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David Hume is the greatest and also one of the most provocative philosophers to have written in the English language. No philosopher is more important for his careful, critical, and deeply perceptive examination of the grounds for belief in divine powers and for his sceptical accounts of thecauses and consequences of religious belief, expressed most powerfully in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion.The Dialogues ask if belief in God can be inferred from the nature of the universe or whether it is even consistent with what we know about the universe. The Natural History of Religion investigates the origins of belief, and follows its development from harmless polytheism to dogmatic monotheism.Together they constitute the most formidable attack upon the rationality of religious belief ever mounted by a philosopher.This edition also includes Section XI of The Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and a letter concerning the Dialogues, as well as particularly helpful critical apparatus and abstracts of the main texts, enabling the reader to locate or relocate key topics.… (more)
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Apparently, religious issues were very touchy subjects at the time, and so his disquisition takes the form of a dialogue in which the characters express opinions (some of which are very antithetical to established religion) without revealing the author’s personal beliefs.
One of the characters, Philo, a skeptic, pretty articulately demolishes the argument for God’s existence based on the apparent design of the universe. He shows how the design of a complicated device like an ocean-going ship arises not from the acts of the individual workmen who build the ship, but rather from years of tinkering with previous designs. From that analogy, he argues that it is just as plausible to infer that the universe was designed by many designers (gods, if you will) as it is to infer that there was a single all powerful designer, the Christian god. In explaining that many causes could have contributed to the state of the universe, he anticipates, but does not quite articulate, the modern concept of emergence of complex order from simple phenomena.
Implicit in Philo’s argument is that our belief that there must be a cause for every effect or condition in the universe is an empirical observation, not a requirement of logic. Although he does not explicitly state so in this book, Hume its known to have believed that the existence of the universe may not require or be subject to the same kind of cause we observe in changes in the various states of the universe.
Philo also argues that the persistence of evil in the world militates against the existence of a God who is all-good and omnipotent.
The other two characters, Cleanthes and Demea, raise various arguments for belief, but are not as cogent as Philo.
Nonetheless, in the end, Philo seems to reverse course and asserts, “To be a philosophical skeptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential step towards being a sound, believing Christian.” Holy Cow!! I suppose one might guess that Hume was merely trying to avoid censure from religious authorities. On the other hand, at least one commentator, Richard Popkin, a well known academic philosopher, opines that Hume may have been trying to be ironic, showing the reader how silly religious belief was. Based on my other readings by and about Hume, I tend to think Popkin got it right.
This book is an excellent and important element of the Western Canon of philosophy. It is sometimes heavy going because 18th century diction tends to be ponderous to the modern reader. Nonetheless, I think it is worth the struggle for anyone interested in the development of religious skepticism.
(JAB)
But... commas. The punctuation and write-style are dated and very difficult to read at times. A truly modern rendition of the text risks changing some meaning, but at the benefit of making the ideas so much more clear.
4 stars for the work, but 3 stars for the lack of clarity of reading in the (nearly) original.