The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

by Ben Shapiro

The final step away from Judeo-Christian ethical monotheism and Greek teleology and toward outright atheism came courtesy of the jolly British empiricist David Hume (1711–1776). Like Hobbes and Spinoza before him, Hume discounted the possibility of miracles—he said that the laws of nature speak to us more frequently than any human testimony, and therefore the evidence for miracles was annihilated. He even argued that polytheism was as rational as monotheism. He also attempted to demolish classical proofs of God’s existence. He took on the cosmological argument by stating that it is quite possible for something to come from nothing, so the notion of an Unmoved Mover was unnecessary; he also attacked the idea that order requires design (he says that an acorn can grow an oak tree without design, for example). Most of all, Hume rejected the idea of