The object of this paper is to show that there are no valid formal objections to the argument from design, so long as the argument is articulated with sufficient care. In particular I wish to analyse Hume's attack on the argument in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and to show that none of the formal objections made therein by Philo have any validity against a carefully articulated version of the argument.

Prof. Flew's main purpose in God and Philosophy (Hutchinson, London, 1966) is ‘to develop and to examine a case for Christian theism’ (1, 1). But in next to no time he shows his reader that here, as with the New York Commissioner for Air Pollution, ‘for’ really means ‘against’. For Flew's aim is to attack Christian theism and to develop the argument against it. One of his fellow-humanists rightly reviewed this book under the title ‘A Case for Atheism’. As the case for atheism is being developed one quickly loses faith in the assurance that this ‘philosopher of religion has … no business to be counsel for either the prosecution or the defence’ and aspires to resemble most of all the examining magistrate (2, 3). Soon we are told that an attack should and shall be launched against the heart of the quinta via of Aquinas (3, 19, etc.). This is not just a slip of the pen for indeed the book contains a number of attacks on Aquinas. Of course Aquinas is not the only Christian theist who is attacked but he is Flew's chief individual target.

Certain primitive Yoruba carry about with them boxes covered with cowrie shells, which they treat with special regard. When asked what they are doing, they apparently reply that the boxes are their heads or souls and that they are protecting them against witchcraft. Is that an interesting fact or a bad translation? The question is, I believe, partly philosophical. In what follows, I shall propound and try to solve the philosopher's question, arguing that it has large implications for the theory of Social Anthropology.

An appeal to the inexplicable has always been a favourite tactic of the Supernaturalist; and even today those Supernaturalists that remain seem to derive some comfort from it. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, the orthodox Protestant apologetic in this country laid great stress on the ‘inexplicable’ events allegedly associated with Christ's life as anthenticating the truths of revelation. (A. G. N. Flew, God and Philosophy, London, 1966, p. 142–3.) A more general thesis has been put forward as often, and even more often assumed: that the occurrence of inexplicable events demonstrates the reality of a ‘spiritual’ realm. And in current literature we can find it claimed that the hegemony of science or the tenability of materialism is threatened by those inexplicabilities which are now known as the phenomena of ESP. (See, for example, ‘A World of Spirits’, a dialogue between J. Pearce-Higgins and C. Evans in Theoria to Theory, Vol. I, No. 4.)

Philosophers constantly discuss Responsibility. Yet in every discussion of which I am aware, a rather obvious point is ignored. The obvious point is that responsibility is ascribed to collectives, as well as to individual persons. Blaming attitudes are held towards collectives as well as towards individuals. (It should be noted that I am discussing that sense of Responsibility—moral or social—in which Responsibility is related to attitudes of blame, praise, indignation, remorse, reward, and punishment; not that sense of Responsibility in which even material objects can be responsible, and which is broadly equivalent to ‘causally operative’.) Responsibility is often ascribed to nations, towns, clubs, groups, teams, and married couples. ‘Germany was responsible for the Second World War’; ‘The club as a whole is to blame for being relegated’. Such statements are not rare.