Since Philo’s point here seems unanswerable, it is good to speculate a little about the allure of the argument to design. Why do not people appreciate Philo’s counter? I suspect the root cause is the same as that responsible for some of the problems of free will. We think that it is more satisfactory to halt the regress with ‘intelligence’ rather than ‘generation’, because we think that in our own experience we have an example of an uncaused mental event, say, my deciding to initiate an action, giving rise to a physical event. So we take that as a model for the arbitrary creation of a universe
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