Journal of the History of Philosophy

Hume's Critique of Religion J. C. A. GASKIN A NUMBER OF ARTICLESHAVEAPPEAREDin recent years calculated to modify the traditional picture of Hume as the Great Sceptic in matters of religion. It has, for example, been said that "David Hume has left his readers to wonder about his personal convictions on the great question of religion''1 and the same writer has questioned Kemp Smith's identification of Hume with the sceptic Philo in the Dialogues. 2 It has also been said that "there is no context in which Hume ever challenges the argument from design" and that "the most important point made in the Dialogues is that religion is not the basis of morality.''3 In this article I shall challenge these views as they are presented in articles by Noxon and Capaldi (see fnn. 1 and 3) and I shall seek to reaffirm that Hume is almost wholly critical of almost every aspect of religion. In particuar I shall argue the folowing three reated points: I. That in the Dialogues Philo more than any other character speaks for Hume and that Philo's (Hume's) acceptance, if such it can be called, of the design argument is so limited and qualified that it is of almost no significance as a religious affirmation. II. That while it is true that Hume thinks religion is not the basis of morality, this underestimates the hostility of his position. He thinks that religion as it has actually shown itself in history is positively detrimental to both social morality and individual happiness. III. That many of Hume's "personal convictions on the great questions of religion" can be clearly established and all of them are sceptical or hostile. The major difficultyin finding out whether Hume believed in a God (and if so, what sort of a God) is that he repeatedly prefaces or concludes his remarks with an affirmation of belief while his remarks themselves are critical and destructive. This divergence between what he affirms and what he argues has given rise to a number of different conjectures concerning his real views on religion. The most enduring of these is that Hume is an agnostic who could not be candid about his agnosticism because of the pressure upon him of orthodox eighteenth-century public opinion. That such pressure existed there can be no doubt and that some of Hume's avowals (e.g., at the end of the essay "Of the Immortality of the Soul") are disingenuous concessions to public opinion 1 James Noxon, "Hume's Agnosticism," The Philosophical Review (1964); reprinted in Hume: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. V. C. ChappeU (New York, 1966). Some of the ideas in this article reappear in Noxon's recent book, Hume's Philosophical Development. 2 Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. N. Kemp Smith, 2rid ed. (Edinburgh, 1947). This edition, with the same pagination, is reprinted in the U.S.A. by Bobbs-MerriU in the Library of Liberal Arts. Referred to as Dialogues followed by the page number. a Nicholas Capaldi, "Hume's Philosophy of Religion," International Journal for Philosophy of Religion (1970). [301] 302 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY is more than probable. But there are also occasions when Hume admitted to "some belief" in private contexts in which public opinion could not have influenced him, and there is something unsatisfactory about saying that repeated avowals made in public and private throughout a man's life are nothing but pious pretences. These same objections lie in the way of A. E. Taylor's conjecture4 that Hume is so lacking in any serious commitment either way that he quite happily argues sceptically whenever scepticism will give him literary notoriety and then professes belief whenever it suits him to do so. A more recent thesis, developed by R. J. Butler5 and adopted by Noxon (see (a) below), is that Hume considers that belief in God (via the design argumen0 is an "original instinct" or "natural belief" which survives, like belief in an external world, when its rational foundations are destroyed. I have already challenged this thesis in another article6 and argued that for Hume belief in God is not a natural belief but a weak, rational possibility...