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/lit/ - Literature

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19257421 No.19257421 [Reply] [Original]

>Secondly, your theory gives you no reason to ascribe perfection to God even in his capacity as a finite being, or to suppose him to be free from every error, mistake, or incoherence in his activities. Consider the many inexplicable difficulties in the works of nature—·illnesses, earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, and so on·. If we think we can prove a priori that the world has a perfect creator, all these calamities become unproblematic: we can say that they only seem to us to be difficulties because we with our limited intellects can’t follow all the infinitely complex details of which they are a part. But according to your line of argument these difficulties are real; indeed they might be emphasized as new instances of the world’s likeness to the products of human skill and contrivance! You must, at least, admit that we with our limited knowledge can’t possibly tell whether this system contains any great faults, or deserves any considerable praise, when compared to other possible systems and perhaps even when compared to real ones.

>> No.19257518

>>19257421
It would help if we had the context of what he's arguing against. As far as I can tell, he's saying that arguments that God is "perfect" can't be based on what we observe about the world, because we don't understand the world well enough to evaluate whether it's "good" or "bad" on the whole.

>> No.19257597

>>19257518
This is an excerpt taken from "Dialogues concerning Natural Religion" by David Hume 1779 (https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/hume1779.pdf)) The book is his argument on why God/gods can't logically be real. As you can assume from the tittle the book is presented as dialogue between two people arguing and in the quote Philo is refuting Cleanthes argument that despite the imperfections of the world it still requires a designer.

>> No.19257723
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19257723

>>19257597
Does a fine piece of marble sculpture not go through a series of imperfect states before reaching its final form?