Human legs are also contrived for walking and mounting. That's when Demea says, good God, you're using an a posteriori argument.

6:05 Stephen: And he's using the Lord's name in vain.

6:10 Wes: So that's the beginning of that. And so a lot of this really is about the nature of order and arrangement and where that comes from. Whether it has to come from something that's mind like, or whether it can come from simply what seems on the face of it, like happenstance, like atoms and laws of nature and trial and error, and ultimately growth and reproduction. Things like that later on, though, that

6:36 Dylan: will be flipped around. That order will be a seeming order, because there'll be all kinds of things that don't fit that order. Maybe it's too soon to worry about that, but.

6:46 Wes: So in paragraph 14 he says, Order, arrangement, or the adjustment of final causes, is not of itself any proof of design, but only so far as has been experienced to proceed from that principle. For aught we know, a priori matter may contain the source or spring of order originally within itself as well as mind does. And there's no more difficulty in conceiving that the several elements from an internal unknown cause may fall into the most exquisite arrangement than to conceive that their ideas in the great universal mind from a like internal unknown cause fall into

7:20 Mark: that arrangement unknown either Way we don't really understand.

7:25 Wes: So order might be spontaneous. Yeah.

7:28 Dylan: And he points to ideas in the mind at the end of that paragraph.

7:33 Wes: So in a way, in our experience, it's sort of the mind that seems to be spontaneously self ordering.

7:39 Dylan: Yeah. But the ideas in the human mind, we see by an unknown inexplicable economy, arrange themselves so as to form the plan of a watch or a house. Experience, therefore proves that there is an original principle of order in the mind, not in matter.

7:56 Mark: So he says that here, but later on he contradicts that and says, well, actually we also have experiences of minds that are greatly disordered. And on the other hand, we see matter like when just an animal grows that just looks like it is acquiring some order from no apparent mind cause. So that we experience, even though the elements of a watch, you throw them on the ground, or the elements for building a house, they don't spontaneously put them together in something. But animals and plants spontaneously put themselves together in order all the time.

So maybe that counts as an experience of matter ordering itself. So it's difficult for me not to want to jump ahead at various points here, because it's interesting the way that the dialogue progress, that Philo will kind of give a point, but then say later, well, actually, let's consider that again. And maybe the universe is more like an animal, more like a plant jumping right to the end. I think the way that this comes down is, like I was saying in the intro, that ends up being a verbal dispute. And the place that he lays that out is paragraph 215, then part 12.

Men may argue to all eternity whether Hannibal be a great or a very great or superlatively great man, what degree of beauty Cleopatra possessed, what epithet or praise Livy or Thucydides entitled to, without bringing the controversy to any determination. The disputants here may agree in their sense and differ in their terms, or vice versa, and yet never be able to define their terms so as to enter into each other's meaning, because the degrees of these qualities are not like quantity or number, susceptible of any exact mensuration which may be standard in the controversy.

That the dispute concerning theism is of this nature and consequently is merely verbal, or perhaps if possible, still more incurably ambiguous will appear upon the slightest inquiry. If you're saying how good is the analogy between the universe and a house? It's kind of a judgment call. There's no standard for how good an analogy is. And so there's something frustrating about that, that he wants to say almost that there Is no fact of the matter, whether it is a good analogy or not, that it would have to come down to like what the upshot is.

10:09 Wes: So the verbal dispute, he doesn't explicitly mention what you're talking about there, right? I mean, the verbal dispute is between the next sentence.

10:18 Mark: I ask the theist if he does not allow that there is a great and immeasurable because incomprehensible difference between the human and the divine mind. The more pious he is, the more readily he will assent to the affirmative and the more he will be disposed to magnify the difference he's focusing on there. Not just the universe versus the house, but the creator of the house, in other words, the human mind and the alleged creator of the. You know, whatever the principle of order is, there's got to be some principle of order because things are orderly. But what is that? Is that anything like a mind or not? And I, I think that's what he's saying, that it's obviously not exactly like a human mind. So it's kind of just which. Are you going to emphasize the difference or are you going to emphasize the similarity and that. I'm just saying that's true. The whole analogy.

11:07 Wes: The theist and the atheists, their positions collapse into this sort of skeptical middle ground. You know, the atheist in the end will admit on some very broad definition of intelligence or something like that, that there seems to be something to the design argument very, very broadly construed. And then the theist, to the extent that they say that the divine mind can't be like the human mind, are coming towards the same middle ground.

11:39 Mark: So Stephen, does that make sense to you? Do you buy that? That they really amount to the same thing?

11:44 Stephen: Absolutely not. I'll tell you why. Mark? No, I have nothing. No, I think it's a good point. Doesn't it seem like this argument from design just sort of like is based on top of the head of a pin? Doesn't it seem like it's saying that the existence of a God is self evident because of the apparent design of everything in the world? But it seems like the argument is founded on the idea of what else could possibly be true, which just sort of invites people who are critical thinkers to come up with some sort of exception to the rule? And once you come up with any exception to the rule of what else could possibly be the case, the whole argument falls flat. It seems comparable to the cosmological argument in that sense.

12:25 Mark: Yes, it's exactly comparable in that you have to say there's an order.

12:30 Unknown speaker: Right.

12:32 Mark: There's obviously order in the world. Not everywhere, but enough that we notice it, that we can study that science makes sense at all. It's not just a Dadaist surrealist landscape that we operate in. And so there must be some ordering principle.

12:48 Wes: So I don't think it's actually analogous to cosmological, but go ahead. That may not be that relevant, though.

12:54 Stephen: Right. I mean, I just feel like the question that falls from that is, is that order created with us in mind? And it feels like what the argument from design is sort of suggesting is that because things are seemingly ordered and because you can look at the human eye and it resembles in some weird way a watch, that a human being created in the same way that it was created for a purpose, the eye was created for a purpose. And therefore there must be some sort of governing creator behind that.

13:18 Mark: So, Wes, why I guess I thought that Stephen was right in saying that these are comparable is because also you could say, not necessarily that the cosmological argument conceived as there's a series of causes, and, you know, there has to be a greatest one that. But just the idea, the version of that that Aquinas gave, I don't know if it was called. It's probably not called the cosmological argument anymore, but it's certainly related that there just must be a ground of being. And so, well, there must be something. And you could call it God, or you could call it not God.

13:51 Wes: Because what the cosmological argument does show is that there must be a necessary being. Unless you reject the chain of, you know, unless you reject a certain part of it. The other part of it is that we do accept a principle of sufficient reason for everything within nature. And I don't think that quantum mechanics, by the way, actually changes that. So we do accept that principle, but we don't. Obviously, not everything, you know, has a human designer behind it. So it's a different sort of analogy. And then the question is whether you can extend the principle of sufficient reason outside of creation itself to a relationship between creation itself and some divine creators.

So it's a little bit different. And then the other part of it, as I mentioned, is I think it's plausible that the cosmological argument establishes that there must be a necessary being or beings, even if the necessary beings turn out to be the ultimate particles that can no longer be divided into subparticles and therefore just have their properties. And when you say, why do they have their properties? You can't attribute that to any other cause. You can't divide them further and say, well, their properties are dependent on the properties of these other particles.

Or the other way that's the mereological or the part whole way to look at it. And the other way is the look at it temporally through time. Some sort of Big Bang or first beginning to things. It's intuitively difficult for us to accept that the Big Bang just is this uncaused event, that there was some first uncaused event. Those are the senses in which I think it's stronger now. I mean, the weakness of it, of course, is whether the necessary being is the universe itself, atoms in the true sense of atoms, or some sort of mindless God, or a God that must have a mind.

That's the weak part of it.

15:49 Stephen: Mark was talking about how the universe is not totally random. That there's obviously some sort of governance that people are referencing when they claim that the universe has to be designed. And what I want to say is that in practice, oftentimes the extension of this claim that the universe is intelligently designed is that the universe and the world for that matter are some sort of terrarium created with human beings in mind, or all life, for that matter. People cite empirical evidence saying, oh, how convenient that you breathe this gas that's all around you.

How convenient that your life is sustained by eating plants and animals again, things that are all around you. What, it was just random chance that all those things worked out in your favor? And pre Darwinian evolution, this must have seemed like a totally knockdown argument, not because Darwinism is 100% true necessarily, but because structurally, and this is my point, the whole argument seems to be kind of weak. It relies on there being absolutely no other possible explanation for why things appear to be designed and just the existence of a theory that says that certain organisms with certain genetic mutations thrived in a particular set of climate conditions, and that it's not that this place was designed with us in mind, but the creatures that didn't correspond with this environment died off long ago.

Just one other theory existing sort of undermines the conventional way this argument's used. Does that make sense?

17:05 Wes: Yeah, it does. Although I don't think it depends on evolution specifically, even though that seems to be such a compelling case. I think it's also the laws of nature in general and the fact of the orderliness and consistency of the universe and its structure, and also the traditional philosophical concern about the knowability of the universe which drives people towards idealism to say, well, the universe must be the world and even material Things, they must be mind like in some sense if they are to be knowable. They must be mind like if the mind is to cross the gap between what is mental, what seems to be merely physical.

And even if we think of that merely as structure, right. Even if we think of that as a form, that sort of lines up with say a Platonic account. And this is the sense in which I think when he says the atheist allows that the original principle of order bears some remote analogy to say a godlike intelligence. I think that's what he's getting at. He's getting at the sense in which just the orderliness of things, which is a ground for their knowability, we wouldn't be able to have, and this is how Kant sort of takes human runs with it. We wouldn't be able to have experiences at all, we wouldn't be able to have minds if they weren't predicated on a relation to this sort of orderliness.

I'm giving the broader Intelligent Design example, which I think he thinks that the atheist would allow at some level. But I think, Stephen, you've pointed out the sort of stricter intelligence design case wouldn't follow. And I think you're right, biology does seem to be the most compelling example for them.

18:51 Dylan: It seems like we're going to have to make a leap of some sort to go from we've been using the word orderliness or how everything seems to fit with everything else, the fittingness of the world, to saying that that had to be designed. And that's predicated on the notion that it doesn't just happen by itself. There has to be some action that does that. It's still not clear to me how that gets you to an act of God in an act of intelligent design on it, as opposed to a law like world, like Spinoza or something.

19:29 Unknown speaker: Right.

19:29 Mark: See, I think that Hume is trying to rule out non Spinoza pictures of God, that those are anthropomorphic, those are savage, those are demeaning toward the notion of God. And they don't make any sense, they're self contradictory, that you have a thing that is omnipresent and unitary, yet somehow it can act, it can have the subject object distinction and thinking of, you know, what an action means for us is, you know, that I am a being with multiple parts and so I can lift my arm. The notion of God just can't be like that. So God can't act in that way.

So the only way that you can really make sense of God acting is the Spinozic way. I Think this is Hume's view that to say God is acting and to say nature is operating according to stable laws are one and the same thing. And that's the only reason why he can say it's merely a verbal dispute. So Hume would say, yeah, I know Spinoza, you don't think you're an atheist, but you sort of are. Or rather it's merely a verbal dispute. Whether you are or aren't, there's no practical difference because you have such a, a correct view of what God would have to be, that it doesn't bear any resemblance to what traditional religion would have in mind.

20:50 Dylan: But is it just the notion of traditional religion as being historically born out of an anthropomorphic God, or is it something about whatever you have to mean about God as driving our morality or as providing a first cause or any of those things that those aren't going to be operation by natural laws, there's some kind of activity presumed of God that is willful.

21:22 Unknown speaker: Right?

21:22 Mark: Which is why Spinoza spent the entire thing explaining that actually goodness is a matter of reasonableness, which is kind of written right into nature itself and human nature. And so actually Hume, you know, has a very similar thing. We don't need God telling us what's good. It's human moral sentiments and being reasonable and impartial with regard to those sentiments. That's how we find out what virtue is. So if you want to say that's the action of God, it has to be God acting through us in the same way God acts through gravity.

21:57 Wes: There's a difference for Spinoza between virtue and piety, though, and piety just. You don't have to be reasonable at all. The masses aren't going to know God philosophically and they're not going to be reasonable. And all you want from them is obedience. And they have to have a very limited knowledge of God. They only need to know that God exists and that God is love, that he ought to be imitated by loving one's neighbor, which turns out to be a form of knowledge of God. So there's more to the Spinozan account, I think.

22:33 Mark: Well, but like Dylan was pointing out, we hear some very Spinoza like things about the function of religion. The proper function of religion is just. It sounds exactly like the end of this reading, part 12, paragraph 220, Philo's talking. The proper office of religion is to regulate the heart of men, humanize their conduct, infused the spirit of temperance, order and obedience, and as its operation is silent and only enforces the motives of morality and justice. It is in danger of being overlooked and confounded with other motives. When it distinguishes itself and acts as a separate principle over men, it is departed from its proper sphere and has become only a cover to faction and ambition.

Yeah, so that sounds very much like Spinoza, the true religion. Hume doesn't say this, but it's really just a matter of acting. In other words, Hume doesn't say there is no cognitive content and no beliefs or something like that. He doesn't make the kind of Spinozic pronouncement like that. But I think it's inherent here that what religion is supposed to do is just to regulate our hearts. It is supposed to be just something to orient us in a certain way. It's not a source of knowledge at all. But yeah, what did you think, though, other folks, of this end part?

You know, I even saw bits of Nietzsche in here. Just the fact that he's. When it comes down to it, Hume doesn't like what religion does to us psychologically. Like, the true religion wouldn't do any of these things. But he says, you know, we can't deal with the true religion. We have to deal with religion as we actually find it in the world. And the way it. We find it in the world, it makes us superstitious, it makes us zealots, we just use religion as an excuse for pursuing our less socially positive passions, etc. It's inevitable it will depart from its proper sphere, as he says.

24:24 Wes: Right. So Cleanthes tries to say paragraph 10. So religion, however corrupted, is still better than no religion at all. The doctrine of a future state is so strong and necessary a security to morals that we never ought to abandon or neglect it. So he's saying, yes, there may be elements of superstition, for instance, in the idea that there's a heaven and a hell, but these, what he calls rewards and punishments, that sort of stuff is motivating. It makes people get in line and then Philo objects to all that, because what happens with those doctrines?

And by the way, Spinoza said it's okay if you have all your religious ceremonies and particular forms of worship and things like that, as long as you don't take them seriously, as long as you don't get into fights with other people about them, you know, whether you should have this ceremony or that ceremony, or whether there's such a thing as transubstantiation, if you can sort of have your religious ceremonies in a live and let live way, that's okay. But when you take them seriously, people get into fights and wars about that. And so Philo says all history abounds so much with accounts of its pernicious consequence on public affairs, factions, civil wars, persecutions, subversions of governments, oppression, slavery.

And he'll go on to say it's not actually that motivating to get people to be good. Human inclinations, just our impulses, our desires are much stronger and in a way craftier than this idea that we might go to hell, for instance, this trying to from on high regulate our behavior with these commandments. And in fact someone who's holier than thou, we're actually more suspicious of that person than someone who sort of has a healthy skepticism. If someone pretends to be really, really good, we think they're probably a hypocrite. And they probably are.

And then I'll even go on to say religion in the superstitious sense kind of leads people into an anti moral stance. They can basically justify any atrocity by way of their own self righteousness. And then they often lie to themselves. They're hypocrites. That's the other thing it leads to. So the zeal, as he calls it, it rationalizes bad behavior and it turns people into liars. So far from being in the way Cleanthes suggests sort of this, even if it's false technically, this sort of practically good thing. No, it's a terrible thing. And as Mark pointed out.

Yeah, that lines up exactly with Spinoza's argument on how religion gets used for the sake of factionalism.

27:06 Dylan: He says it must be acknowledged that terror is the primary principle of religion. It is the passion which always predominates in it and admits of short intervals of pleasure.

27:16 Wes: He does talk a true religion, again in a way analogous to Spinoza, which he says has no pernicious consequences. He doesn't really say what true religion is and says, I'm just talking about religion as it's commonly found in the world. There's true religion and then there's just religion as it is among human beings.

27:35 Mark: So do you think he's just relying on a shared understanding with Cleanthes of they're both using this term true religion, which I think Cleanthes does try to describe.

27:44 Wes: So paragraph 24, I think cleanthes tries to give us the essence of true religion. It sounds very Spinozan, so I'll just read it because it does sound like Cleanthes is giving us Spinozan. So the most agreeable reflection which it is possible for human imagination to suggest is that of genuine theism which represents us as the workmanship of a being perfectly good, wise and powerful, who created us for happiness and who, having implanted in us immeasurable desires of good will, prolong our existence to all eternity and will transfer us into an infinite variety of scenes in order to satisfy those desires and render our felicity complete and durable.

I love that, an infinite variety of scenes because it really would take a lot of variety to keep someone happy for eternity and not bore them to death. So Philo says, well, that's all nice, that's all well and good, but they're nothing more than appearances with regard to the greater part of mankind. The appearances are deceitful. And that of the terrors of religion commonly prevail over its comforts. And then it gets into religion being allied to sorrow and terror. He'll basically say, and again, this is something Kant picks up and goes with, is that skepticism keeps us open to revelation.

So in other words, if you're trying to naturalize religion and use the intelligent design argument, you're going to screw it up. You're actually going to produce things that are antithetical to faith. And the only way to make room for faith is to separate them in the way Spinoza thinks he does and the way Kant thinks he's going to do, to sort of separate our faith from our scientific activity, let's say. So he says. But believe me, Cleanthes, the most natural sentiment which a well disposed mind will feel on this occasion is a longing desire and expectation that heaven would be pleased to dissipate.

At least alleviate this profound ignorance by affording some more particular revelation to mankind and making discoveries of the nature attributes and operations of the divine object of our faith. A person seasoned with a just sense of the imperfections of natural reason will fly to reveal truth with the greatest avidity. To be a philosophical skeptic is in Emmanuel letters, the first and most essential step towards being a sound believing Christian. And the dialogue is sort of opened up with Cleanthes saying, are you really trying to found religion on skepticism?

And there's a lot of debate about how seriously we should take Hume in that, whether he's an atheist and all that stuff. But I think this line of argument, because it's not just in Hume, this idea of skeptical skepticism as being a ground for religion, not something that's antithetical to religion, is something that can be taken seriously.

30:20 Mark: So maybe we should back up to connect this to the problem of evil.

30:24 Stephen: So the problem of evil, age old problem in philosophy. Am I right, boys? Typically, people write theodicies to justify God. Theodicy being a word comprised of two words that means a justification of God. The idea of how can a benevolent, all powerful God exist in the world while still allowing for evil to exist goes back a long time. I feel like at the center of any theodicy, he cites Epicurus. Yeah, that's what I was going to say is Lucretius and Epicurus. Those classic four questions that are unanswerable ring throughout the contents of any theodicy.

The idea of is God willing to prevent evil but unable to do so? Then he is not omnipotent. Is God able to prevent evil but unwilling to do so? Then he is malevolent or evil. The other two questions basically say that if God is both willing and able to prevent evil, then why is there evil in the world at all? And so a theodicy aims to answer that question. And there's two primary strategies of any theodicy, in my view. It's either they say that nothing is evil at all, or that all the evil that exists in the world is a necessary evil. Right? And it seems like that's the position that Cleanthes is taking, is the idea that, yes, all this stuff is a necessary evil, but at least there's more happiness than misery in the world.

31:32 Mark: It's hard to differentiate between those two options because as soon as you say it's a necessary evil, it's kind of an arbitrary matter. It's merely a verbal dispute. Whether you say it's a necessary evil, it's not evil at all. If I give you a shot that is going to protect you against disease, then the pain you feel, you could either say, well, the pain is a necessary evil. You could say, no, actually it's really not evil. Right, I'm giving you a shot, I'm helping you.

31:57 Stephen: Right? It's a necessity.

31:58 Mark: Like there's unpleasant, I guess you could say, but evil? Why call it evil?

32:03 Wes: Well, there are some different sorts of arguments. I mean, one of them is just that from our limited perspective, we can't see that the universe as a whole is good or is the best possible world. Even if in our little corner and from our point of view, it looks bad and painful and all that. And then it's another sort of argument to say, well, we need pain. If we didn't have pain, we couldn't protect ourselves. It's essential to our survival. Or if all the bad stuff weren't there, we couldn't have free will. And having free will is better than. Than being an automaton in a sort of perfect shiny little pain free world. He's going to rub out all those sorts of different kinds of arguments you can use to justify the ways of God to human beings or to do theodicy.

32:49 Stephen: It seems to me, and I don't want to keep hammering on this point, but Cleanthes argument that all of this is like necessary evil, ultimately it seems comparable in structure to the cosmological argument and to the argument from design in terms of how shaky it is and how contingent upon one example to the contrary it is. Right? So I mean, if you say that all evil is a necessary evil, then all somebody has to do is point out a single instance of evil that appears to be unnecessary and the whole argument falls flat. Which seems to be one of the tactics Hume uses when he's talking about this.

I mean, Philo uses. I mean, Hume gives four different reasons why there appears to be evil in the world that's unnecessary. The first one he calls into question childbirth or the birth of animals, for instance, like, why is it that women have to go into a hospital and be in complete agony for 18 hours and get an epidural and feel like they're possessed by a demon? Like, why is that pain necessary in that sense? Why couldn't God just make it so that it just ploops out and nothing hurts at all? I mean, he talks about how, why couldn't God be more generous in providing his creatures with better endowments?

The idea of why does anybody have to go without at all? Why is there any scarcity? He talks about why is the world that we live in so extreme in terms of heat and cold and wind and rain and all these things that cause us pain in that regard, all the catastrophic effects that come as a consequence of that. And the last one is sort of an extension of that, which is why doesn't God prevent certain natural disasters that cause pain? I mean, if a fleet of ships is out on the ocean, why doesn't God make sure that there's no hurricane that comes and sweeps them all under the sea?

And I think the point that he's making here is that these are all examples of evil that exists that. I mean, it doesn't seem necessary. It seems like God could be doing something to prevent this stuff. He's just choosing not to.

34:29 Wes: Yeah, in the case of pain, why can't we just function solely on pleasure? You can't say that, you know, I need to feel pain so that I can retract my arm if something's burning. And let's say, why not just have it be a. You know, we're pleasure driven. Why not have that When I touch the hot stove, have that just be a diminution of pleasure. And naturally I'm going to seek something more pleasurable. Do we actually have to have that subjective feeling of torment to survive in the world? He's going to say we don't.

34:56 Mark: I don't know if I. If I turn on like a bad tv. Yes, I feel the diminution of pleasure, but I might just, out of kind of a morbid curiosity, just want to stare at it for a while. And if we did that with a fire, then your hand is burned off before you, like. Oh, I guess I shouldn't be exploring that. We need something sharper.

35:15 Wes: So you're talking about jouissance now, Mark, did you really want to bring this to Lacan?

35:21 Mark: I didn't think I was talking about.

35:24 Stephen: I mean, it seems like his ultimate point here is that we typically think of God in terms of being this governor of good and evil things that happen to us in the world. But I mean, when you really look at it, it seems like God is as indifferent to good and evil happenings as he is to hot and cold days, or windy or non windy days, or rainy and non rainy days. Right?

35:42 Wes: Yeah, it's that indifference. He has a great section on that, this idea of indifference, paragraph 14. Just because this impressed me so much. There is indeed an opposition of pains and pleasures in the feelings of sensible creatures. But are not all the operations of nature carried on by the opposition of principles of hot and cold, moist and dry, light and heavy? The true conclusion is that the original source of all things is entirely indifferent to all these principles and has no more regard to good above ill, than to heat above cold, or to drought above moisture, or to the light above heavy.

So he's responding to an alternative theory, which is not just that the single principle of the universe is this omnipotent and all good God, but that he's responding to manicheanism, which is the idea that there's a good principle and then there's an evil principle, and that the world is just a mixture of the two. And I think it's pretty impressive to say, actually, no, it's just from the bird's eye standpoint, there is no good or evil. It's just indifference that's more terrifying because it means the world doesn't care about us.

36:52 Mark: This kind of goes back to earlier when we were talking about just what the design argument, what it is to be designed. Like I Normally think about, like, the example of the house having an internal construction. In other words, the parts of the thing you're looking at seem to fit well with each other. But I think it's another aspect of design to say that these parts are optimized for people. And of course, that's kind of a matter of what your level of analysis is. If you're analyzing the whole environment, you might say, look, the people are apart, and the animals that we are meant that God gave us to hunt and kill.

And the fruit from the trees. Look at all that stuff. We are the parts of a system, and it's working very well to feed us and things like that. But that always seems like a weird, you know, so that's like the. Look at the shape of a banana. It's like it's got a handle. That kind of like really dumb intelligent design argument, I always find, really, to be of a different order than look at the different parts of the eye. If any one of them were different, the eye would not function. And it seems like when we're talking about the problem of evil, we're kind of getting at that.

That you could believe in design. Like, yeah, there are organisms that this system has an order to it, but that doesn't mean that it interacts with other things in a larger system that is itself orderly. So maybe this is something that Hume did not even really think very clearly about because, like I was saying, like, why he thinks it's a verbal dispute ultimately, whether you believe in a designer or not or whether you call it God or not. Because he thinks there has to be some underlying principle of order. But maybe the underlying principle of order operates at such a high level of abstraction that's just like the physical laws.

38:37 Wes: There is a designer. It's just the system is designing. The system of evolution is designing animals. It's just that the system is doing it unconsciously and indifferently.

38:49 Dylan: I guess I want to be really careful about using the word design there. I was expecting Mark to say that there's order. But why does the notion of design come out of there being order?

38:59 Wes: Well, design only in the broadest sense, right? Not in the design.

39:03 Dylan: To me, just using that word means intention to the future. That the notion of order doesn't imply.

39:12 Wes: I think we're about to have a verbal dispute here.

39:15 Dylan: That might be right. Maybe it is an inconsequential distinction. But I always took the intelligent design argument to be turning on the notion that, yes, the world is ordered and therefore it is designed. And in being designed, it requires a designer, but being ordered doesn't require an

39:33 Mark: orderer, an ordering principle.

39:36 Wes: Yeah, I think we just mean design in the sense that evolutionarily, despite the blindness of the forces involved, say limbs really do have functions, let's say. And there is a deeper. We should do an episode on Aristotelian final causes at some point just to really concentrate on all of this. Because if Aristotle's right, the line between what's intentional and what's non intentional is not as clear as we think. And in that sense, to say what has a purpose and what doesn't have a purpose isn't as clear as simply pointing to a human like mind. But I would leave it at that for now.

40:15 Mark: I was just trying to point out the difference between, like, this is a well designed pig in that it seems like it's pretty well designed to find other pigs and mate with them and find food and all that kind of stuff. And the legs function so they can walk as opposed to, this pig was designed to be my dinner. Like those are two very different senses of design.

40:35 Wes: Well, it was designed to be. I mean, it was bred, it was bred by human designers to be your dinner.

40:41 Dylan: All the pigs that you see are that way, Mark.

40:44 Mark: God bred them to be my dinner.

40:46 Wes: We have to leave domesticated plants and animals out of this because they literally are intelligently designed, genetically engineered to be your dinner.

40:56 Mark: And that's like one of the analogies he points out. Like, we see a house and if we've never seen a house before, we might be like, wow, the guy who made this house is brilliant. And then we realize he's just a dumb copier. Actually a ship is the example that he's just a dumb, A workman who's just copying the designs of other people. And so I'm right here, Mark.

41:19 Wes: The point of that section is that all of this could have come out about by trial and error. That section is sort of hinting at the possibility of something like evolution.

41:28 Dylan: Yes, yes.

41:29 Wes: In the case of say, boat building or something like that, there is an evolution like sequence of trial and error that before you get a blueprint in someone's head that's to make a really good sailboat, lots of stuff evolutionarily has to have happened before that. And that evolutionary stuff is just sort of hit or miss and then it gets selected for. Even in the case of a craft of a human art, it makes so

41:54 Dylan: much sense that we're doing Darwin next. Yeah, let me ask something about it being a dialogue. He does this thing in the dialogue that happens in some of the Platonic dialogues where he has it narrated by someone who is witnessing the discussion and then that person wraps it up at the end and it's actually narrated as a letter to some yet other person who was there. And the person who was the witness of it is a student of Cleanthes who's like the tutor of them.

42:25 Wes: There are so many layers of cover your ass in this. Yeah, they could accuse me of atheism. Well, it's just a dialogue about.

42:34 Stephen: I mean, you've mentioned that a couple times. I mean, we've alluded to the idea that there's some sort of tension here and that you're covering your ass and stuff. We haven't really talked about why. I mean, I'm not sure at this point it needs to be said, but Hume's essentially living in a completely different world than we are. He's writing this during the Scottish Enlightenment where the threat of religious persecution if you come out against the church, is very real. And so there's a lot of people that think that, I mean, his earlier work, the Major Treatise and the Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, that he sort of disparately mentions God and religion to sort of distance himself from that.

And that this book comes out posthumously in a very deliberate sense because he's worried about religious persecution. Do you guys think that is true? Do you think his views are more in line with Philo? Mark, you were talking about how it's like up for debate whether Hume is using Philo as his mouthpiece in the sense that Plato used Socrates as his mouthpiece.

43:23 Wes: This is a good. Because this is something we didn't discuss, which is at the beginning of part 12, Philo says, but hey, I'm really religious and I believe in some kind of something that seems, really, seems to be a lot like intelligent design. So to the extent that Philo looks like this person who is using skepticism to ground faith, you know, is Hume similar to that guy or is he just more of a straight up atheist? I think that would be the question.

43:52 Stephen: There are those addendums, but I mean, it feels kind of like an olive branch to me. Again, I'm seeing this as like a book that he's writing where essentially somebody coming into it believes that it's a self evident principle that there must have been a cause to the universe. And they're probably coming into this book, reading it thinking that that cause has all sorts of properties that they really have no reason to believe that it does. And I feel like throughout the book, Philo and Cleanthes sort of shred apart a lot of people's conception of the idea of a God. And I feel like at the end, I mean, it's sort of an olive branch he's extending of like. Well, of course. I mean, any moron believes that there's governance to the universe, but let's not confer too many qualities onto it that are unreasonable. Does that.

44:31 Wes: The question is, how much is that just an olive branch, or can we take any of that seriously? So he says things like all the sciences lead us insensibly to acknowledge a first intelligent author, and their authority is often so much greater as they do not directly profess that intention and all sorts of other things which say that he's in favor of. It's confusing. I honestly don't know. How do you reconcile this part with what's come before now, the way he ends it, which I mentioned before, where he says skepticism can serve as a foundation for faith, I think that can be taken seriously because there's a long tradition of philosophers after Hume taking that seriously and arguably even Spinoza as well,

45:10 Mark: and before Hume, that's why mentioned Montaigne is a great example of that.

45:15 Wes: So that part, I think, whether Hume believes it or not, I'm not sure. But philosophically, we can take it seriously. The part about Philo embracing. I don't know, what do you guys make of that? Is there any way to reconcile that with what's come before?

45:29 Dylan: If I read it sort of generously and I think of it as being consistent, I think of it as Philo not being that asshole skeptic who's constantly naysaying everything. Right. And he's doing something along the lines of what Spinoza does, which is say, well, you know, I'm happy to live here and go through certain kinds of motions. And yeah, you know, there's something about the notion of I can walk over to your side. Cleanthes enough to say that there's order in the world that seems to be design. And maybe he doesn't quite say this, but that I can use that in the same way I use skepticism as being a foundation for religion.

I can use the notion that there is a way in which the world works to drive science. Right. Even if it's not taking wholeheartedly that there's a God that is an anthropomorphic entity that drives the way the world works, that there is a teleological bent to the universe that is very much like, somebody made it this way. So thinking about how it got made this way is a way to pursue figuring it out. Now, I've read a lot into it right there.

46:45 Wes: The Stanford Encyclopedia article that Mark pointed us to calls this as the double reversal. So there's the reversal in the sense of the. He seems to reverse himself on the argument from design, and then he reverses that by watering down what it means to embrace the argument from design so much.

47:06 Mark: I was trying to think of this in terms of empiricism, that a tight version of empiricism in terms of everything has to come down to sensory impressions or abstractions from sensory impressions. There's no talk of that in this whole thing. But there is talk about when I experience something, what is my mind immediately brought to. And that's, as we know about his take on causality is what causality is all about. It's not that we have any secret insight into how one event caused another event, but because of constant conjunction, we get expectation.

And so I experience things as causal. I experience. If I see a car that's about to hit a wall, then I have certain expectations about what's going to come next. I feel this danger. And it's not that I'm. There's a process of reasoning going on there. So put that into this idea of I experience things as ordered. You could analyze that and say, well, certainly he has to acknowledge that you have to have a certain amount of scientific training. If you're a dope, then you're not going to experience the world as ordered because you just don't really think about stuff.

But if you've got the correct kind of scientific lenses on, then part of your actual experience of the world is as ordered as. And that's really all he's saying by saying is designed. Again, he's not trying to then say, like in contemplating external intelligent design, that that means that there is a being external to that whole event who came in through an action and ordered it. But just saying it's a principle of order. And we can actually experience that principle of order in a very. I don't know if we want to say direct or not. I'm having trouble with that word.

But it's something that is arguably part of experience.

48:53 Wes: Yeah, Kant turns that. And Stephen, I know you're gratified by the amount of times I've mentioned Kant now. So for Kant, in a way, the intelligent designer becomes the mind. The categories, those are the things that are structuring experience. And there is, for Kant, there is no experience.

49:13 Dylan: We designed it for ourselves.

49:15 Wes: Yeah, exactly. And there is no such Thing as

49:18 Dylan: we are gods,

49:22 Wes: and there is no such thing as experience without that structure. It's not just. You don't have to have a scientific lens on. There is no world without structure. And it's our structuring that in a way creates the world. And so then you get the German idealist after him. You say, well, how do you say that? That basic level, that basic functional level of the ego, there is no way to individuate that ego between one person and another. And so it just becomes the abstract structuring ego becomes God. And that becomes sort of the Hegelian world spirit type idea. So you can see how this vague sense that there is a kind of design to the universe, but not in the typical sense that actually does get played out through the subsequent history.

50:10 Mark: Well, let's kind of give our closing statements. Really great talking to you, Steve.

50:15 Dylan: Yeah, it was awesome.

50:16 Stephen: Really talking to you guys. That's my closing statement. Does the closing statement have to be about the actual text?

50:22 Wes: Nope.

50:23 Stephen: All right, well then I just want to tell everybody to love your family because they're not going to be here forever. You're going to die, your mom's going to die, everyone you love eventually is going to die. And appreciate them while they're here, folks. Because I never had a family, my dad told me I wasn't worthy of having a family. And so if you are worthy of having a family, appreciate them. This concludes my closing statements.

50:53 Mark: Dylan, what is your closing statement?

50:54 Dylan: How do I follow that up? We often say a lot about how it's written and stuff like that. And besides the structure of it, I did want to say that like Hume in general, it's pretty easy and pleasant to read, especially for something written in 1770s. It's relatively straightforward. I think it also reads a lot more modern in the sense of the ideas. Maybe it's just my lack of understanding of intellectual history, but the intelligent design argument that's there, it just sounds like any intelligent design argument you've ever heard. So it was good talking to you guys. I enjoyed the discussion tonight.

51:36 Wes: As Dylan mentioned, we do usually talk about this earlier because the writing. It's been a while since I've read Hume and I guess I associate Hume with very kind of staid English rationality and kind of dryness. But yeah, he's a lot of fun to read. He's a stylist. There's lots of great stuff in here that we didn't talk about. Just all the sections on how miserable the world is are actually a Lot of fun to read. To hear anyone say that stuff out loud is gratifying. Paragraph 13 of Part 10. Look around this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organized, sensible and active.

You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity, but inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding, how hostile and destructive to each other, how insufficient all of them for their own happiness, how contemptible or odious to the spectator. The whole represents nothing but the idea of a blind nature impregnated by a great vivifying principle and pouring forth from her lap without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children.

52:50 Stephen: Still, not as bad as Schopenhauer.

52:53 Wes: No, not as grumpy as Schopenhauer. And we're pessimistic, but sounds very different from the guy who shows up in part 12 to moderate his views. But beyond that, all kinds of great stuff in here that some of the arguments that sort of prefigure evolution and explain how it might be possible to get something that looks like design from random chance and all sorts of stuff we didn't cover. So listeners should definitely read this.

53:19 Mark: Yeah, I really enjoyed that metaphysical section that you're referring to where he's talking about how the world is kind of in a constant state of flux, but that temporary stabilities get achieved. That's what life is. So he's anticipating Darwin, but at the same time he's really given a version of Heraclitus. That's crazy. I would not have expected to see from the guy who. Does this idea correspond to my impression? No. So I've cast it to the flames. You know, that he's much more entertaining here, even though part of the point of that is to show how unmoored and speculative just all this cosmogony is. He's definitely not a. Whereupon one cannot speak, one should be silent. He's not. He's not like, no, you can speak. You just got to know that you're just having fun. So a fun text we seldom get in this time period. A fun text. I enjoyed Spinoza, but was Spinoza fun?

54:22 Wes: Yeah, I find all of this early modern stuff fun.

54:26 Mark: Actually, Hobbes is not fun. I challenge you.

54:34 Dylan: It's nasty and brutish, but not short, nasty, brutish, long.

54:40 Mark: So next time we're doing the Origin of Species and. Yeah, that's not a coincidence. It was when we started reading this. I was like, ah. We had planned, I think, several times during the first couple years. Like, we're going to include Darwin, we're going to include some proto science. Darwin was considered philosophy at the time. He's a natural philosopher. It just kind of went off of my radar, and it's not been involved in the last couple years of discussions about what we might cover. And so this definitely was the missing piece. And now that we know that from our Stuart Umphrey interview recently, that natural philosophy is a thing, it's still a thing.

It's not just science. Before they had a name of it. It's better than that. Our closing song reflecting the majesty of creation is Here Comes the Flood. It was a song originally recorded by Peter Gabriel. And this is the Security project from the 2016 Live One album. I interviewed Trey Gunn, who is the stick bass player. You can hear him soloing in the intro here. And you can hear him on Nakedly Examined Music, episode 21. Check it out. Nakedlyexaminedmusic.com Folks should go tell us what they want us to cover on the show and all the things they want to have Stephen come back and talk with us about on partiallyexaminedlife.com, the blog or the Facebook group, etc.

So good night, everybody.

55:58 Wes: Good night.

55:59 Stephen: Good night.

57:16 Unknown speaker: Sam.

57:42 Mark: Sa.

58:07 Unknown speaker: Sam. Sa. When the night shows the signals go on radios all the strange things they come and go as early warnings Stranded starfish have no place to hide still waiting for this morning Easter tight there's no pointing direction Cannot even choose the side. I took the old track the hollow shoulder across the wood on the tall cliffs they were getting older sons and daughters the jaded underworld was riding high Waves of steel held metal at the sky and as the nails sunk in the clouds Rain was warm and soaked the crowd Lord, here comes the flood we will say goodbye to flesh and blood if again the seas are silent any still alive it'll be those who gave their island to survive Drink up dreamers, you're running dry.

When the flood comes you have no home, you have no walls in the thunder crash you're a thousand miles within a flash don't be afraid to cry at what you see the act is gone there's only you and me. And if we break before the door we'll use up what we used to be. Sam.

1:02:35 Mark: Here comes the flow.

1:02:49 Unknown speaker: It begin the sneeze of silence in any slime Everybody

1:03:01 Mark: to survive

1:03:05 Unknown speaker: Drink and dream us your running dry sa.