Hume's Criticisms: Teleological & Cosmological

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Hume's Criticisms of the Teleological Argument

David Hume saw the following faults in the teleological argument.

Analogies are stronger the more alike the two things being compared are.
In the case of the design argument, Hume claims that the world and the watch are very unlike each other.
The world is composed of organic and mineral matter, so it is not like a machine and more like an organism.

Hume says that the governing principle of the world could be one of many - such as generation or gravity - and that these would work equally as well as intelligence.
There might not even be one supreme governing principle but many, each in charge of their own domain.

The analogy of a man-made thing is bound to lead to the conclusion that the universe was designed. But Hume points out that we already have experience or knowledge of watches or houses being made, and so this just begs the question when it comes to the universe.
The analogy of a man-made thing also implies a human-like God (like effects imply like causes), but this causes problems as God is meant to be infinite in His qualities.

A perfect God cannot be inferred from the state of the universe.
As Hume says: “The world is very faulty and imperfect, and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity who abandoned it”.
Analogy leads to a non-moral God.
- One should judge the craftsman on the quality of the work they produce – earthquakes and illness do not imply a just God. There could be two gods or forces: a good and an evil. That would explain far better the state of the universe.

David Hume saw the following faults in the cosmological argument.

Hume attacks the principle of sufficient reason on which Aquinas' third way is founded.
- This principle states that there should be a total explanation rather than a partial one for any phenomenon.

Hume argues that you cannot move from saying individual elements of the universe require an explanation to the whole universe requires one.
- This is to commit the fallacy of composition. This is to assume that just because all the individual members of a group of things have a certain property, the group itself has that property.
- For instance, just because all the tiles on a floor are square, this does not mean that the whole floor has to be square – it could be many other shapes.

But the fallacy of composition is not formal and does not always hold.
- If you substitute colour for shape in the floor tile example, the fallacy doesn’t work (if every floor tile is red, then the whole floor WILL be red).
So the question is whether contingency is more like shape or colour in the floor tile analogy. It is difficult to see, if everything in the universe is dependent on other things for existence, how the universe as a whole could not also be dependent on something else for existence.

Hume questions the reality of the ‘whole’ that people refer to, saying that ‘whole’ things are usually created by “arbitrary acts of the mind”.
- E.g. When we unite several counties into one kingdom, this has no influence on the nature of things. It is simply a human perception.

David Hume saw the following faults in the cosmological argument.

The word ‘universe’ could be just a convenient term for our own perceptions, rather than referring to any reality.
Modern physics seem to provide some support for this – with the view of ‘pocket universes’ which exist within larger ones. To look for a ‘whole’ gets very difficult in this view.

Hume says that it is not inconceivable that the world had no cause or just always existed.
- He says “it is neither intuitively nor demonstratively certain” that every object that begins to exist owes its existence to a cause.

Hume says that like causes produce like effects.
- For example, parent rabbits produce baby rabbits.
- So as many things in the universe seem to be the offspring of two parents, why should we assume that there is one male ‘parent’ of the universe – wouldn’t it make more sense to postulate a male and female creator God?

To base an argument on causation is foolish as we can never be sure that causation is anything other than a psychological effect.
In fact, it is more foolish in the case of the universe, because as we lack past experience of formation of universes, we haven’t even got anything to base our ‘habit of mind’ on.

Any being that exists can also not exist, and there is no contradiction implied in conceiving its non-existence. But this is exactly what would have to be the case if its existence were necessary.
So the term ‘necessary being’ makes no sense a posteriori – any being claimed to exist may or may not exist.
In Hume’s own words: “all existential propositions are synthetic.”