Dialogues and Natural History of Religion

"There will be lots of people who disagree, but I think that the most important contributions — the best books — in the philosophy of religion are these two little books that David Hume writes. Some mid-twentieth century editions of these works in English would often start by saying that the philosophy of religion begins with Hume and begins with these two works — that all of the subsequent philosophical discussion of religion comes afterwards. In some ways, that’s probably not really fair to the medieval tradition. There were many people working inside the Catholic Church who, in various ways, were doing philosophy of religion. Nonetheless, there are lots of things about Hume’s works, and I’ll focus on the Dialogues , that make them particularly attractive. The first thing is their readability. If you’re a modern reader, you have to make an allowance for the language as the language is a bit dated now, but they’re enormously readable and the literary execution is fantastic. Hume was a great writer. It’s very hard to write philosophical dialogues. Plato was pretty good at it, and the next best philosophical dialogues are Hume’s. The only comparable work in English is Berkeley’s Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous . “It’s a bit hard to tell what Hume’s own view was. Was he an atheist? Was he an agnostic? Was he a deist? He covers his tracks pretty carefully in the Dialogues. ” When you think about what Hume was doing in the Dialogues , he’s engaging with his contemporaries, primarily in the United Kingdom, and there are lots of them in the wake of Boyle and others, who hold that you can kind of read off your theology from the universe. They take the design argument is the centrepiece of theology. I think that Hume does a fantastic job of demolishing the arguments that were around at the time. He’s enormously imaginative. He also does a good job of presenting things from different points of view and of obscuring what his own opinion is. There are all kinds of ways in which I just think the Dialogues is a superb piece of work. Yes, but very important in the history of studies of religion. Hume’s speculations are a bit from the armchair; he didn’t have a lot of data to work with. But what he has to say about the origins of polytheistic religion—the kind of psychological benefits you might expect you can get from piecemeal polytheistic or popular religions (as opposed to the kind of benefits that you might get from the highly theological conceptions of doctrine)—still ring quite true today. His importance is not just for philosophy of religion, but for the anthropology and cognitive science of religion as well. He’s a distant starting point for a whole lot of subsequent investigation of religion. I assume, though I haven’t checked this, that he had some influence on Kant — not just in the ways that we know he did in other areas of Kant’s thought — on Kant’s views on religion and for other subsequent figures as well. Many people refer back to Hume in their discussions of religion. I think that he would probably say something like this, though I’m going to update him a little. There’s a range of existential anxieties that people have. There are different kinds of anxieties: death, loneliness, deception, disease, injustice, pain, loss, want, and I guess there are some around sex though I doubt Hume talked about those. Organised religion helps people to deal with those anxieties. Maybe it doesn’t do it well in all cases, but it helps people to get on with their lives in the face of those kinds of anxieties. Roughly this is the kind of view that Hume has of religion. Here’s one interesting thing. Hume went to one of Holbach’s parties. Holbach inherited a lot of money when his uncle died, when Holbach was about thirty, so he devoted his life to running a salon in Paris. All the famous intellectuals and politicians came to Holbach’s salon. One time when Hume was there, he asked Holbach “do you think that there really is an atheist somewhere in the world?” The story goes that Holbach said to him “I know there are. There are twelve of them in the room.” Now, Hume could have just been dissembling. But it may be that Hume really did think that our propensity to believe in God and religious belief was just so hard to resist that you just wouldn’t find people doing it, even though he thought that the intellectual arguments for believing in God were pretty shaky at best. As I said before, it’s a bit hard to tell what Hume’s own view was. Was he an atheist? Was he an agnostic? Was he a deist? He covers his tracks pretty carefully in the Dialogues , which makes it hard to tell. He also made sure that the Dialogues weren’t published until after he died. But that may have just been protecting his social reputation up while he was living. I would like to think he was an atheist, but I really don’t know. I think Hume imagined that, although he was doing it from the armchair, he was saying: this is what properly-conducted natural, human, and historical science would tell us about what happened. Way back, our early ancestors were polytheists and formed these beliefs about the gods in response to things like the forces of nature. They assumed that there were gods of the wind and so on because there were all these forces that they couldn’t explain. The later emergence of monotheism is explained by other political, social, and psychological factors. Of course, not everyone will accept this kind of account. Even in ancient times, say when you get to the Greeks and the Romans, there are people that are supposed to be initiates — that are supposed to have some direct epistemic access to the gods. One distinction that one might draw is between natural theology and revealed theology. So, there is stuff that you can only know by the basis of revelation. You get this kind of distinction in somebody like Aquinas between the things that you can know just by the light of reason, for example, that God exists, but you can’t know just by the light of reason that there was a creation at a fixed point in the past. It’s only on the basis of God having revealed to us through Scripture that the world has a finite past. That would be the kind of natural/revealed distinction as it applies to theology. But, of course, Hume doesn’t think that anyone has ever had a direct line of epistemic access to the gods. He wants to explain the origins and maintenance of religion in purely naturalistic terms. His main target is definitely the design argument, which is natural theology. He has one chapter where he has this argument that has aspects of cosmological and ontological arguments mixed into it, though it’s not a hugely satisfactory part of the whole. But then he has this other discussion in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding about miracles which is getting much closer to testing the claims of revealed theology."

"The great thing about the Dialogues is the attack on the argument of design, it’s usually taken to be the decisive destruction of that argument. There are many, many strands to it. Part of the beauty of the Dialogues — and one thing that makes it a very funny book apart from anything else — is that Hume gives us two spokesmen for religious belief. One of them, a guy called Cleanthes, is the spokesman for the argument from design. The other one, a chap called Demea, is probably modelled on Leibniz or on 17th century rationalism. He thinks there’s a mathematical or quasi-mathematical logical proof of the existence of God. In Cleanthes’s hands, the argument from design is presented like a piece of science. Just as if you find the cheese has been eaten, you might suppose that the best explanation is that there is a mouse about, so if you find order and beauty and complexity in nature, the best explanation is that it was designed by a splendid intelligence of some kind and that we call God. So Cleanthes is offering us a quasi piece of science. Demea is offering us a quasi piece of mathematics or logic. The humour of the Dialogues consists in setting these two at each other’s throats. So by the end Demea has said that Cleanthes is little better than an anthropomorphite — that he can’t know whether God is single or many, whether the world is designed by a committee or by an infant deity who is an object of derision to his superiors, or by a superannuated old deity who has since died. In other words, all these things that are common to human beings become possible attributes of God. So Demea says Cleanthes is little better than an atheist, and Cleanthes turns around and says Demea is little better than an atheist, because his mathematician’s God is beyond understanding. It has no attributes we can make sense of. So each of them is sceptical about the other. Meanwhile the actual sceptic in the Dialogues , Philo — who most people, and I myself, think is Hume — just has to sit back and watch these two tearing each other apart. That’s right, there are very few. Berkeley’s Three Dialogues is perhaps the only other wholly successful example since Plato. One might mention Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems , although that’s more about physics and astronomy. It’s very rare, and it’s even more rare for it to be pulled off successfully. Exactly, that’s something that makes the Platonic Dialogues slightly iffy to some of us, the way the patsies just fall over and say “Gosh you’re so right, Socrates,” at the point you want to say, “No, dig your heels in! He’s not right!” Yes, that’s right. Cleanthes says that the whole world is a kind of library, and you can read the Creator’s mind in it. This is a point at which Demea gets hot under the collar and says “No, God is too mysterious! When we read a book we enter into the mind of the author, but we can’t know the mind of God in that intimate way.” So that’s a point at which Demea rebels against Cleanthes, and in fact does the sceptic’s work for him. Some of the central ideas were put in very pithy form in section XI of the First Enquiry , so that’s as early as 1749 or so. But he goes on revising the Dialogues and adding to them almost until his death in 1776. It was more than 35 years in the making. It’s a good question. I’m not completely convinced by any of the explanations I’ve heard. It’s certain he had friends amongst the moderate party in the Church of Scotland, and he might have been cautious about offending them. But he’d already published a chapter on miracles, and the gist of the arguments of the Dialogues in section XI of the First Enquiry . He then published quite inflammatory essays on suicide and immortality. It’s not plain that the Dialogues are more inflammatory than anything else that he was quite happy to have published. It may be that by the 1760s — the last decade or so of his life — he’d become less interested in presenting the arguments on natural religion. Natural religion is considering religion as a doctrine: these are the arguments for it, arguments independent of revelation, and those he destroys. But he’s also very interested in religion as a natural phenomenon that is part of the biography of human beings. He wrote a shorter book on that, The Natural History of Religion , which really considers religion as a kind of psychological or social phenomenon. That is the ancestor of writers like Durkheim who are anthropologists who have looked at the functional role that religions play. Exactly. The naturalism we’ll come on to because it’s very much emphasized in the book by Norman Kemp-Smith, who gives him a kind of proto-anthropological, proto-psychological/sociological interest in the way human beings behave. Yes, he was very interested in all that, and in a sense his whole philosophy can be seen as an unravelling of such constancies as there are in human nature, both in connection with the ways we think, the categories we think with and also in connection with our ethics, which he also wrote extensively on."

"Yes, the difficulty of demonstrating rationally anything much about God is the focus of my second book, which is Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. This was published almost a hundred years after Spinoza’s Tractatus—again, it was published posthumously, because even in the relatively free-thinking atmosphere of late 18th century Edinburgh, Hume’s critique of religion was highly unacceptable. His friends urged him not only to give up the idea of having it published in his lifetime, but even of having it published after his death, because they thought that it would condemn all this other works to the dustbin of history. Nobody would read them, because they would write Hume off as a wicked unbeliever. But Hume insisted and took steps to ensure that the Dialogues would be published after his death, and he was right to have done so, because his works are now far from ignored. This one is probably the most read of all his books, and I think it’s arguably the masterpiece of English language philosophy. The secret of its success is the way in which powerful and original arguments are woven into an elegant dialogue between three thinkers. The dialogue form is hard to pull off in philosophy, and Hume is one of the very few since Plato to be able to manage it. His announced topic here is “natural religion”. This is contrasted with “revealed religion”, and it means the sort of religious conclusions one can arrive at by reason rather than revelation. So for example, if somebody says “I know that Jesus wants me to do this, because he came to me in a vision,” or “because that’s my reading of scripture,” then that counts as revealed religion. On the other hand, if someone were to say that he is going to behave in a certain way, or that he believes in God, because of certain rational arguments, then that is natural religion. “I think it’s arguably the masterpiece of English language philosophy.” The part of natural religion that Hume focuses on in the Dialogues is something that is often called “the argument from design”, which is an argument for the existence of God that starts from the way the world works and is structured. The suggestion here is that the best explanation for what we observe is the existence of a designer—a god who made us. And this is of course a very familiar argument, with an intelligent, divine designer still offered by many people as a necessary supplement to science, as something that is still required by the evidence of complexity and apparent order in the universe. What Hume does in his Dialogues is to undermine that line of thinking in a brilliant series of arguments that I don’t think have ever been bettered, let alone answered. They are more profound, I think, than the Darwinian critique of intelligent design. Hume, certainly would have endorsed natural selection if he had known about it. But it’s not enough to read Darwin and Dawkins. You have to read Hume as well to understand the flaws in the theistic argument from design. One of the key ideas is the limitations of arguing by analogy in this context, which is the way the argument from design usually works. Take, for example, a watch found lying in a forest. You might say to yourself: this watch cannot have come together by chance. Somebody must have designed it and made it. Then, by analogy, you might reason: surely nature wouldn’t work as it does unless there were a designer who made it. Now one of the many things that Hume points out is wrong with this kind of analogy is that even if you accept the analogy in principle, it still wouldn’t get you to the sort of God we’re after, but only to a superior intelligence who had made the world and the creatures in it. This intelligence wouldn’t necessarily be everlasting, omnipotent, or omniscient… Well that’s one of the clinchers. If you’re going to ask where everything comes from and who designed it, you really do have to ask the same of God. So if you put forward God as the explanation for nature, you’re also going to have to ask who made God. Yes. And one of the most striking things that distinguishes these Dialogues from contemporary anti-religious books like, for example, Dawkins’s The God Delusion or Hitchens’ God is Not Great, is that none of Hume’s characters ever actually puts himself forward as an atheist or agnostic. Even Philo, whose views are closest to Hume’s own, pretends to be a believer. Hume’s technique is to pretend that he is the true defender of religion, that he is just trying to strengthen religion by shaving off the weaker bits. Now the thing is that when you have read and sympathised with all of Hume’s writings on religion, you realize that he has in fact shaved away everything. But that is why he manages to be so persuasive. He takes the reader very gently. Yes. It’s a very Socratic approach. And as an unbeliever myself, I think that technique is a much more effective way of showing religious people the error of their ways… I think it’s the best of the bunch of the recent atheist books, and I sympathize with most of its conclusions. But I do think that it strays very much into misanthropy. Because, if you believe, as Hitchens and Dawkins and I believe, that religion was invented by people, then to hate religion is to hate people. Well that’s my main disagreement. And I also think that Hitchens is too quick to attribute harm in human history to religion, whereas I think that religion has also had a lot of good effects. And where it has bad effects one has to remember that this is people using religion to their own ends. It’s not as if there’s a Satan out there who created religion and who’s doing all these bad things. If you really are a naturalist and you don’t believe in the supernatural or God, then you have to remember that the harm religion does is the harm that people do. Well if you were to ask Hume whether he believed in God or not, or alternatively, whether one simply could not answer questions of that kind in any sensible way, he would have to say the latter, though he certainly wasn’t tempted by any religious belief. He was a consistent and extreme empiricist. He thought that what the human mind could divine one way or another was very limited."

"Contemporary modern western atheism really starts, intellectually, with David Hume. He’s an interesting figure. Some people deny he was an atheist because he never came out with any statements which were unambiguous on that. They would categorise him as an agnostic. Others say that’s simply because, at the time he was writing, it was too dangerous to be open about atheism: not dangerous for his life, but it would have made things difficult had he come out as an atheist. His Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion was published after his death, perhaps for that reason. I found to my frustration that Hume’s writing on religion wasn’t available in a single volume. I’m afraid there’s a slight bit of self-plugging here, but I edited a volume of his work on religion, and that’s my first choice. Hume is the main man. Hume is where I’d like to start. What’s so wonderful about Hume is that the very reason why some people are able to claim that he’s an agnostic rather an atheist, the whole reason there is a debate, is that he is extremely measured. He’s not one of these people who just gives a strong polemic against the insanity of religious belief: he looks at the arguments and the reasons for believing or not believing, soberly. There’s no grandstanding or histrionics about it. That’s right. A lot of it is responding to the kind of arguments that were very common in his time, and actually, surprisingly, endure today: arguments that there must be a ‘First Cause,’ or that the order and design that we see in the universe must indicate some designer behind it, or that reports of miracles provide good evidence for God’s existence. He was responding to the more intellectual defences of religion that were around in his time. He picks these apart extremely effectively. It’s a good example, actually, of how you don’t need to be aggressive, and you don’t need to insult in any personal way the people you disagree with, in order to dismantle their position. Hume is much more devastating, in his way, than most of the new atheists are. It’s an interesting question whether he’s a good writer or not. I’ve always thought him a good writer, but I know some people read Hume and find him difficult. It’s partly just a question of period style. He does tend to write in very long sentences. I think that was just the typical writing of the time. In the 18th century people put a lot of commas and semicolons in, and there weren’t so many full stops. Present day readers can find that quite awkward. That’s right. This makes his dialogues far superior even to Plato’s. The Platonic dialogues can be stylistically grating because it seems that anyone who is forced into conversation with Socrates is just there to be shown how wrong they are. Most of the time, people are just saying ‘Yes, Socrates, I agree, Socrates,’ or they’re falling straight into his traps. In Hume’s Dialogues , you get very strong versions of the arguments on both sides. If you were to read the Dialogues —without knowing in advance which side Hume was on—there are certainly places where you wouldn’t be sure whether or not this book was ultimately going to be a defence of religion. Remember that it only takes one good argument to prove God’s existence. You could dismiss several arguments as insufficient to establish that, and still conclude with one that was good enough. [Spoiler alert: he leaves all the traditional arguments for God’s existence in tatters]. That’s absolutely Hume’s principle. I don’t want to summarise it and make it too crude, but what he’s really showing is that none of the reasons people have to suppose that there is a God, is strong enough to establish any such thing. So what you’re left with is the position where you don’t have sufficient grounds to believe. Now, that doesn’t mean you’ve proved there is no such thing, but in the absence of good grounds to believe that something exists, then your default position is to assume that it doesn’t until proven otherwise. People often say, ‘You can’t prove a negative’ — that you can’t prove that God doesn’t exist, and therefore that’s another reason why you can’t be an atheist. That’s a misunderstanding of the ‘can’t prove a negative principle.’ We understand in all normal circumstances that to believe that something exists in the absence of any good reason that it does exist is irrational. They get it the wrong way round. It’s not that you need to prove that something doesn’t exist. It’s rather that if you show there’s an absence of reasons to think it does exist, then you have no use for that hypothesis. I agree with you. It’s a much misunderstood principle. I suppose the point is that there are circumstances when it’s impossible to do all the checking necessary to establish the negative. So if we’re going to prove, let’s say, that the Ark of the Covenant isn’t buried somewhere under the sand of the Sahara Desert, it’s impossible to prove that. The Sahara’s too big, so for those practical reasons you can’t. But you’re right, when it’s a small enough area to look in—a pocket say—it’s easy to establish a negative. It’s easy to establish that there’s no elephant in your fridge, and if you end up saying there might be an invisible and intangible elephant, then you’re being silly. Now, there are so many different definitions and understandings of what God is, that there’s always room to turn round and say, ‘Well, it’s true that you haven’t established the existence of God, we can’t prove it, but there are plenty of places that God could be hiding.’ From that point of view, you can’t get the decisive argument. “Without God, there’s nothing to fall back on as an authority, nothing to tell us what the right way to live is.” You have to go back, again, to that Humean principle of proportioning your belief to the evidence, and think about the right kind of evidence for what it is you’re looking for. If you believe some divine, benevolent ruler of the universe exists, there are certain things you’d expect to follow from that. There are certain things you might expect to see in the universe if that were true. Then, when you find that those things don’t obtain, it’s reasonable to conclude that it probably doesn’t exist. The fact that it doesn’t prove it 100% is a huge red herring because there are so many things the existence of which you can’t prove with absolute certainty. You have to live and make your choices on the basis of what seems most probable."

"His argument was largely that, supposing the then very fashionable view that the universe must have been created by a designer, God, supposing that were true, it wouldn’t tell you anything about the nature of that God, other than that he had created the universe. It wouldn’t allow you to infer that God was what Hume called provident, that he looked after his people and that he was interested in their well-being and that he made human beings in his own image. It would tell you nothing whatever about God except that he designed the universe. Hume thought it didn’t actually make much difference whether you believed that God did design the universe or whether you didn’t, because if you could say nothing about this God then it wasn’t a very interesting belief to hold. This is all extremely pertinent, I think, to the kinds of argument that Stephen Hawking is producing, in so far as I can understand them, that there is no reason to suppose that there’s a God who created the universe. I think people ought to read these pieces, the parts of Hume that are concerned with this, because it is actually an argument that is useful now, 200 and something years later. Yes, and I think people take a great leap, actually, who say that God can be inferred from the marvels of the universe. People who say that immediately go on to say that that God who must have created the universe is interested in the moral laws of the universe as well as the natural laws. What they’re saying is that the God who laid down the natural laws by which the universe operates is the same God who laid down these moral laws by which we ought to conduct our lives. But actually the two things are completely separate."