Episode 167: Hume on Intelligent Design (Part Two)
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
Mark Linsenmayer
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 10 July 2017
⏱️ 64 minutes
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Summary
Continuing on David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), with guest Stephen West. We get further into what's wrong with the design argument and why Hume thinks that it's merely a verbal dispute whether we want to say that God designed the orderly universe or just say that the universe is orderly. Also, the problem of evil!
Listen to part 1 first, or get the ad-free, unbroken Citizen Edition. Please support PEL!
End song: "Here Comes the Flood" by The Security Project; one of its leaders Trey Gunn appeared on Nakedly Examined Music ep. 21.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Partially examine life relies on your support to find out how to help in ways that are cheap or even free for you |
| 0:05.4 | Check out partially examine life.com slash support |
| 0:16.0 | Hey, you're listening to partially examine life |
| 0:18.9 | Episode 167 and part two on David Hughes dialogues concerning natural religion |
| 0:24.4 | Last time we talked quite a bit about what these three different characters represented and talked about the cosmological argument |
| 0:31.7 | Which is not even what the dialogue is about |
| 0:34.1 | So we should turn our eyes more directly on to the design argument which actually takes the bulk of this work up |
| 0:42.6 | Let me speak up and say something right off the bat |
| 0:45.4 | Humus is the example of a house |
| 0:48.2 | Generally speaking. This is what he's getting at |
| 0:50.4 | We see say a construction worker build a house |
| 0:53.5 | Designed in a particular way for a purpose and we see that from a certain privilege perspective |
| 0:58.2 | Now think of the houses the universe and think of the construction workers god |
| 1:02.3 | What is our perspective of the universe like we are essentially this |
| 1:06.8 | subspecies of primate that is hurling around this giant ball of gas and the middle of our solar system on a blue |
| 1:12.7 | Speck of dust and a completely uninspiring solar system galaxy galactic cluster like it's like 90 95 percent of the entire |
| 1:20.2 | Universe is dark matter or dark energy. We have no idea what that is |
| 1:23.5 | Who are we to be making inferences about the nature of this universe and beyond that the nature of the creator of the universe now |
| 1:30.3 | Go back to the house example |
| 1:31.9 | If the house is the universe and the construction workers god |
| 1:34.0 | We're kind of like a termite that's living in the basement in the drywall |
| 1:38.8 | Who are we to look at the house and make inferences about what it was designed for or about the construction workers that made it and why they did it or that they |
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