Why does philo accuse cleanthes of anthropomorphism

Was the language and grammar an issue? Didn't find yours? Ask a new question Get plagiarism-free solution within 48 hours. Review Please. Next Previous. Related Questions. Response Paper on a newspaper article with argument. Why is it called the Ontological argument? Are there other What is a grammar? What is Universal Grammar? Give an example. How is this evidence for innately Clifford claims that it is always morally wrong to believe something on insufficient evidence.

Is this view plausible or not? Wolf claims that for your life to be meaningful, at least some Create an Account and Get the Solution. Log into your existing Transtutors account. Have an account already? Click here to Login.

No Account Yet? Click here to Sign Up. That is, for God's thoughts to order the universe, there must be a high degree of order in God's thoughts. If order requires an explanation, then we have only replaced one question, "why is there order in the universe?

Thus, by saying that God created the order, we do not gain any knowledge, but only displace our ignorance into a realm about which we could never learn. Cleanthes replies that he is not interested in the cause of the order of God's thoughts: he is satisfied, he says, to know that there is an anthropomorphic God and does not need to go further. Cleanthes thinks that Philo is objecting to the design argument on the basis of the claim that God's intelligent design cannot be the final cause and that, therefore, it cannot be the cause at all.

He, therefore, responds that all philosophers must confess that ultimate causes are unknown. Cleanthes is right in this claim: even modern science's most sturdy theories do not assign final causes. For instance to use an example that Cleanthes could not have possibly used , we consider the Big Bang theory a good explanation of how our universe came into being even though we don't know what caused the Big Bang. Our lack of a plausible cause for the event that caused everything subsequent does not keep us from putting our faith in this very satisfying and well-confirmed theory of the origins of the universe.

Philo does not claim that questions are left unanswered by the design hypothesis; rather, says that this hypothesis does not provide any explanation of the order of the universe.

If we accept the design argument, the question of "what creates the order of the universe? Philo thinks that explaining our ordered universe by appealing to the order of God's ideas is much like explaining why you punched your friend by the fact that you wanted to punch your friend.

It might well be true that you wanted to punch your friend, but this information does not really explain why you punched your friend. All it does it push the mystery from the realm of action to the realm of emotion or ideas. To really give an explanation of the action in question one would need to tell a story about why you wanted to punch your friend or how the accident occurred, or why and how someone forced you to do it. Philo sees that the design argument has the same problem: all it does is push the mystery from the realm of matter to the realm of ideas.

What Philo thinks we really need in order to explain the high level of order in our universe is some general principle or law that tells us how order arises, either in matter or in thought. It is only when we have a general law that we will be able to begin to understand why and how our universe became ordered the way it did.