Examining arguments from design › From an ordered world to a designer

Finding a house gives us a reason to expect a builder. Does finding an ordered world give us the same kind of reason to expect a divine designer? The comparison is attractive because both cases involve parts arranged together. Its difficulty emerges when we ask how much experience supports each inference, and how much the proposed cause is supposed to explain.

David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion makes that difficulty the subject of an extended conversation. Cleanthes defends an inference from the world's order to intelligence. Philo tests the inference and its consequences. Demea objects to describing God through human characteristics and later offers a different kind of argument. Their disagreements concern both whether a divine cause can be inferred and what could be known about such a cause.

These questions need to remain separate. Evidence for some intelligence behind the world would not automatically establish one infinite, perfectly good, all-powerful creator. Hume makes the distance between those conclusions difficult to overlook. The reader's task is to examine the steps that would connect them, rather than treat the familiar word God as supplying attributes the argument has not earned.