Copyright© Struan Hellier 2003 - Feel free to use this essay as you wish, but please leave my name on it.

Demea represents one aspect of orthodox theology which maintains that God exists and that this is a "truth so certain and self-evident" that no man of common sense could ever doubt it. In addition, God is incomprehensible to us and we can only "humble ourselves in his august presence," and adore him in silence. After such an introduction it is perhaps surprising that Demea bothers to argue at all. If God is self evident and incomprehensible then no citation of human authority or argument is needed to back this fact up. It will be my intention to show that Demea's arguments are poorly presented and very weak. He is not allowed by Hume to reply to criticisms set against him and instead takes refuge in pre-philosophical conviction. It would seem that Demea only argues when pressed and is not comfortable while arguing as he sees all theological arguments as irrelevant to his beliefs. Indeed Demea's distaste for arguing on these topics culminates in his departure. For this reason justice is not done to his a priori arguments and Cleanthes and Philo are allowed to get away with poor refutations.

Demea is on home ground in his argument against design where he insists again upon the incomprehensibility of God. For Demea the design argument smacks of anthropomorphism. "His ways are not our ways. . . . by representing the deity as so. . . . similar to the human mind, we are guilty of the grossest and most narrow partiality." In effect he is saying that the whole argument is pointless as it reduces God to our own limited level. This is a surprisingly similar position to that of Philo whose emphasis upon experience leads him to conclude that the first cause is unknowable as it is beyond empiricist enquiry. Of course Philo sees no need to posit a deity as the first cause preferring instead a natural explanation. For Demea the design argument is also unsatisfactory because it tells us nothing of the attributes of God or even whether there is one God or many. It is therefore useless to all purposes of life and is a weak foundation for religion.

This all leads Demea to restate the certainty of God and under prompting from Cleanthes to offer the argument a priori. That this argument is not actually of vital importance to Demea is demonstrated by the fact that he has obviously not thought it through for himself but instead resorts to paraphrasing authority. "The argument I would insist upon is a common one" he says. Then he proceeds to misquote Samuel Clarke, and in doing so contradicts himself. In the first line Demea states that, " whatever exists must have a cause or reason for its existence; it being absolutely impossible for anything to produce itself." Later at the end of the paragraph he concludes that, "We must. . . have recourse to a necessarily existent being who carries the reason of his existence in himself." This obvious incoherence was avoided by Clarke who started. "Whatever exists contingently . . etc. Fortunately neither Cleanthes nor Philo pick up on this point so we may now ignore it.

Of greater importance to the structure of Demea's argument is the awkward leap he makes from the argument he seemingly wants to prove, namely that to traverse an infinite series of causes without a temporally ultimate cause is absurd, to an argument that the "whole eternal succession, taken together . . . requires a cause or reason." This latter argument concedes that the series may be infinite but still caused by God rather than the more orthodox creation story of a finite succession with God at its start. This, as we shall see later, will render some of Cleanthes' criticisms obsolete.

Cleanthes first objections are against the use of a priori reasoning to establish the actual existence of anything. "Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent." So to accept that a triangle exists involves accepting its three angles, this is true on a priori grounds. But, there is no contradiction on a priori grounds in rejecting the concept of both the triangle and its angles. The actual existence of a triangle is only demonstrable by empirical evidence. To this it may be objected that a triangle is real but this is just another way of saying that a triangle is necessary which is precisely the assumption called into question. We cannot introduce the concept of existence into the concept of a thing we are trying to ascertain the possibility of for then we would have presupposed the answer, which is tautological. This argument though a perfectly reasonable objection to the ontological argument, which starts with a necessary being, has no effect upon the argument of Demea, which is in part an empirical argument, based on our present existence. Demea claims that because we know by empirical means that we exist, we can argue back from that point on a priori grounds. We need a necessarily existent being to explain why we are here.

Cleanthes then objects that it is absurd to argue that something, which has existed from eternity, has a cause, "since that relation implies a priority in time and a beginning of existence." It is here that Demea could argue that the causal series need not be eternal and, as we have seen, surprising that he did not argue this earlier but instead argued that there must be a reason for the series as a whole. This surely is a case of Humean irony with Cleanthes arguing against Demea from a position he has previously professed to be false. His whole argument from design rests upon a creator, an "initial cause" and "author" of everything who designs the laws of nature and the world we know, but here he is attempting to refute Demea's argument by arguing from an eternal causal series. Philo, perhaps sensing this, utterly ignores Demeas' position in his first criticism and instead attacks the design argument by showing that the world we know may be likened to mathematical regularity and order. At first sight remarkable but upon analysis a necessary result of the nature of the numbers in question. Clearly this could explain order in the universe but it has no bearing upon the existence of an initial cause.

Philo's last criticism is a criticism of all a priori arguments and reflects Hume's position as an out and out empiricist. Again the point of Demea's argument is missed as it derives from an empirical premise.

Neither Philo or Cleanthes address the real problems of Demea's argument and Demea does nothing to advance his case, preferring instead to fall back upon his original position that religion is not found in reason but from a gut reaction to the world and a, "consciousness of his (mans) imbecility and misery." The better half of part X is spent with Philo and Demea vying for position of most wretched and miserable man. Demea sees life after death as the answer to this problem of suffering but keeps quiet when Cleanthes rejects this as an ad hoc hypothesis. Again Demea has no stomach for a fight.

It would seem that Hume agrees with Cleanthes that Demea is a mystic for whom empirical reasoning is useless and even a priori reasoning is worthwhile only to the extent that it backs up his beliefs. In portraying Demea as such I believe Hume does not do justice to the arguments he forwards. Philo and Cleanthes could do much better in their criticisms of the cosmological argument. For instance pointing out, as Kant did, that it can give us no concept of the properties of God, or as Khamara argued, that no good argument can have a conclusion that is modally stronger than its modally weakest premise and therefore it is wrong to base an a priori argument on an empiricist premise. That Demea is portrayed in this way probably reflects Hume's own position that empiricist knowledge is all, but in doing this Hume does discard good arguments with too little effort.

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