Explain David Humes reasons for thinking that there could be other causes for design in nature besides God and say what they are.

In his Dialogues Concerning Natural
, David Hume has one of the participants, Philo, critique the idea of the creator God
who made the world. Philo argues that whatever it was that designed the world, it is very
different from the God worshipped by Christians or adherents of other religions. We arrive at
this conclusion by examining the world and speculating from what we observe the kind of creator
that would have made it. At the most basic level, Philo argues that monotheism is
ill-founded:

A great many men join together to build a
house or ship, to found and develop a city, to create a commonwealth; why couldnt several gods
combine in designing and making a world? This would only serve to make divine activities more
like human ones.

Philo goes on to argue that this
cooperative polytheism would do away with the need to regard any one being as omnipotent or
omniscient, claims for which there is no evidence and which seem to be contradicted by the
nature of the world around us. Also, since even flawed human beings are capable of cooperation,
why should we not attribute this capacity to the divine?

Philo says that if
we are to judge the creator of the world by what he has produced, we must allow that this
creator is neither omnipotent nor omniscient. Again, he draws anfrom men building a
house:

If I showed you a house or palace where there was
not one convenient or agreeable apartment, where the windows, doors, fireplaces, passages,
stairs, and the whole arrangement of the building were the source of noise, confusion, fatigue,
darkness, and the extremes of heat and cold, you would certainly blame the planning of the
building without any further examination.

Hume's
argument, therefore, is not so much that there are other causes of design or even other
designers instead of God, but that any designer we infer from the observable facts would be
entirely unlike the God described by Christians. This designer would probably consist of many
beings, none of them infinitely (or even especially) wise or good. Moreover, since everything we
see around us is finite and the beings we observe are corporeal, there is no reason to think
that the designer(s) of all this would be infinite and incorporeal.