Reading Questions & Notes on Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
Read: The whole thing. Okay, so it is long and, as a dialogue, potentially confusing and convoluted (who said what when?). So, give yourself plenty of time to read carefully and critically –make sure you understand the arguments that are being made and how these arguments are being contested and supported (as well as who is supporting/contesting). Below I will give some background that may help understanding the basic point of the text.
Background on Hume: Hume is a skeptic. He takes the basic empiricist framework developed (in particular) by Locke to its logical conclusions –we can have no “certain” knowledge about the world (external or internal) at all. Here is a short version of how this works.
1. All ideas come from impressions (ideas are in fact attenuated impressions –there is no real ontological distinction between them).
2. Impressions are of two sorts: sensation and reflection (external and internal respectively).
3. We cannot have an idea that does not relate directly or indirectly to some impression or another –thus, no ideas of things for which we do not have experience.
4. This gives us a simple criterion for the critical examination of all of our claims to knowledge:
a. If we find an idea that we believe refers to something for which we have no experience, then we are wrong.
b. To understand what an idea really means (i.e. that to which it refers) then we merely analyze that idea into its corresponding impressions.
c. Example: God is an idea we normally believe refers to some being which is outside of our experience (nobody has ever seen God). So, in fact, this cannot be what the idea refers to –since all ideas must come from impressions. To understand the idea of God we must trace out the actual impressions used in (imaginatively) forming this idea.
5. Knowledge is simply a particular combination of ideas (into what we call propositions: “God is Good”, “the sun rises in the east”, “the sum of the squares of the two sides of a right triangle are equal to the square of the hypotenuse”.)
6. There are two kinds of propositions:
a. Relations of Ideas (analytic, certain, and provide no knowledge of the world)
b. Matters of Fact (synthetic, uncertain and provide knowledge of the world)
7. All Matter of Fact propositions are predicated on the relation of cause and effect (this is how we infer from the presence of something in our experience to the existence of something outside of our experience).
8. All knowledge of cause and effect is based on experience (as per proposition one above).
9. We have no direct impression of causal relations (we never experience “cause” per se); hence, the concept or idea of cause must be constructed via imagination.
10. Causal relations are the result of two factors –the experience of the constant conjunction of events in the world of experience, and the habitual belief on the part of people that the future will resemble the past.
11. Hence, all knowledge is based on a habitual belief which is unfounded and hence, all knowledge is ultimately ungrounded and uncertain.
12. Hence, skepticism.
Hume takes this skepticism very seriously –and he applies it most rigorously to religion. Adam Smith wrote about Hume’s final illness and remarked that the only reason Hume wanted to stay alive was to see the elimination of the strange superstition known as Christianity that pervaded the world! It is relatively clear that Hume was an atheist, but there remains some dispute; but, what is clear is that he had no sympathy for religion as such (certainly not the big three Christianity, Judaism, Islam). In fact, after having worked out his basic epistemological framework, Hume’s remaining writings are almost all devoted to the aim of attacking religion in one form or another (he also wrote a six volume history of England and some political works).
On the Dialogue: There are three main characters in the dialogue –Philo, the skeptic, Cleanthes, the natural theologian, and Demea, the dogmatist. When you are reading the dialogue you should note carefully who teams up with who during the debate –the shifting alliances between the cast of characters is, I think, very telling about what Hume’s project is in this text. In the beginning, you will note, the skeptic and the dogmatist seem allied against the “natural theologian”. But this shifts during the course of the discussion. The key here is of course to watch the arguments and discover what the over-all point of this dialogue is.
Cleanthes: natural theologian—offers a posteriori arguments for God’s existence and nature. If Cleanthes is correct, it is possible to develop religion from a rational basis in our experience of the world. Note: this is not a personal or subjective experience of “faith” or whatever, but an experience of an objective or common world, and so it is an experience and reasoning that everyone can share.
Demea: dogmatist, or pure rationalist—offers a priori arguments for God’s existence (very much like Descartes’ arguments, though the particular argument Hume had in mind is offered by Liebniz and Clark). For Demea, we do not need to rely on experience to prove God’s existence and nature; in fact, such reliance undermines belief in God. Rather, we can prove God through the use of pure reason alone, and as a result, base religion in reason alone, and so avoid the potential pitfalls of experience.
Philo: skeptic—attacks all arguments offered to prove that God exists, whether a priori or a posteriori. Philo’s precise position may be difficult to ascertain. However, it seems clear that he believes that reasoning from experience permits some reasonable assertion of the existence of a Deity, but no reasonable basis for religion. This becomes clearer near the end, but is the subject of much debate.
Which one is Hume? Again, a matter of debate—indeed, whether it is even worthwhile asking the question.
Here are some general questions to keep in mind while reading the dialogues:
Author: Thomas Bowen
Oakton Community College
Updated: March 1, 2007