Hume: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: And Other Writings

by David Hume, Dorothy Coleman (Editor)

David Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, first published in 1779, is one of the most influential works in the philosophy of religion and the most artful instance of philosophical dialogue since the dialogues of Plato. It presents a fictional conversation between a sceptic, an orthodox Christian, and a Newtonian theist concerning evidence for the existence of an intelligent cause of nature based on observable features of the world. This new edition presents it together with several of Hume's other, shorter writings about religion, and with brief selections from the work of Pierre Bayle, who influenced both Hume's views on religion and the dialectical style of the Dialogues. The volume is completed by an introduction which sets the Dialogues in its philosophical and historical contexts.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion

216 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1779

About the author

David Hume was a Scottish historian, philosopher, economist, diplomat and essayist known today especially for his radical philosophical empiricism and scepticism.

In light of Hume's central role in the Scottish Enlightenment, and in the history of Western philosophy, Bryan Magee judged him as a philosopher "widely regarded as the greatest who has ever written in the English language." While Hume failed in his attempts to start a university career, he took part in various diplomatic and military missions of the time. He wrote The History of England which became a bestseller, and it became the standard history of England in its day.

His empirical approach places him with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others at the time as a British Empiricist.

Beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume strove to create a total naturalistic "science of man" that examined the psychological basis of human nature. In opposition to the rationalists who preceded him, most notably René Descartes, he concluded that desire rather than reason governed human behaviour. He also argued against the existence of innate ideas, concluding that humans have knowledge only of things they directly experience. He argued that inductive reasoning and therefore causality cannot be justified rationally. Our assumptions in favour of these result from custom and constant conjunction rather than logic. He concluded that humans have no actual conception of the self, only of a bundle of sensations associated with the self.

Hume's compatibilist theory of free will proved extremely influential on subsequent moral philosophy. He was also a sentimentalist who held that ethics are based on feelings rather than abstract moral principles, and expounded the is–ought problem.

Hume has proved extremely influential on subsequent western philosophy, especially on utilitarianism, logical positivism, William James, the philosophy of science, early analytic philosophy, cognitive philosophy, theology and other movements and thinkers. In addition, according to philosopher Jerry Fodor, Hume's Treatise is "the founding document of cognitive science". Hume engaged with contemporary intellectual luminaries such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, James Boswell, and Adam Smith (who acknowledged Hume's influence on his economics and political philosophy). Immanuel Kant credited Hume with awakening him from "dogmatic slumbers".

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

For whatever reason I've always liked reading about "natural religion"- the project of using reason and our experience of the natural world to establish facts about theology. Whether it's Pascal:

All appearance indicates neither a total exclusion nor a manifest presence of divinity, but the presence of a God who hides Himself. Everything bears this character.

or Shaftesbury:

If the mere will, decree or law of God be said absolutely to constitute right and wrong, then are these latter words of no significance at all. For thus, if each part of a contradiction were affirmed for truth by the Supreme Power, they would consequently become true.

and whether or not it goes anywhere, there's something fun about the journey. Here's Hume agreeing with me:

... opposing one species of superstition to another, set them a quarreling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape,
into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy.

As an aside, I always liked that Hume was widely known as a happy and friendly guy. It makes me want to know what his philosophy was about more. His attitude towards philosophy is so interested but also so humble:

we always render our principles the more general and comprehensive; and that what we call philosophy is nothing but a more regular and methodical operation of the same kind

To get to the point, Hume ends up applying a modest version of the argument from design.

If the whole of natural theology, as some people seem to maintain, resolves itself into one simple, though somewhat ambiguous, at least undefined proposition, that the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence.

What was most interesting to me are a) what Hume thought was at stake here and b) the standards of evidence Hume wanted to use to get here.

What was at stake? Hume has his interlocutors, the theist and the skeptic, both ultimately agree on a major point. They both think the universe has a Prime Mover, since they can't help but assent to the Principle of Sufficient Reason. If we call the Prime Mover God, then pragmatically speaking, the only *difference between the ideas* of the theist and the skeptic is the nature of the deity. More specifically, it's about how much to anthropomorphize the Prime Mover. I love this sort of deflation of a debate on pragmatic grounds.

Hume's pragmatism is most on display when he criticizes the ontological argument.

It will still be possible for us, at any time, to conceive the non-existence of what we formerly conceived to exist; nor can the mind ever lie under a necessity of supposing any object to remain always in being; in the same manner as we lie under a necessity of always conceiving twice two to be four. The words, therefore, necessary existence, have no meaning; or, which is the same thing, none that is consistent.

He attacks not the truth of the words' meaning, but rather their ability to carry any determinate, intelligible, practical significance to humans at all. It's not that the world isn't the type of thing that could support a "necessary existent"; it's that *humans aren't the type of thing that can imagine a consistent meaning for those words*. I love this kind of move. It becomes less about what's true and more about what belief we could reasonably land on- I think this is just such an advanced philosophy for its time, and it sounds a lot like later thinkers like C.S. Peirce.

So what were the standards of evidence that Hume thought appropriate? Hume thought that reasoning about matters of fact could only properly done by inference from experience:

Where that reason is properly analysed, that it is nothing but a species of experience

Why is this? Here he is sounding adjacent to Quine talking about the reliance of all human thought on a web of belief:

Were a man to abstract from everything which he knows or has seen, he would be altogether incapable, merely from his own ideas, to determine what kind of scene the universe must be, or to give the preference to one state or situation of things above another. For as nothing, which he clearly conceives, could be esteemed impossible or implying a contradiction, every chimera of his fancy would be upon an equal footing; nor could he assign any just reason, why he adheres to one idea or system, and rejects the others, which are equally possible.
Again; after he opens his eyes, and contemplates the world, as i really is, it would be impossible for him, at first, to assign the cause of any one event; much less, of the whole of things or of the universe. He might set his fancy a-rambling; and she might bring him in an infinite variety of reports and representations. These would all be possible; but being all equally possible, he would never, of himself, give a satisfactory account for his preferring one of them to the rest. Experience alone can point out to him the true cause of any phenomenon.

Compare that vision with Quine:

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.

Without experience, our thought is like a field of force without boundary conditions: completely underdetermined and open to "fancy a-rambling". For Hume, this comes from the simple observation that we seem to have more freedom in our ideas than in our impressions.

So repeatedly, Hume points to everyday experience and extrapolates them arguments about God. The argument from design is one example; every time you see an intricate machine, there was a human creator. But there are other examples of the application of this reasoning. Before he has his interlocuters agree about the Prime Mover, he considers the idea of an infinite chain of causes, itself uncaused.

But this supposes, said Demea, that matter can acquire motion, with-
out any voluntary agent or first mover.
And where is the difficulty, replied Philo, of that supposition? Every
event, before experience, is equally difficult and incomprehensible; and
every event, after experience, is equally easy and intelligible.

The point is that we have no experience of either an uncaused cause or an infinite chain of causes, so the two ideas are equally weird. There's no reason *arising from experience* that can help us differentiate between these two theories. I've seen this reasoning applied to argue for the possibility of causal loops in time travel- empirically speaking it's not actually weirder than other ideas we have about e.g. the beginning of time.

At the end of the day, I find Hume's more limited formulation of the argument from design somewhat compelling. Assuming a Prime Mover, you might be able to assign some qualities to it by scientific inquiry. For example, the Prime Mover might be the universe itself, in a sort of pantheistic gloss.

The world, therefore, I infer, is an animal, and the deity is the SOUL of the world, actuating it, and actuated by it.

It's not that much of a stretch, I find, to imagine a complicated structure like the universe might have some kind of emergent consciousness to it the same way that the human brain does. The moral of the story, though, is that *if there is anything to find out about the nature of this thing*, then our inquiry into it is going to resemble naturalistic, scientific inquiry, not fanciful speculation from the armchair or outright fideism. And that's what I like so much about Hume's thought.

One last thing: I also love it when Hume talks about human nature because he sounds so much like Montaigne. Here he is criticizing skeptical philosophers for not being able to live up to their philosophy:

it is impossible for him to persevere in this total scepticism, or make it appear in his conduct for a few hours. External objects press in upon him: Passions solicit him: His philosophical melancholy dissipates; and even the utmost violence upon his own temper will not be able, during any time, to preserve the poor appearance of scepticism. And for what reason impose on himself such a violence? This is a point in which it will be impossible for him ever to satisfy himself, consistent with his sceptical principles... But how shall he support this enthusiasm itself? The bent of his mind relaxes, and cannot be recalled at pleasure: Avocations lead him astray: Misfortunes attack him unawares: And the philosopher sinks by degrees into the plebeian.

Philosophy isn't an activity that occurs in the logical space of reasons alone. It's an activity pursued by emotional, inconstant humans who have their own purposes and whose reason doesn't necessarily hook into the contours of the world. But it's still fun to try.

[Thomasso · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a classic and I wished I had read it many years ago. Was Kant a Prussian Hume, as Hamann once remarked?

[Ruby · Rating 4 out of 5]

reread for work