Abstract

David Hume, the celebrated Scottish philosopher of the 18th century, wrote a work entitled Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, in which he provides a detailed criticism of several theistic arguments. In the Dialogues there are found 3 interlocutors, each of whom approaches natural religion from a different philosophical standpoint. Cleanthes is the character upon whose argumentation we will mainly focus, as he is the defender of the a posteriori argument from Intelligent Design. Philo, another interlocutor, is a philosophical skeptic who opposes Cleanthes' arguments. Out of the three, many consider Philo's positions to be representative of those of Hume himself. The purpose of this paper is to analyze Philo's objection to Cleanthes' Intelligent Design argument, and to show that the analogy within the ID argument is strong and that it warrants belief in the existence of a designer of the universe.