RE: A "meta-argument" against all future arguments for God's existence ?
February 26, 2022 at 6:26 pm
(This post was last modified: February 26, 2022 at 6:32 pm by Angrboda.)
(February 26, 2022 at 6:23 pm)Klorophyll Wrote:(February 26, 2022 at 6:09 pm)Angrboda Wrote: Anyway, the teleological argument is crap. You're just too stupid to realize this.
Neither Kant nor Hume agree with you. I guess I should be proud of how stupid I am.
You're full of shit. I can quote you where Hume shits all over the teleological argument. Show us where Kant or Hume say the teleological argument isn't crap.
(And Kant is a moot point, as he was a theist bound determined to bend himself into a pretzel to prove God, so he's hardly a worthwhile defeated.)
Quote:My main reservation about what Cleanthes has said,
Philo remarked, is not so much that he bases all religious
arguments on experience as that his arguments seem not
to be the most certain and unbreakable even of that inferior
·experience-based· kind. That a stone will fall, that fire
will burn, that the earth has solidity, we have observed
thousands of times; and when any new instance of this sort
is presented we don’t hesitate to draw the usual conclusion—
·this stone will fall, this fire will burn, the earth that I
am about to put my right foot on is solid·. The exact
similarity of the cases gives us a perfect assurance of a
similar outcome; and we never want or look for stronger
evidence than that. But the evidence is less strong when
the cases are less than perfectly alike; any reduction in
similarity, however tiny, brings a corresponding reduction
in the strength of the evidence; and as we move down
that scale we may eventually reach a very weak analogy,
·leading to a conclusion· that is confessedly liable to error
and uncertainty. ...
...If we see a house, Cleanthes, we conclude with the
greatest certainty that it had an architect or builder; because
this is precisely the kind of effect that we have experienced
as coming from that kind of cause. But surely you won’t say
•that the universe is so like a house that we can with the
same certainty infer a similar cause, or •that the analogy is
here entire and perfect. The unlikeness in this case is so
striking that the most you can offer ·on the basis of it· is a
guess, a conjecture, a presumption about a similar cause;
and I leave it to you to consider how that offering will be
received in the world!
David Hume | Dialogues concerning Natural Religion | Part II