Philo, in David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, argues not that we can know from the observed imperfections in the world that God has either limited power or limited goodness, but rather that we cannot use our observations of the world to show that God is infinitely powerful and infinitely good. We cannot conclude that God is all-powerful or all-good because the world is full of experiences in the animal and human realm which are clearly not good by our own definition of that word.

The primary assumption Philo makes is that all we have to go on in discussing the attributes of God is our experiences, or the information from the physical world which enters our minds through our senses. This information, based on causality, does not tell us enough about God as the first or primary cause to…