Our ideas reach no farther than our experience: We have no experience of divine attributes and operations.
— David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part II
Ask any student who the most important figures of early modern philosophy were, and you are likely to hear three names: René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and David Hume. While most will point to Kant as the final philosopher of the Enlightenment responsible for sewing the rift between Cartesian rationalists and British empiricists, it was Hume whose writings so disturbed Kant that he would go on to write his Critique of Pure Reason. No one was more central to the development of philosophical skepticism as Hume. His unwavering attacks on causality, induction, and moral tradition tore down the fabric of rationalism, earning him many followers and many more critics.
But by far the most controversial works of Hume’s career were those dealing with religion. Protesters all over Europe attempted to destroy his livelihood with accusations of atheism and heresy. Hume’s skepticism threatened all of his age’s superstitious attitudes, from the divinity of nature, to the existence of miracles, and even the sanctity of life. However, even he was cautious enough not to publish his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in his lifetime. As difficult as that decision was for him, Hume’s destruction of the teleological argument and criticism of all anthropomorphic conceptions of God would have been enough to end a hundred careers, discrediting all of the work he had accomplished over the years. So, he had it released after his death. The refusal of his equally accomplished friend, Adam Smith, to have anything to do with the work’s publication is testimony enough to how dangerous it was.
Hume’s Dialogues are written in the style of Plato, featuring three characters (Demea, Philo, and Cleanthes) who are engaged in argument with one another. This form is well suited to the nature of the text’s criticism, as it allows Hume to escape some level of scrutiny by offering a variety of opinions and not claiming any as his own. It also forces the reader (and himself, I suspect) to evaluate the questions posed from the different mindsets demonstrated by each interlocutor.
The characters begin their tenuous discussion of religion by agreeing that it does "not [concern] the being but the nature of God" (13). Whether they remain within those confines is a matter we will address later. But Demea sets the stage for the coming argument by saying that God, in his infinite perfection, surpasses all human understanding. Philo agrees, but makes the clarification that because "all perfection is entirely relative," human beings could not hope to define God by their narrow conception of it. Cleanthes expresses disagreement by recounting the argument from design (also called the teleological argument), saying,
"Look round the world; Contemplate the whole and every part of it: You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines... All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy which ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the production of human contrivance... Since therefore the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble, and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man, though possessed of much larger faculties" (15).
Most of the Dialogues deal with this argument in one form or another, so we will have no need to restate it as many times as Cleanthes does. He does not claim that human beings have the capacity to understand anything specific about God, but he also does not subscribe to the "mystic" beliefs of Philo and Demea (28). Cleanthes merely presents forth some general inferences that he believes are proven by how conveniently the world functions: that God is an intelligent designer of the universe, and that his mind is similar, though infinitely greater, than that of human beings who build machines.
Philo attacks this reasoning, saying that the whole of Cleanthes' argument rests on a false analogy. Though human beings are able to build boats and compasses, worldbuilding is a rarer hobby. How could we grasp what the creation of the universe consists of? How can we possibly relate it to any of those puny machines our limited minds can build? What basis do we have to suppose any great intelligence, much less one similar to man, is responsible for such a feat? Can we observe the whole of the universe, make statements about something we fail to even grasp in its totality? Philo argues,
"After having experienced the circulation of the blood in human creatures, we make no doubt that it takes place in Titius and Maevius; but from its circulation in frogs and fishes it is only a presumption, though a strong one, from an analogy that it takes place in men and other animals. The analogical reasoning is much weaker when we infer the circulation of the sap in vegetables from our experience that the blood circulates in animals" (16).
Here, Philo illustrates a general rule that rests behind his skepticism: the more divorced phenomena are from experience, the less certain our knowledge about them becomes. It is easy to assume the cause of something when that interaction has been demonstrated to us in many circumstances, but our assumption is much weaker if we try to assign it to something very different of far greater magnitude. We can fathom the construction of a playground and the cause of that phenomenon, but we cannot say the same about the creation of the universe.
Moreover, Philo denies the logical necessity of design, arguing that while thought found in humans and animals is only one of many principles by which the universe operates, there are infinitely more that we could arbitrarily say gave birth to it. He asks, "why select so minute, so weak, so bounded a principle as the reason and design of animals is found to be upon this planet? What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call ‘thought’, that we must thus make it the model of the whole universe?" (19). When two animals mate, they do not "design" their offspring. It is made up of a chaotic combination of genetics, environment, and numerous other factors. Yet the inner workings of it are complex and self-sustaining. Why couldn't a sustaining universe spring from chaos in a similar way? Why assert that its functions must be constructed?
Philo's argument rests on Hume's empiricist belief that "when two species of objects have always been observed to be conjoined together, I can infer, by custom, the existence of one wherever I see the existence of the other" (20-21). Here is where we will make a few distinctions Hume does not assert that reality only consists of what we can see, feel, hear, etc., nor does he argue that our senses cannot be deceptive. What he means to say is that when we have had greater direct contact with certain phenomena, their validity is more easily determined and possesses more certainty (but not total certainty). For example, if I see a painting, I may infer the existence of an artist. Why? Because I am directly acquainted through my senses with the idea that artists create paintings. However, I cannot take the universe and assert the existence of a creator. I have no idea what went about with the creation of the universe, what a "creator" would even be, what (if anything) steered the universe into its current state. This is not to completely deny the design hypothesis. There may very well have been a designer, and we may be a result of his careful planning. But, unlike the existence of an artist for a painting, we have no reliable way of confirming or denying that. It is simply too far divorced from our experience and our reality.
While all of this seems entirely reasonable today, it was truly dangerous to have criticized religion so harshly in the 18th century. Hume was ahead of his time, and even remains ahead of ours in a few ways. Having glanced at his work to a sufficient degree, we will now move on to a second philosopher unafraid to live dangerously. Someone who wasn’t just ahead of his time, but ushered in a new one.
Hume, David. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Edited by Richard H Popkin. 2nd ed.
Hackett Publishing Company, 1998.
