ABSTRACT
David Hume (1711-76) is generally considered to be the greatest philosopher to have written in English. He is also the most formidable critic of religion in modern times. In his own time his anti-religious opinions caused him real professional damage, in spite of the general recognition of his personal charm and goodness; and the pride that his native Scotland now takes in him as their greatest Enlightenment gure is quite recent. The religious environment into which Hume was born was one in which the national church was dominated by a stern form of Calvinism inculcated during the Reformation by John Knox. Hume seems to have reasoned himself away from this tradition during his adolescent years, and to have been devoid of religious sentiment for the rest of his life. During his student years at Edinburgh University, Hume decided upon a literary career rather than the legal one that his family had wished for him. He went to France for further study, and to write his rst and greatest work, A Treatise of Human Nature, which appeared in London in 1739 and 1740 (Hume 2000). It did not gain as much attention as Hume had hoped, and he famously said that it ‘fell dead-born from the press.’ He did, however, gain from it a reputation as an irreligious and atheistic thinker, even though he had removed material on religion from it before it was published. This reputation prevented him from being appointed to the chair of Ethics and Pneumatical (mental) Philosophy at Edinburgh University in 1745 (Mossner 1970: 153-62). Hume felt he had been the victim of superstitious prejudice, and when his next philosophical work came out, it contained material on religion that he had previously excised from the Treatise. The work in question is the one now known as the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume 1999), and the recycled material is Section X, ‘Of miracles,’ which is still his best-known essay on a religious subject. It is followed by the less well-known but equally important section, ‘Of a particular providence and of a future state’ in which Hume argues that the popular ‘Design’ argument for God’s existence, which alleges that the order of nature revealed by modern science shows our world to be the work of a divine mind, does
not have any more practical implications than a wholly godless naturalism (Hume 1999). In 1755 and 1756 Hume was once more the target of public criticism for his anti-religious views, and there was an attempt to have him publicly censured at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland (Mossner 1970: 336-55). By this time the Edinburgh religious establishment contained a group of more liberal gures, known as the Moderates, who included some of Hume’s closest friends, and the attempt failed. It is important in judging Hume’s detailed intentions to bear in mind that some of his closest associates were clerics, and that he was fully aware of the fact that it was in their urbane hands that Edinburgh became a renowned center of scienti c and literary activity (Sher 1985). They were the representatives of what he was subsequently to refer to as ‘true religion.’ It was they who persuaded Hume not to publish the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, which he had begun at about this time but which did not see print until after his death (Hume 1980). The other major work on religion that Hume did publish, in 1757, was The Natural History of Religion, which is generally agreed to be the rst work of comparative religion in English (Hume 1957). In it Hume turns aside from discussion of philosophical arguments in favor of religious belief to a historical analysis of its origins and psychological sources. Hume is a very systematic thinker. Not only do his views about religion re ect other themes in his philosophical system; they also form a unitary whole within themselves. I shall attempt in what follows to indicate very brie y, rst, those elements in his wider philosophy that are re ected in his philosophy of religion, and then proceed to describe in outline the arguments of his writings on religion, showing as far as I can how they relate to each other (Penelhum 1992).
