Faith and Reason
by A look at Hume’s Cleanthes and Aquinas.
The common mistake in Cleanthes’s and Aquinas’s respective arguments is the assumption that God’s intelligence is the same type of intelligence as a human intelligence. In essence, they anthropomorphize God by claiming that God has human-like intelligence. Yet, as Cleanthes himself notes, such an intelligence could not create nature.22 For a fuller understanding of this problem, it helps to look at an example of an good analogy. For instance, a city is to a planner as a house is to a builder. Here, there is sameness, rather than resemblance, since both the planner and the builder have human intelligence, and both the city and the house are created from this same type of intelligence. However, the analogies between a human’s characteristics and a God’s characteristics fail because they claim the two are equivalent, when they have no empirical evidence to suggest this.
Consequently, the differences in Cleanthes’s and Aquinas’s descriptions of nature are not sufficient to prevent their respective arguments’ shared downfall. It is easy, however, to understand why they both fall into the trap of flawed analogies. It is extremely difficult to grasp with a human mind (the only one that I, and presumably you, the reader, have ever known) that something other than a human-like mind, and therefore human-like intelligence, could create a world in which so many patterns and laws can be found empirically by our minds.
This concept is even harder to grasp for believers like Aquinas and Cleanthes. Every day believers make a “leap of faith” by accepting there is a God. But Aquinas and Cleanthes attempt to rationally prove God’s existence to atheists. Accordingly, there can be no “leap of faith” in this reasoning. Yet, the philosophers do make a leap in their arguments. They anthropomorphize that which by their own definitions is beyond human capacity. Thus, their main fault lies in the fact that they do not distinguish between the belief in God based on faith, and one which appeals only to reason. Thus, Scott Adams sarcastic quip: “The creator of the universe works in mysterious ways. But he uses a base ten counting system and likes round numbers.”23
Bibliography
Adams, Scott. 2009. “Scott Adams Quotes.” Retrieved January 29, 2009.
“http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/s/scott_adams.html”
Aquinas, St. Thomas, “Summa Theologiae” In First Philosophy, Fundamental Problems
and Readings in Philosophy, edited by Andrew Bailey, 42-47. (Canada: Broadview Press 2002).
Hume, David, “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” In First Philosophy,
Fundamental Problems and Readings in Philosophy, edited by Andrew Bailey, 54-89. (Canada: Broadview Press 2002).
1 Philosophy or Religion – Does God Exist? 18: “these arguments begin from the premise that the natural world shows signs of intelligent design or purpose.”
2 Hume 56, Aquinas 46
3 Hume 56
4 Aquinas 46: “We see things which lack knowledge, such as natural bodies.”
5 Hume 56
6 Ibid
7 Ibid
8 By this I mean that these bodies lack intelligence
9 Aquinas 46
10 Ibid
11 Ibid
12 Hume 56
13 Ibid
14 Ibid
15 Ibid
16 Ibid
17 Ibid
18 Aquinas 47
19 In Class 01-20-2009
20 Hume 56
21 Aquinas 47
22 Hume 56: “The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all of nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the production of human contrivance; of human designs, thought, wisdom, and intelligence.”
23 Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert Comic Strip and writer of the relatively unknown thought experiment God’s Debris
Liked it
