The Role and Foundations for Knowledge Page 2

In his next example, he tries to "bring the case still nearer the present one of the universe" (24). Cleanthes goes on to assume that if "books are natural productions which perpetuate themselves in the same manner with animals and vegetables, by descent and propagation", it would not be possible to find a stronger analogy to the original cause than to that of mind and intelligence (24). Again, Cleanthes does not provide an example that is close to human experience. The idea of books being able to reproduce like animals is simply a hypothetical situation that would have to be assumed true because there is no documented evidence of books being able to reproduce. If an example cannot be closely related to human experience, it is not as legitimate of an example, because people have to assume its truth. Cleanthes' examples lack a needed connection to human experience, and in effect, this hurts the soundness of his argument.

Philo has a hard time seeing eye to eye with Cleanthes on the proof for the existence of God. He states that through Cleanthes' proof, "No satisfaction can ever be attained by these speculations which so far exceed the narrow bounds of human understanding" (32). He continues by saying, "It is still more unreasonable to form our idea of so unlimited a cause from our experience of the narrow productions of human design and invention" (35). Philo helps show how people can only know things for sure through human experience by using an example of how microscopes open a "new universe" vastly different from mankind. His example helps show how we can only know how much we know through experience and no more. Before microscopes existed, people did not know of the microscopic world that exists in today's sciences; people learned of this world by experiencing it with a microscope. By pointing this out, Philo helps show that people can only know things for fact through experience. The concept of a microscope is much easier to comprehend than a loud, overbearing voice because everyone knows what a microscope is and can relate to how it is used and what we see through it, but the existence of a loud voice is very questionable because there is no evidence to back its true existence. Philo sums up his main problems with Cleanthes' hypothesis of using experience to prove the existence of God in the following passage:

"your hypothesis is able, perhaps, to assert or conjecture that the universe sometime arose from something like design: But beyond that position he cannot ascertain one single circumstance, and is left afterwards to fix every point of his theology by the utmost license of fancy and hypothesis." (37)

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