Cleanthes

Cleanthes

Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in the mid-18th century during the Age of Enlightenment, the period in history in which rationalism reemerged for the first time since the ancient Greeks as the primary basis of authority. Rationalism, one of the most popular schools of thought among the philosophical minds of this era, is the belief that reason and logic are the primary sources of knowledge and truth. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is the fictional account, provided by a youth by the name of Pamphilus, of philosophical conversations held between three main characters: Philo, Cleanthes, and Demea. Each of these individuals represents a different popular religious/philosophical perspective debated by philosophers during the Age of Enlightenment. These arguments mainly concern the nature of God’s existence. Demea defends the cosmological argument and is passionately invested in the principles of fideism. Philo is a philosophical skeptic. Cleanthes ascribes to empirical theism, the supposition derived from experiential evidence that a deity or god exists. Empirical theism is a facet of natural religion, the theological attempt to define God by means of reason as opposed to faith. He defends this position that religious belief can be explicated by means of logic and reason rooted in a posteriori truths, those truths based on the reasoning extracted from evidence that has been taken from worldly experience.

A major cornerstone of empirical theism is the teleological argument, also known as the design argument. The teleological argument is a rational, systematic approach to validating God’s existence. In short, the design argument states that (a) every design has a designer; (b) the universe has a complex design; (c) therefore, the universe has a designer. Cleanthes expresses this argument through an anthropomorphic analogy in which the world is a machine and God its human-like designer/creator. He explains that the world is “nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines” that are “adjusted to each other with an accuracy which ravishes into admiration all men who ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance...Since therefore the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that he causes also resemble, and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man, though possessed of much larger faculties, proportioned to the grandeur of the work which he has executed. By this argument a posteriori, and by this argument alone, do we prove at once the existence of a Deity and his similarity to human mind and intelligence.” This analogy basically states that, when two ends are proportionally similar, so too must be the means by which they came to be. This machine Cleanthes speaks of is complex and purposeful, as is the natural world. The machine is complex and purposeful because it had a designer, a man who created it with intention. Because the two are, generally speaking, analogous in the way of having an intricate composition, the world, too, must also have an intentional designer, God. Why God? Nature is so adaptive, evidently purposeful, and complex that it is, in many ways, beyond the realm of human comprehension; therefore, some supremely intelligent being must have deliberately designed and created it. God is the greatest, incomparably intelligent and divine, so He must exist as this deliberate designer.

Though Cleanthes presents the teleological argument with conviction and confidence in his logic, his theological reasoning is not impervious to Philo’s skeptical inquiries. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion consists mainly of a back-and-forth between Philo and Cleanthes, with Philo probing and criticizing natural religion and Cleanthes defending it. Philo’s criticisms are deeply rooted in skepticism. Before the design argument is even mentioned, Philo and Cleanthes kick-start Dialogues with a heated debate over the legitimacy and validity of skepticism. Skeptics believe that it is theoretically impossible for people to postulate final truths. Human beings are in no way, shape, or form omniscient; therefore, they cannot possibly make statements about what is absolutely true and what is not. They also do not have this ability because human reason is unreliable, often clouded by unavoidable and uniquely human emotions and hubris. Philo states that people must be aware of the “weakness, blindness, and narrow limits of human reason,” that it is uncertain and self-contradictory. By making this statement however, Philo contradicts the very argument he seeks to defend by making a postulated final truth about the nature of human reason!

Later on in Dialogues, Cleanthes uses Philo’s own weapon against him, exploiting skepticism as a defense for the arguments for natural religion. Cleanthes reminds his fellow philosopher that “the declared profession of every reasonable skeptic is only to reject abstruse, remote, and refined arguments; to adhere to common sense and the plain instincts of nature; and to assent, wherever any reasons strike him with so full a orce that he cannot, without the greatest violence, prevent it.” In other words, skeptics only distrust far-fetched theories apparently derived from misused, manipulated information. Those that appear to be based on common sense are acceptable. With this in mind, Cleanthes instructs Philo to “consider, anatomize the eye; survey its structure and contrivance, and tell me, from you own feeling, if the idea of a contriver does not immediately flow in upon you with a force like that of sensation. The most obvious conclusion, surely, is in favor of design.” When one examines a simple, obvious case such as the human eye, it is hard to deny the manifest validity of the design argument. As Cleanthes succinctly phrases it, “The order and arrangement of Nature, the curious adjustment of final causes, the plain use and intention of every part and organ; all these bespeak in the clearest language an intelligent cause or author.”

Unscathed by Cleanthes’ systematic dismantling of the skeptical criticisms of the design argument, Philo still goes on to employ skepticism in an attempt to prove that Cleanthes’ analogy used to support the claim of an intelligent design is insufficient and flawed. He argues that this is because the universe and a machine are simply not alike enough to compare. A person can say “that a stone will fall, that