ABSTRACT
Religion has become a serious scientific subject in this century because we have realised that when it is taken very seriously it is potentially dangerous. "Generally speaking," said David Hume, the eighteenth-century philosopher, "the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous". Hume was the most radical of sceptical philosophers; he claimed that inductive reasoning could not be justified logically or cause and effect established. He was writing in a brief historical period of cool reason after the horrors of the thirty-year religious war in Europe and before the French and American Revolutions and the subsequent Napoleonic wars. Hume's radical scepticism was what prompted Kant into embarking on his philosophical journey that led to the German metaphysics of the nineteenth century. Bertrand Russell, committed to science and logic, saw scepticism as the only defence against religion or "a welter of conflicting fanaticisms".
