Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Hume on Religion

David O'Connor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134634095
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

David Hume was the most important British philosopher of the eighteenth century. His Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is a classic text in the philosophy of religion.
Hume on Religion introduces and asseses:
*Hume's life and the background to the Dialogues *the ideas and text of Dialogues *Hume's continuing importance to philosophy.

C h a p t e r 1

Introduction

Hume’s life, his philosophy of religion, and his influence

Life

David Hume was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 26 April 1711, and died there sixty-five years later, on 25 August 1776. In an autobiographical essay, ‘My Own Life’, written shortly before his death, Hume tells us that, on both sides, he came of a ‘good’ family (MOL: 3). The family was related to the earl of Home, although not itself of the aristocracy. The Humes were country gentry, fairly comfortably off, but ‘not rich’ (MOL: 3). Upon their father’s death, in 1713, Hume’s older brother, John, inherited the family estate, while Hume himself and his sister, Katherine, each received a modest annuity. Knowing fom an early age that his inheritance would not be enough to support him, Hume saw that he would need to earn a living, and money was to worry him on and off until he was almost forty.

The family estate, Ninewells, which was not large, was in Berwickshire, near Berwick-on-Tweed, close to the English border. Hume spent much of his childhood there, receiving a good education by tutors hired to teach his brother and himself. As a boy, Hume was well read: ‘I … was seized very early with a passion for literature, which has been the ruling passion of my life, and the great source of my enjoyments’ (MOL: 3). By his own description, he was a sober and industrious boy, with a ‘studious disposition’ (MOL: 3). Hume was raised in the Presbyterian Church, the established Church of Scotland, which, at the time, represented a severe and censorious form of Calvinism. His biographer, E.C. Mossner, tells us that the young Hume was quite religious and that he accepted without question such doctrines as original sin, predestination, and the total depravity of human nature.

Despite this early devotion, Hume lost his faith quite young, either as a student at the University of Edinburgh, 1722 to 1725–6, or shortly thereafter. A few months before his death, Hume told James Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson (1709–84), that ‘he never had entertained any belief in religion since he began to read Locke and Clarke’ (Boswell 1947: 76). That was in his early teens, while enrolled at the University of Edinburgh. It may be a bit of an exaggeration that reading those philosophers – John Locke (1632–1704) and Samuel Clarke (1675–1729) – was the sole or principal cause of Hume’s loss of faith, yet reading them at a time when his religious conviction was wavering undoubtedly both sped and shaped the collapse of his faith. But, possible overstatement notwithstanding, the remark to Boswell also shows us that Hume’s abandonment of religious belief had a pronounced intellectual dimension. Mossner puts the two points together as follows:

it is abundantly clear that the youthful Hume relinquished his religious beliefs gradually over the course of years rather than immediately upon reading Locke and Clarke. And it is also clear that those religious beliefs were relinquished under philosophical pressure – that Hume reasoned himself out of religion.

(Mossner 1954: 64).

There is also an ironic aspect to Hume’s point that it was upon reading Locke and Clarke that he lost his faith, inasmuch as both of those philosophers believed a convincing case could be made out for the existence of a deity. At any rate, in spite of his loss of faith, Hume remained very interested in religion, and, in the words of the Hume scholar, J.C.A. Gaskin, ‘wrote more about religion than about any other single philosophical subject’ (Gaskin 1988: 1).

Hume’s mature attitude to religion was not benign. From his adolescence onwards he had a strong antipathy to the grim and rigid Presbyterianism that had prevailed in Scotland during his youth and in which he had received his own religious upbringing, as well as to Catholicism, which he saw as a superstition (EHU: 51). In addition, he had a lifelong distaste for, and distrust of, what he saw as a mixture of zeal and hypocrisy widespread among the devout, or at least among those professing to be devout. His particular term of disparagement for this phenomenon, borrowed from Locke, was ‘enthusiasm’. In Boswell’s last conversation with Hume, the biographer quotes him to say that, ‘when he heard a man was religious, he concluded he was a rascal, though he had known some instances of very good men being religious’ (Boswell 1947: 76).

In his late teens, with university life already behind him, Hume had an insight that would change his life. It was the concept of a new, comprehensive, and fundamental system of philosophy. The cornerstone of this new system would be Hume’s introduction of ‘the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects,’ as the sub-title of his first book, his Treatise of Human Nature (1739), tells it. In essence, Hume believed he had discovered a radically new way of understanding human nature. As he would develop his theory, first in the Treatise, and then subsequently in the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748), a human being is less a creature of reason than of feeling and habit. It was a theory having the potential to cause an intellectual revolution. For, if true, it would overturn the basis of self-understanding that had prevailed from ancient times, namely, human nature understood as first and foremost rational.

This turn to experimentalism in the human and social sciences – our present-day equivalent of Hume’s ‘moral subjects’ – was modelled on Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) great success the previous century in providing a fundamental and comprehensive experimentalist account of physical nature. It was the opening up to Hume’s imagination of what he called a whole ‘new scene of thought’. In a letter, he later described his vision as follows:

after much study and reflection on this [new medium by which truth might be established], at last, when I was about 18 years of age, there seemed to be opened up to me a whole new scene of thought, which transported me beyond measure, and made me, with an ardour natural to young men, throw up every other pleasure or business to apply entirely to it.

(Mossner 1954: 65)

Presently, we will see something of the Newtonian influence on Hume’s thinking in the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion.

Hume entertained very high hopes for his Treatise of Human Nature, expecting it would both be well received and revolutionize philosophical thinking. The expectation that it would, indeed that it could, be both of those things is, perhaps, testimony to some naïveté on Hume’s part, for intellectually revolutionary works are rarely welcomed by those whose thinking they deem, or show, to be obsolete. His expectations so high, the book’s reception was a bitter disappointment. In a passage that is often quoted, Hume described the book’s initial impact this way: ‘Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the press; without reaching such distinction, as even to excite a murmur among the zealots’ (MOL: 4).

Indeed, in one respect, response to the book was even worse than that. Not only did it not change the philosophical outlook of its readers at the time, but, six years after publication, it was the basis for significant harm to its author’s interests.

That came about as follows. In 1745, Hume was a candidate for a professorship of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. But he was accused by the principal of the university, William Wishart, also professor of divinity there, of heresy, scepticism, and atheism, charges based on Wishart’s reading of the Treatise. To his very great disappointment, Hume did not get the job. Six years later, in 1751, Hume would try again for a professorship, this time of logic at Glasgow University, but he was denied then too. Thus it was that Scotland’s greatest philosopher never succeeded in winning appointment to a university professorship in his own country, or, for that matter, anywhere else.

Hume had a second career as a diplomat and government official, in addition to his life of scholarship. This began in 1746, not long after his rejection at the University of Edinburgh, when he was offered, and quickly accepted, the post of secretary to General St Clair who, at the time, was planning a military expedition to the eastern provinces of Canada. Hume spent the next three years as a diplomat in General St Clair’s service, first in his military campaign in France, the plan to fight against French forces in Canada having been called off, and then in a diplomatic mission in Italy. One effect of Hume’s second career was to solve his hitherto chronic financial problem. Returning to England in 1748, he pronounced himself financially secure: ‘my appointments, with my frugality, had made me reach a fortune, which I called independent, though most of my friends were inclined to smile when I said so: in short I was now master of near a thousand pound’ (Mossner 1954: 220). Hume’s second career thus aided his first in an important respect, for he was now free, at the age of thirty-seven, to devote himself to a life of reading and study, without worrying over-much about how to maintain a sufficient income.

In the early 1750s, Hume circulated portions of his recently-drafted Dialogues concerning Natural Religion among his friends, and was widely advised in strong terms to suppress the book. Fearing the effect upon his life and reputation of an anticipated hostile reaction to the book, Hume took the advice. He returned to the manuscript ten years later in 1761, and revised it again in 1776, shortly before his death. Although withheld from publication for prudential reasons, Hume was eager that his Dialogues appear in print, and to that end he specified in his will that, within two years of his death, the book must be published. It was eventually guided into print by Hume’s nephew and namesake, as both Hume’s long-time publisher, William Strahan, and his long-time friend, Adam Smith (1723–90), the famous economic theorist, were, for their own reasons of prudence, reluctant to arrange for publication.

In the early 1760s, approximately fifteen years after his diplomatic service on the staff of General St Clair, Hume returned to that second career. For three years, until 1766, he served as secretary to the British Embassy in Paris, a period in which he enjoyed many contacts with French intellectuals, notable among them Voltaire (1694–1778) and Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–78). Hume returned to London in 1766 to be Under Secretary of State, a post he held for two years. Recalling his rejection, twenty years before, for a professorship at the University of Edinburgh, and recalling especially the reasons for that rejection, we may see a measure of poetic justice in his appointment now to be Under Secretary of State, for among Hume’s responsibilities was appointment and promotion of church authorities in Scotland. In 1768 Hume retired to Scotland, famous, prosperous, his ambition to be a man of letters and, in that respect, of ‘reputation’, realized.

What kind of person was David Hume? By all contemporary accounts, his mind was quick, nimble, sharp and subtle, traits that at first, apparently, struck many as surprising. This was because, in body, by early middle age, he had become heavy and fat, with a face and eyes that, in repose, were dull and lifeless. For, then as now, we tend to associate sharpness of mind with sharpness of features, and clumsiness of body with that of mind. Hume was gregarious, funny, witty, by every account a splendid conversationalist, and he was popular among his friends and acquaintances. He enjoyed good conversation, the company of both sexes (although he never married), food, and wine. Hume described himself as, ‘a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions’ (MOL: 9). Adam Smith, in a letter written shortly after Hume’s death, described him this way,

his temper, indeed, seemed to be more happily balanced … than that perhaps of any other man I have ever known … I have always considered him … as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.

(Smith 1947: 247–8)

Hume’s demeanour and behaviour in the months before his death are a good illustration of Adam Smith’s description. In the first half of 1776, suffering greatly from colitis, and possibly cancer, Hume knew that he would not live long. Despite that, Boswell detected in him no terror of death, no trace of the fear of the unknown that, twenty years earlier, in his Natural History of Religion (1757), Hume had identified as a chief source of religious belief. In Boswell’s words, ‘it surprised me to find him talking of different matters with a tranquility of mind and a clearness of head which few men possess at any time’ (Boswell 1947: 78). In short, it seems that, in both good times and bad, Hume embodied many of the pagan virtues he so admired; temperance, prudence, courage, rectitude untied to any kind of supernaturalism, sympathy, and cheerfulness in the face of the inevitable. Consistent with this, at the end of his life no less than before, Hume appears to have had none of the grim joylessness of the strict Presbyterianism in which he was raised.

Hume on religion

Philosopher, historian, psychologist, anthropologist of religion

It is principally for its seminal contributions to the philosophy of religion that Hume’s thinking on religious topics occupies an important place in the world of ideas today. His most extensive philosophical examination of fundamental religious ideas occurs in the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, thus making that book his major contribution to the philosophy of religion. But the Dialogues is not Hume’s only philosophical work on the subject of religion. In addition, two famous sections of his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, published just three years before the first draft of the Dialogues in 1751, deal with important topics in the philosophy of religion and one of them anticipates aspects of Hume’s thinking in the Dialogues. Furthermore, several of Hume’s essays, ‘Of Suicide’ and ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’, for instance, also deal philosophically with religious questions.

But Hume’s philosophical writings on religion do not comprise the whole of his work on the topic. For he was also a psychologist, anthropologist and historian of religion, as his book, The Natural History of Religion (1757), clearly shows. Furthermore, his six-volume History of England (1754–62) emphasizes the role of religion at important points in English history. Parenthetically, Hume was more famous in his own time for that History of England than for any of his philosophical books, and it was to remain the standard work in its field until well into the nineteenth century.

The principal topic in The Natural History of Religion is the origin of religious belief, with Hume’s approach combining history, psychology, and anthropology, as I said. Essentially his thinking is that the monotheistic religions such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all derive from polytheistic religions (NHR: 135, 159). The effect was to suggest, controversially, that the single-deity religions are further removed from original religious feeling than those countenancing multiple gods, the pagan religions of ancient Greece and Rome, for instance. In addition to that historical claim about the origins of religion, in the same book Hume makes a controversial psychological point on the subject. It is that religious belief, whether polytheistic or monotheistic, traces in the end to dread of the unknown (NHR: 176), a point he repeats in the Dialogues (DNR: 128). It is a point in which we may see a foreshadow of an idea that would be made famous over a century later by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939).

From time to time in this study of the Dialogues, we will see that Hume’s other writings in the philosophy of religion, and also his non-philosophical writings on the subject, shed a useful sidelight on aspects of his thinking in the Dialogues. But, by and large, it is the Dialogues alone and in its own right that we will concentrate on here.

Hume’s philosophy of religion

The main theme in Hume’s philosophy of religion is the relationship between faith and reason. Is religious belief supported by reason, and, if it is, how well? Or does the weight of evidence go against it? And if it does, how decisively? Or is the subject matter of religious belief beyond the scope of reason altogether? Due largely to Hume’s influence, these questions shape philosophy of religion to this day.

Basic features of Hume’s philosophy of religion: evidentialism, deism, irony, and scepticism

Evidentialism

There is an important assumption in Hume’s philosophical thinking on religion. It is that religious belief is rational if and only if there is sufficient evidence to support it, and that, otherwise, it is not. In a more general form – any belief is rational only in direct proportion to the balance of evidence in its favour – the assumption is fundamental in Hume’s approach to all philosophical inquiry. He puts the point best himself: ‘A wise man … proportions his belief to the evidence’ (EHU: 11...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• A note on the edition of the Dialogues used
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: Hume’s life, his philosophy of religion, and his influence
• 2. An overview of the Dialogues
• 3. The scope and legitimacy of natural religion: (Prologue, and Dialogues, Part I)
• 4. Cleanthes’ first design argument: (Dialogues, Part II)
• 5. Cleanthes’ second design argument: The ‘irregular’ argument (Dialogues, Part III)
• 6. ‘A mind like the human’: (Dialogues, Parts IV and V)
• 7. Naturalism and scepticism: (Dialogues, Parts VI, VII, and VIII)
• 8. Further weakening of natural religion: (Dialogues, Part IX)
• 9. The problem of evil: (Dialogues, Parts X and XI)
• 10. ‘True religion’: (Dialogues, Part XII)
• Afterword: Where is Hume in Hume’s Dialogues?
• Bibliography
• Index