Episode #052 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

Just think for a second about what happened on the last episode of the show. We all learned about David Hume, Scottish philosopher, the foreman of what’s known as the Scottish Enlightenment, living in the 1700s, calling into question all kinds of stuff: cosmological argument for God’s existence, teleological argument for God’s existence, Aristotle’s four causes—which, by the way, when he did it was completely scandalous. He even called into question causality itself. I mean, what was wrong with this guy? Let’s—can we do a psych profile on David Hume 300 years later? Was he abused as a child? Did he have some sort of bum leg that made him angry at the world like he’s Dr. House? I mean, why is this guy ruining the party for everyone else? Well, no, David Hume wasn’t any of this stuff. But if there’s one thing I could assure you he was, it was a skeptic.

I think I’ve said this on the show before. I’m not really sure anymore. I’m getting too many of these. But there’s this weird way that some people look at skeptics, like they think there’s some sort of direct relationship between skepticism and misery. The more skeptical you are, the more miserable you become as a result of it. But this is not the case, my friends. Skeptics can enjoy a good novel! Skeptics still subscribe to Netflix. Skeptics aren’t somehow less capable of being happy or something.

A long, long time ago I remember being nine years old, and I was watching a movie with a group of people: semicircle of couches, projector, TV screen, whatever it was. The movie was Star Wars. I don’t remember exactly which episode it was, but regardless, you get the point: space laser beams, spaceships flying through the air, and yes, space explosions as well. Now, let me just say before all you people start to judge me here, I was but a humble, innocent, 9-year-old child when this happened. My intentions weren’t bad. I mean, how much evil plotting is a 9-year-old kid capable of doing? There was a genuine curiosity that I had coursing through my veins.

So, I’m looking at this giant space battle unfolding in front of me, and I notice something. Why do all these explosions look like they’re out of an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie? Shouldn’t gravity be affecting them in some way? Shouldn’t the oxygen levels or something be affecting them? Like, why do these look exactly like they would look within earth’s atmosphere? Shouldn’t they look a little bit different? So, I decide at this point I’m going to pose the question to the group, try to get educated. Big mistake. I kid you not, this guy, this 35-year-old man, this old, old man—well, 35’s not old now, but it was old to me at the time—this man looks at me dead in the eyes, and he says, “Hey, thanks. Thanks, buddy. You just ruined the movie for me. No, thank you. Thank you for ruining the movie for everybody.” And I look around me, and all these kids are taking their social cues from this one guy. And they’re all just glaring at me now. Like, they’re angry. These kids were mad at me for—like my skepticism was hostility or something. It was infringing upon their thoughts.

There’s this mentality that ignorance is bliss and then any skepticism about anything just makes you progressively less and less happy the more skeptical you are. But then I think there’s a level above that where you realize how completely out of your control everything outside of your mind is, and you can become even more happy than the ignorant person. But few people embody this spirit more than David Hume. If you were to sit down and have a conversation with the guy, you would see what all of his friends and colleagues were unanimously talking about during his lifetime. This guy was cheerful and witty. He was brilliant. He was jolly, happy. David Hume was like a big, skeptical Santa Claus. And even towards the end of his life when he was terribly sick and dying—I mean, just put yourself in his shoes for a second. It would be so easy to wallow in your own misery when you’re sick and dying—even then he remains with this really skeptical, wise cheerfulness in all of his writing and all of the stuff that he says.

The great Scottish economist Adam Smith that we talked about a few episodes ago, a good friend of David Hume during his lifetime, said, “Poor David Hume is dying fast, but with more real cheerfulness and good humor and with more real resignation to the necessary course of things, than any whining Christian ever died with pretended resignation to the will of God.” You hear the testimony of the people that knew the guy during his time, and they talk about him having these sorts of deep intellectual conversations. And he’s just brilliant and funny and cordial all throughout them. And he loved having these conversations with people.

Now, one of the main recurring conversations that he was going to be having during his lifetime was on the subject of whether God exists. And if it does, what qualities can we ascribe to that God? He would have gotten these questions mostly from the religious folk of his time that understandably felt very criticized by his thinking. And what we’re going to talk about next is one of the most common arguments that he would have fielded in one of these lively discussions. This would have been one of the most common arguments for God’s existence during this time period. Recently it’s kind of lost some steam just because of the concept of natural selection; it’s lost a bit of its bargaining power, that is. Yet, nonetheless, people still make this argument all the time in today’s world. So, how fortunate for us that we can think about David Hume’s rebuttals to this argument and have it not only help us practically speaking in a conversation setting, but also it can help us with our own personal development.

The argument is sometimes called the teleological argument, although there are multiple teleological arguments. That’d be a mistake to do that. Sometimes it’s called the argument from design. The argument from analogy is mixed in here somewhere, the watchmaker argument. Just honestly call it whichever one you like best. So, here’s the scenario. So, if someone was sitting down with David Hume and making an argument for God’s existence, one of the many ways they may have started out trying to prove God’s existence is by painting you a picture in your mind’s eye. Here’s probably how it would sound. They’d say, imagine you’re walking down a beach, sand beneath your toes, the ocean roaring on one side of you, little birdies cheeping in the distance. You look down in the sand, and you come across a watch. You pick up this watch, and your intelligence realizes something; it recognizes something. You look at the cogs. You look at the levers and numbers and hands of the watch, and you know that these parts weren’t just arranged by happenstance or randomness. No, you recognize a design when you see one. You may not know who created the watch or why they created the watch or anything like that. But one thing is for certain. This is not a byproduct of randomness. How could it be? This watch was designed.

The argument then takes this point and applies it to the universe. Look at how well suited everything is for the purpose that it serves, right? Look at how I breathe oxygen, and oxygen happens to be all around me. How convenient. Look at how I eat plants and animals, and they happen to be all around me, constantly reproducing so that I can persist. How convenient that I live essentially in a terrarium that’s been perfectly designed for my existence! How convenient. And this extends beyond human life, by the way. I mean, people would point to how the universe obviously has order. Look at the law of gravity. Look at the laws of motion, the laws of thermodynamics, or just any constant in the universe that creates this order. Those things obviously aren’t just random, so they must be intelligently designed.

Now, I put that last sentence the way I did purposefully, for you to recognize the real statement that the argument’s making here. The only alternative to the world being a chaotic, unordered, random mess—which would be the natural state of things if it truly were random, right?—the only alternative is that things were designed by some higher intelligence. Take a look at the human eye for instance. If the human eye was truly just a random configuration of particles, it would look like a chicken liver: this bloody, mangled mess laying on the table, completely useless when it comes to seeing the world. And how convenient that you look at the human eye and it’s so elegantly put together, that there’s a retina and a cornea and complex systems regulating eye pressure constantly and all the things that go into making just your eye work so well for what it does. And now think of it in the context of the human body and how magical that is.

How can any right-thinking person look at that and call it randomness? I mean, come on. You criticize me for having beliefs based on a leap of faith? You’d have to be Evel Knievel to make that leap of faith, to look at the human eye and believe that it just randomly came together somehow. What are you doing in your brain to make that happen? We have two choices. Which one is more reasonable to you, that something intelligently designed all this stuff or that this is the byproduct of unbridled randomness with no direction at all?

Well, before we continue, let’s just take a second to revel in the understanding of how difficult this would have been to argue against in the 1700s. I mean, I’ve said it on this show before. If I lived pre-natural selection, I never ever would have questioned whether this was designed by a supernatural creator that had us in mind. It would have seemed so obvious to me. So, just consider for a second that David Hume did question it, alright? It’s easy to lose sight of that. Real quick, I just want to clear something up, because there might be a few people out there that are saying this to themselves. Like, “Hey, what, you just blindly accept that natural selection is the way that it happened? Don’t you think that’s a little dogmatic, Stephen West, just assuming that it’s the truth?” Well, I agree. That would be presumptuous if that’s what I was doing here.

But that’s the beauty of natural selection when it comes to this argument. It’s not that natural selection has to be true beyond any shadow of a doubt here for it to be useful. It’s that the linchpin of the watchmaker argument is that you have two choices. Which is more likely, a highly convenient collection of unbridled random particles or that something intelligent designed it this way? What natural selection offers, whether it’s true or not in the long run, is an alternative explanation—that’s the value of it—an explanation for how things may seemingly be intelligently designed for this environment, but in reality, some random mutations corresponded with the environment better than others. This gave those creatures a severe reproductive advantage over the rest of their species. It’s not that we’re designed so that we perfectly correspond with the climate and living conditions on this planet. It’s that all the other billions upon billions of creatures over eons that didn’t fit nicely into these conditions died off long ago.

Again, the profundity of natural selection here in the context of this argument is not that it’s true beyond a shadow of a doubt, but simply by virtue of it existing as a theory, it destroys the false dichotomy that people were operating from during the 1700s, that it’s either designed or completely random. We have two choices. Here’s a way that randomness can seem like it was designed—if it’s directed by the climate of a planet over billions of years. And another thing to consider here—kind of on the opposite end of this—is, does this really disprove the existence of this designer? I don’t think it does. Well, we’ll talk about all that. But let’s talk about David Hume right now.

When David Hume heard this watchmaker argument, he would have had a lot to say. So, let’s break down the core of the argument right now. One, there are things from nature that appear to be designed, things like eyeballs. Two, there are things that are manmade that appear to be designed, like watches, for example. These two things at some level share some quality. People interchange what this quality is that they share all the time. They’ll say complexity, symmetry, both things are in some way a means to some end. Whatever you want to put there as the quality that they share, the argument’s the same. They share certain qualities, a certain intelligence between them, something that implies they were designed. Well, we know in the case of the watch that those qualities were put there by an intelligent designer, a human, the guy that made the watch. Well, if we accept the premise that was very popular at the time that we talked about last episode, that similar effects typically have similar causes—knowing that, it seems pretty likely that when we see those qualities in nature, they too were put there by an intelligent designer. His name is God. You can buy his book at the Barnes & Noble near you.

Now, David Hume attacks this argument at basically every single point in the argument. Basically, every sentence he has something to say about some assumption that you’re making. If for some reason I was having a conversation with David Hume and I painted that picture of walking along the beach in his mind’s eye, there wouldn’t be many sentences he wouldn’t just stop me and, “Oh, no, no, no. Don’t you think you’re making a few assumptions there, Stephen West?” I’m going to talk about them all eventually, but let me start with the most general one.

David Hume just thinks this is a terrible analogy on many levels. He says that one thing he’s noticed over the years, over the course of his life, is that whenever you’re making an analogy, the further away the two things are from each other, the less effective of an analogy it’s going to be. Like, comparing tangerines to oranges is going to be a much better analogy than comparing a horse to a house cat just because they both have four legs. Hume would say, look, we’re pretending as though this majesty of nature is comparable to a watch laying on a beach somewhere. But is it really that similar, really? Just think of all the massive differences here. Nature is primarily alive. A watch or things designed by a human are never alive. Nature has a quality of self-sufficiency. It regulates and maintains itself. Human artifacts need constant maintenance. Hume would say that if you just look at the universe for what it is, there’s a lot of different things it resembles much more than some intelligently designed watch laying on a beach somewhere.

Now, if you were having this argument with David Hume, he could sit here all day and just argue against your analogy, point out the weaknesses in it. But he probably wouldn’t. What Hume would probably say is, this is a terrible analogy, but let’s just move forward as if it wasn’t. Let’s move forward so that I can break down the next sentence in your thought experiment, which was that there is some resemblance between eyeballs and watches, some resemblance between things in nature and things intelligently designed by human beings, that is only explainable by there being an intelligent designer of the universe. I mean, after all, these people are claiming to prove the existence of God, right? The onus is on them here.

Well, when you put it in these blunt terms, it doesn’t seem that difficult to refute, right? I mean, all David Hume needs to do is come up with some alternative explanation, basically any alternative explanation that corresponds with this example, and he’s done his work, right? Now, for the record, David Hume gives several here. He says that maybe everything arose by chance. Isn’t that possible? Maybe there are an infinite number of universes out there where every possible world is actualized. And maybe we just got really, really lucky on ours. Now, keep in mind, a lot of people were using this argument in the time of Hume, and they would have been using it as kind of like a QED, mathematical proof of God’s existence.

This specific point by Hume is not supposed to be some revolutionary argument. And it’s not. It’s just supposed to cut the legs out from underneath someone that claims that there was literally no other explanation for why things appear to be designed here. And if you find one of these people in your everyday life, start recording on your phone. Make a YouTube video. You’ve found a rare Pokémon. But in reality, this is not a revolutionary argument at all by David Hume. Most people making this argument in today’s world are going to be arguing that this doesn’t prove beyond a shadow of a doubt the existence of God. They’re just saying, which is more likely, an intelligent designer created this or that everything arose by chance?

So, let’s do a quick recap of David Hume’s rebuttal so far. First, the analogy is just a terrible one in the first place, that there are so many fundamental differences between things in nature and things that humans create that to pretend as though things necessarily follow from this comparison is just plain irresponsible. But let’s say the analogy works; let’s move forward. Hume says that an intelligent designer still isn’t the only explanation for the resemblances you see. Maybe it’s chance. Maybe there’s an infinite number of universes; we got lucky. And here he definitely would have included natural selection as one of those explanations, probably several others considering 300 years of human thought has passed since then. But even if we ignore this and we tap out—we say you’ve done it—even if we accept that you have now proven that there is an intelligent designer behind the origins of the universe, Hume then argues, what have you just proven the existence of?

Let’s be real, people using this argument aren’t philosophers arguing to other philosophers that there may have been a cause behind the origins of the universe. Philosophers always realize this is a possibility. Barring some exceptions, some very obvious exceptions in some cases, philosophers are some of the least arrogant people you’ll ever meet just because of the process that they engage in on a daily basis. But the reality today is—the reality during the time of David Hume would have been as well—the people who are typically making this argument that we’re talking about, they want to prove the existence of—what?—not just an intelligent designer but the God of the Abrahamic religions, right? Just like in the case of the cosmological argument, David Hume is going to argue that the people that use this argument to prove the existence of an intelligent designer are then assuming hundreds of things about this intelligent designer that there’s no mention of in the thought experiment, and there’s no justifiable basis for believing them.

Again, even if we accept the existence of an intelligent designer of the universe, what have we just proven the existence of? Think about it. All we know about this designer for certain is that it was capable of designing the universe, nothing more. That’s all we know. Hume would ask, does this designer that we’re talking about have to be an omniscient God? No, not necessarily, really. Okay, does it have to be omnipotent? Does this thing have to be all-powerful for it to have created the universe? Well, no. It just needed to be powerful enough to create the universe, right? That’s all we know about it. Hume would say, yeah, this God is powerful, but all-powerful? Yeah, this God is very knowledgeable, obviously, but all-knowing? Let’s not even talk about all of the hundreds and hundreds of assumptions we’re making on top of this about whether this God made this vast, fractal universe just for us or whether this God cares about whether you mention his name too close to a forbidden word. Can we even ascribe omniscience and omnipotence to this God?

David Hume would say no. And he’d keep taking you down this path. He’d say, okay, since I’m granting that this intelligent designer exists, let’s get to the bottom of exactly what we know about this designer. How about this one? People would often say, God is perfect. Well, can we assume that this intelligent designer is perfect? After all, we are—I mean, the whole example is that we’re likening the design of the universe that we see around us with the design of a watch laying on the beach somewhere, designed by an extremely imperfect human intelligence. Can we really assume that it took a perfect being to create this universe?

Hume would take it even one step further. He would say, how about this? Can we even assume that it’s one designer? Why should we, after all? Did one human being design and create that watch? No. Typically, when human beings create things, it’s an entire team of designers that execute one thing. Why shouldn’t we assume that there was a team of gods behind the creation and design of the universe? On this same note also, Hume would say that to claim that human intelligence needed a designer is to imply that something that is supposedly analogous to human intelligence also needed a designer. So, who designed the intelligent designer? And we’re left with kind of an infinite regress there. It’s an interesting argument to talk about.

Hume also brings up the point that if we’re being completely honest—we’re looking around us, we’re looking at the evidence at our disposal, and we’re not just ignoring stuff that doesn’t correspond with what we already believe—it’s really easy to find elements of nature that make it seem like it wasn’t intelligently designed. He accuses people of what they’re doing is they’re looking at all of the good, coherent stuff in nature, and they’re saying, “Oh, that means that it had to have been designed.” But what about the incoherent stuff, right? Modern biology has revealed a lot more of these, like that—I think it’s the recurrent laryngeal nerve in that giraffe’s neck. It goes all the way down super inefficiently. Like, if you are an intelligent designer of the universe, that nerve seems incredibly counterintuitive, but it makes total sense if this is something that evolved by random chance. Also, the appendix that we don’t need.

Hume would probably say something like, you know, the process of rain all around us definitely makes sense as part of this intelligent design if it was intelligently designed for us. But why would there ever be devastating floods or winds or any sort of weather pattern like that if this was truly an intelligently designed system for us? The point that Hume’s making here is that we can look at these seemingly imperfect things about the design of the universe and, using the exact same logic case the argument by design, we can say that the universe obviously is not designed.

Maybe the best argument referred to by Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is the idea that if you’re walking along the beach and you come across a watch and this thing stands apart from everything else around it, and that watch’s design implies that there is some grand designer of nature out there, then the ocean is a watch, right? Every grain of sand on that beach around you is a watch. The snack shack made out of palm trees where you buy that disgusting paper tray of nachos—that’s a watch. Yet you know the watch is intelligently designed because it stands apart from what, everything around you that is also intelligently designed? Let’s get something straight though. None of these arguments by David Hume proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that there isn’t an intelligent designer out there that cares about human behavior. For example, what if the universe was intelligently designed and God just took an extremely inefficient path to get where we are now? He affected the climate of the earth to shape us in the way that we did.

But in fairness to Hume, I really don’t think this is what he’s trying to do. In keeping with his cheerful skepticism that you, no doubt, would have been met with, welcomed with in one of these conversations, I think his real intention by making these arguments is just to get us to see how many unfounded logical leaps we are capable of making as human beings when we have a dog in the fight, when we want one outcome to be true over another one. This is a great lesson to take from Hume as you continue growing throughout your life.

So, as you can probably imagine, saying the stuff David Hume did about religion—all the assumptions that they were making—really isn’t the best way to stay under the radar. In fact, historically, it’s been a fantastic way of finding out whether you’re actually right about all this stuff that you’re talking about, if you know what I mean. But I want to make sure we understand who David Hume was. David Hume was not a militant, anti-religious person during his lifetime. David Hume was not the equivalent of a Richard Dawkins, berating people—“That’s like saying I got a flying spaghetti monster.” No, during his life, David Hume was more like one of those Apache helicopters, flying on the horizon. You can’t even see them, but they can shoot you. And when they do, you lose a leg.

And the reason I say this is because, look, there was no way he was ever going to publish this stuff during his lifetime. He knew how much of a hot potato it was. Famously, he went up to his good friend Adam Smith during his lifetime. He said, when I die, please, as my friend, do me this one favor. Please make sure that my work gets published. Adam Smith takes one look at it. He’s like, forget that, man! No. No thank you. Find somebody else to get it published is what he said. Selfishly, looking back, I kind of wish he did come out with all this stuff just to see the backlash that would have happened over it. I guess, on the other hand, I benefitted from it as well. Being at arm’s length from that kind of hostility gave David Hume opportunities to write about stuff that he probably otherwise wouldn’t have had—a sort of freedom in his work.

It’s very obvious that David Hume realized during his lifetime that not everybody that believes in the God of the Abrahamic religions founded their beliefs in philosophical proofs for God’s existence. The reality is, if you ask most people that have a belief in God why they believe in God, they’re probably not going to stop, look you in the eye, and start evoking the cosmological argument to you. No, people base their belief in God on a lot of different things. And David Hume in many of his shorter works addresses some of these things that people cite as reasons why they believe in God. Real quick, just for historians of philosophy, this is typically regarded as making a distinction between Hume’s critique of natural religion versus revelation.

So, this next thing we’re going to talk about is not an unpublished work by David Hume or a work published after his death. This was a highly controversial essay released in his famous Enquiry of Human Understanding. And one of the topics that David Hume dedicates an entire essay to is the concept of miracles. So, in today’s day and age, you don’t got to go very far to find people that are talking about miracles that are happening. You don’t got to look very far past your Facebook feed to find some news story where like a baby is saved from a fire and is spared or a single person survives a train wreck. What are the odds? People leave comments on this news story. What I’m saying is, if you think that your Facebook feed is the only time and place in history that you’re going to find people calling these events miracles or the providential hand of God intervening, reaching in, sparing their life for a few more years, well, you’re wrong. The 1700s were rife with this sort of thinking. And why shouldn’t they have been, honestly? If you believe in God, why shouldn’t these things reinforce your belief in God? I mean, think about the fiery train wreck that the one person survived. Why did they survive when so many others perished? They should have died! How convenient. Mere coincidence or the creator of the universe intervening?

But one big thing that David Hume would want us to do when we look at these sorts of events is to make a distinction between miracles and extraordinary events, because in his mind there is a huge difference in the implications here. Was that person surviving the train wreck unscathed a miracle or just a highly, highly unlikely extraordinary event? He would say it was an extraordinary event. See, to David Hume, a miracle is something that only an all-powerful God could be capable of. A miracle is a temporary suspension of the laws of nature. A miracle is when somebody is levitating off the floor. Gravity is being defied. A miracle is when someone is raised from the dead. The train wreck—that could have been anything. That could have been coincidence.

David Hume lays out his rule of thumb whenever he’s told about miracles here: “When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, [what I do is] I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened.” And what he’s saying here is, look, which is more likely, that the laws of nature were suspended in your favor by a supernatural God or that someone may have been deceived or that somebody’s BS-ing you? This was a big point to followers of the Abrahamic religions during the time of David Hume. Many of them are mutually exclusive in the claims that they make in this regard. They believe in the legitimacy of their religion because of the miracles performed and the fulfillment of prophecy. Yet they’re more than willing to turn a blind eye to the miracles that the other religions use as a basis for their beliefs.

David Hume’s just saying, let’s make a distinction between miracles and extraordinary events. And when it comes to miracles—not that it proves that they didn’t happen—but which is more likely, that the laws of the universe were suspended in your favor or that the miracles that you believe in are the same as the countless other miracles that you’re skeptical about? When it comes to extraordinary events, David Hume would have said, well, what do you expect, really? With as many moving parts and as complex as the world is, as many variables that are in play, just because of the way that things are, we can expect a certain number of crazy coincidences, right? By the way, what’s the alternative, that in a completely random world not governed by a creator that there wouldn’t be any random coincidences? Like, no one would ever survive a train wreck? In this completely random world, as soon as you’re on a train and it goes off the rails, you’re dead. No chance of ever surviving. Randomness is that predictable?

Now, another topic that David Hume discusses that’s going to segue quite nicely into our next episode is another thing that people often use to justify their belief in some higher power that isn’t a QED philosophical proof of God’s existence. It’s the concept of an incorporeal soul. Do humans have souls? Maybe we do have no basis for believing in a lot of the things we do, but there seems to be something about humans that’s different. I look at the cows and the squirrels and the moose; I’m different than them. There’s something more to these bodies than just flesh, bone, and chemicals. What about the soul?

Well, we’ll pick up here next time when we finally get to the bottom of the way that Hume believed humans interact with the world.

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.