J.D. Reiner's Writings

As I study for my comprehensive examinations, I thought that I would make posts from my notes. The first author that I have been studying for my general methods examination is David Hume. I hope that you enjoy it!

The early spirit of natural religion is described very well by the influential Scottish philosopher David Hume. In 1779, his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion were published. To express his ideas, Hume wrote a set of fictional dialogues between three philosophers named Demea, Cleanthes, and Philo. What did he mean by the phrase? Natural religion, according to Hume, is a religious worldview that is based on rationality and empiricism instead of divine revelation. Although reason and science had always been part of religious thinking to some extent, most thinkers considered the revelations of scripture and tradition to be the most important. During the Enlightenment, though, Hume and others decided to see how much religious knowledge we can get without using scripture or tradition. In the dialogues, the three characters debate the merits of natural religion with regard to how it can help us learn about the nature of God.

Demea’s position, which represents religious orthodoxy and mysticism, is a reaction against natural religion. He believes that God’s nature cannot be apprehended by mere reason or observation; rather, God’s nature is only known through faith and mystical experience. Science and philosophy alone will get us nowhere, and worse yet, they can be detrimental to religious life. You might notice that this is a strong statement; indeed, I myself find it a little more fideistic than what many religious thinkers had said in the past. However, I think that Demea’s point, at its best, means something more like this: even though philosophy is compatible with religion, philosophy on its own cannot produce a basis for religion. If we understand him in that way, then we can see why earlier theologians were more than willing to use reason and science to understand and know who God is while also looking at what he has revealed to us.

Like Demea, Cleanthes is also a theist, but he disagrees with the idea that God can only be known through the experience of faith; and so, unlike Demea, he is devoted to the new concept of natural religion. He thinks that something about God can be known from reason alone. His primary argument for this is what we call today the “argument from design.” In human experience, things that have organization tend to have a designer behind them who set them up that way. Cleanthes uses the complexity of the eye as an example. For him, it is almost impossible to look at something as complicated as an eyeball and imagine that there was not someone who designed it with the purpose of providing vision. Therefore, for Cleanthes, revelation is not the only means whereby God can be discovered: natural religion is sufficient.

Unlike Demea and Cleanthes, Philo functions as the skeptic in these dialogues. He is willing to doubt that God can be known either through mysticism or philosophy. He counters Demea’s claim that we can know God only through faith by saying that it can lead to a blind trust in superstitions and a refusal to listen to skeptical arguments even when they make sense. On the other hand, he challenges Cleanthes’ proposal that God can be known through natural religion alone by saying that the argument from design is not logically airtight.

It is easy to imagine that Philo is acting like a contrarian because he does not take very firm positions on many issues, but that is not the point for him. Instead, we might say that his standard of verification is higher than that of both Demea and Cleanthes: it takes a lot of evidence for him to believe something. That may sound impractical, but we must notice that he also says that some amount of pure belief is necessary for practical life too; and, on top of that, he claims that it is good for religious people to have a balance of skepticism and belief. I can hardly help wondering about the extent to which Philo’s own creator, Hume, might have proceeded from that first step and cultivated a Christian faith in his own life.

So, what can we infer about Hume’s own opinions from this text? It is obvious that he clearly valued skepticism; after all, a major focus of the dialogues involve debates about how skeptical someone should be. In writing this book, Hume was essentially taking the role of Philo’s character, although that does not necessarily mean that all of Philo’s positions in the book are the same as Hume’s positions in real life. Maybe what Hume was trying to promote was this: it is often, if not always, better to doubt and question things than to accept them too easily; and that sort of skepticism can be just as much an ally of religion as an enemy.