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Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
- Summarize Cleanthes’s argument from design and consider one of Philo’s objections to it. Does the objection succeed or not? Explain.
- What rival inferences does Philo say we are entitled to on the basis of the observations that are supposed to support Cleanthes’s design argument? Explain why Philo thinks that Cleanthes cannot decisively rule these out.
- What is a major problem that the fact of human misery raises for Cleanthes’s view? Is it a decisive refutation of that view? Explain.