Book Review: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume

Following the classical format of Plato and other ancient philosophers, David Hume presents his arguments around natural religion as a dialogue with several characters discussing the topic from their points of view. Natural religion is distinguished from revealed religion by Hume and most others. Revealed religion is based on revelation, either Biblical or from another religious tradition. Natural religion is what humans can discover about the divine through reason and reflection about the world around us. The characters in this dialogue take the existence of God as a given. What they discuss is the nature of the Divine Being. 

The characters in the dialogue represent various positions. Demea is an orthodox rationalist who lets his faith guide his reasoning and suppositions about God. Philo is a skeptical rationalist who holds a very high standard for what can and cannot be said about God. He gives way on very few points. In between is Cleanthes, a more philosophical theist who winds up more on the side of Philo than of Demea. Hume's personal leanings are not explicitly stated in the dialogue, but based on his other works he is much more like Philo than the other two. 

Philo argues against concepts like the rational order of the universe, saying the comparison to human creation of objects is a superficial parallel. A biological model, with the universe growing like it was a plant or animal, seems just as likely as a constructed universe, with the universe built like it was a machine. Most human attributes that are transferred to the divine nature also seem unlikely and unworthy of a divine being. Infinity is also a concept that has no real meaning for Philo, it being so far from human experience and the natures of the universe and of the things within it. Philo's point of view is the most prominent, most sympathetic in the text. Demea storms off at the end, leaving Philo and Cleanthes to summarize and finalize the conversation.

Hume's arguments are all couched from a point of view that focuses on the limits of human knowing, on a type of pessimistic epistemology (theory of knowing) that sets very sharp limits on what can be known. It's no surprise that the Divine has hardly any knowable attributes. The only surprise is that the interlocutors even agree on the existence of God when many of the arguments refuted by Philo are ones used to prove His existence (like well-ordered nature of the universe). Historically, Hume claimed he was a Christian though most people who knew him personally thought he was an atheist.

Mildly recommended--Hume gives solid reasoning but premises that are hard to agree with.

Book Review: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and A Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend in Edinburgh by David Hume

David Hume is an eighteenth-century English philosopher who had a more skeptical outlook. In this short work from later in his life, he writes about various issues around what humans know and how we know those things. He starts out with a distinction between moral philosophy and natural philosophy. Natural philosophy is what we would call today "the sciences" and is focused more on abstract elements like mathematics and geometry. Moral philosophy is about human behavior, but for Hume it also includes politics, history, and anthropology, not just ethics. Moral philosophy is also grounded on experience or factual states and is often less certain than math.

Central to Hume's philosophy is his denial of cause and effect in experience (and thus in everything covered by "moral philosophy"). We assume the sun will rise tomorrow or bread is nourishing because of our repeated experiences. There is nothing absolute or necessary in the idea that the sun will rise tomorrow as there is necessity in the idea that interior angles of a triangle adding up to one hundred and eighty degrees. We know the sun will rise because of a continuity of experience, not because of a cause and effect relationship. Hume applies this reasoning to all of human experience.

He also argues that all ideas come to us through experience or our senses. This position leads him to deny any and all spiritual realities. Miracles cannot happen because they are violations of the laws of nature, which are necessary and cannot be contradicted, like mathematics and geometry. Hume disregards human testimonies to miracles like Jesus's resurrection as unverifiable and prone to error. He goes so far as to deny the knowability of the existence of God because humans can't reason back from an effect, like the created universe, to a cause, like a creator. 

In "A Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend in Edinburgh" Hume gives a defense against criticisms of his theory, focusing mostly on his natural atheism. The arguments he gives try to sidestep the issue by talking about different ways of arguing and that some arguments still retain their force though they have no basis in experience. It makes for a rather unconvincing shell game.

Hume's style of writing is easy to read. He is very clear and forthright. But he is not convincing. Aristotle defined science as about what happens always or for the most part. Hume seeks an absoluteness that denies the malleability of reality in a search for certitude. This leads him into all sorts of errors.

Not recommended unless you are interested in what Hume had to say as part of the history of philosophy. N.B. I have the first edition of this book which did not include "Hume's Abstract of a Treatise of Human Nature."