Cleanthes
Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in the mid-18th century during the Age of Enlightenment, the period in history in which rationalism reemerged for the first time since the ancient Greeks as the primary basis of authority. Rationalism, one of the most popular schools of thought among the philosophical minds of this era, is the belief that reason and logic are the primary sources of knowledge and truth. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is the fictional account, provided by a youth by the name of Pamphilus, of philosophical conversations held between three main characters: Philo, Cleanthes, and Demea. Each of these individuals represents a different popular religious/philosophical perspective debated by philosophers during the Age of Enlightenment. These arguments mainly concern the nature of God’s existence. Demea defends the cosmological argument and is passionately invested in the principles of fideism. Philo is a philosophical skeptic. Cleanthes ascribes to empirical theism, the supposition derived from experiential evidence that a deity or god exists. Empirical theism is a facet of natural religion, the theological attempt to define God by means of reason as opposed to faith. He defends this position that religious belief can be explicated by means of logic and reason rooted in a posteriori truths, those truths based on the reasoning extracted from evidence that has been taken from worldly experience.
A major cornerstone of empirical theism is the teleological argument, also known as the design argument. The teleological argument is a rational, systematic approach to validating God’s existence. In short, the design argument states that ...