In the final section of Hume’s 1779 Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1947, hereafter DNR), Philo, the character who is widely believed to speak for Hume, claims that the dispute between theists and atheists is merely verbal. In other words, he denies that there is any genuine disagreement between atheists and theists. At most, he claims, theists and atheists have religious beliefs that differ in degree, rather than in kind. It is, of course, hard to see how this could possibly be right: surely there is more than a verbal dispute between someone who believes that God exists and someone who believes that there is no God. How could two beliefs be more flatly and plainly opposed than these?
Philo claims that the dispute between theists and atheists is merely verbal because it concerns “the degrees of any quality or circumstance” (DNR 12.7 217).1 He explains: “Men may argue to all eternity, whether Hannibal be a great, or a very great, or a superlatively great man, what degree of beauty Cleopatra possessed, what epithet of praise Livy or Thucydides is entitled to, without bringing the controversy to any determination” (DNR 12.7 217). Similarly, he suggests, the dispute between theists and atheists is about whether the cause of order in the universe is very much like a human mind or intelligence or very little like a human mind or intelligence. Philo argues:
One reason why Philo’s claim is puzzling is that it is hard to know whether it is intended sincerely, and, therefore, whether it really represents Hume’s views. For one thing, Philo’s remark occurs just after what is widely known as Philo’s Reversal, which comes at the start of the concluding section of the Dialogues. After spending much of the Dialogues engaged in a relentless attack on the evidential force of the argument from design for the existence of God, Philo suddenly seems to change directions. He now proclaims:
Commentators disagree about what to make of remarks like these, and views range from treating them as sincere and expressing Hume’s considered view to dismissing them as thoroughly ironic.
How seriously one takes the remarks about the dispute between theists and atheists being merely verbal depends at least in part on how one understands Philo’s Reversal. This is because the claim that the dispute between theists and atheists is merely verbal seems to depend immediately on Philo’s sudden insistence that the natural world does provide some evidence that the cause of order in the universe bears some, perhaps remote, analogy to a human mind. It is because Philo claims that atheists and theists agree that there is some degree of probability that there is some analogy between the cause of order in the universe and a human mind that their dispute is merely about the degree of a quality. In particular, their disagreement is about just how close or remote the analogy is.
Philo’s claim is puzzling, though, for other reasons as well. First, why should disputes about the degrees of a quality be merely verbal? A dispute about whether Cleopatra was beautiful, very beautiful, or extremely beautiful is a dispute about what language most aptly describes her beauty, but it needn’t be merely verbal. The subjects to such a dispute could genuinely disagree about just how beautiful she was. Similarly, surely someone who thinks that the analogy between the cause of order in the universe and a human mind is very close disagrees genuinely with someone who claims that the analogy is very remote, and not merely about what language best describes the cause of order in the universe.
Finally, the atheist and the theist also disagree about how probable it is that the cause of order in the universe bears some analogy to a mind. What the theist takes to be very probable, the atheist takes to be much less probable. Hume seems to hold that this is another disagreement about the degree of a quality – in this case, the degree of probability. One possibility is that Philo assumes that the degree of probability and the degree of resemblance are not independent but systematically related. Both the atheist and the theist ought to allow that as the degree of resemblance decreases the probability that there is this degree of resemblance goes up.
What should we make of all this? It is tempting to begin a discussion of Hume and atheism by asking whether Hume was an atheist or an agnostic, or perhaps even some kind of theist. However, approaching the topic in this way risks overlooking some of Hume’s more provocative and significant contributions to the philosophy of religion. Instead, we should start by considering what Hume thinks theism and atheism are: what makes one a theist or an atheist, and what is the significance of the difference between theism and atheism? One result of this investigation is that Hume does not view the distinction between theism and atheism as the, or perhaps even a, fundamental division in people’s attitudes toward religion. Hume has a quite different way of thinking about religious attitudes, one that is perhaps unfamiliar to us, and one which, as we’ll see, tends to emphasize different aspects of religion and religious experience.
This chapter has four parts. In the first, we consider various ways that Hume seems to distinguish between theism and atheism. I argue that we can best appreciate Hume’s contribution to the philosophy of religion by recognizing in his work a range of forms of theism, rather than a sharp divide between theism and atheism. In the second part, we consider what Hume means by the phrase “true religion” and consider what Hume’s attitude toward true religion is. In the third part, we consider Hume’s position on the question of whether we have any evidence for the existence of a benevolent or morally good God, and I argue that Hume takes a harder line on the question of whether there is a moral God than he does on the question of whether there is a God with something resembling human intelligence. In the final part, we consider Hume’s famous argument concerning miracles, with a particular focus on the relevance of this argument to theism.
Theism vs. Atheism
Philo’s claim that the disagreement between theists and atheists is merely verbal presupposes that theism and atheism are both essentially tied to questions of cosmology. The dispute, whether merely verbal or not, is about the nature of the cause of the universe. This can be contrasted with religious belief in general. In the Natural History of Religion (NHR), Hume describes religious belief as the belief in “invisible, intelligent power” (NHR 2.1 37). But one can believe in such power, or powers, without having any views about cosmology. In fact, Hume refers to some polytheists as “superstitious atheists”, since they believe in gods – invisible, intelligent powers – but have no views about cosmology at all and “acknowledge no being, that corresponds to our idea of a deity” (NHR 2.4 44). Hume considers such polytheists to be atheists because they simply have never given any thought to the origins of the universe.
Theism, for Hume, then, is essentially a view about the origin or cause of the universe. One might think that a theist, for Hume, is someone who holds that the cause of the universe is a necessary being with the traditional divine attributes of omniscience, omnipotence, and perfect benevolence. However, there is good reason to think that this is not Hume’s view. For starters, in the Dialogues, Cleanthes, who defends the argument from design, gives up quite easily on the view that the divine attributes are infinite or perfect (DNR 11.1 203). He also denies that the deity is absolutely simple (DNR 4.3 159), and he argues that the claim that anything, including the deity, exists necessarily is incoherent (DNR 9.6 189). Nevertheless, there seems little doubt that Cleanthes is, i...
