Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

David Hume

Jan 1779 · Binker North

About this ebook

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is a philosophical work by the Scottish philosopher David Hume. Through dialogue, three philosophers named Demea, Philo, and Cleanthes debate the nature of God's existence. Whether or not these names reference specific philosophers, ancient or otherwise, remains a topic of scholarly dispute. While all three agree that a god exists, they differ sharply in opinion on God's nature or attributes and how, or if, humankind can come to knowledge of a deity.

In the Dialogues, Hume's characters debate a number of arguments for the existence of God, and arguments whose proponents believe through which we may come to know the nature of God. Such topics debated include the argument from design--for which Hume uses a house--and whether there is more suffering or good in the world (argument from evil).

Hume started writing the Dialogues in 1750 but did not complete them until 1776, shortly before his death. They are based partly on Cicero's De Natura Deorum. The Dialogues were published posthumously in 1779, originally with neither the author's nor the publisher's name.

Pamphilus is a youth present during the dialogues. In a letter, he reconstructs the conversation of Demea, Philo, and Cleanthes in detail for his friend Hermippus. He serves as the narrator throughout the piece. At the end of the Dialogues he believes that Cleanthes offered the strongest arguments. However, this could be out of loyalty to his teacher, as this does not seem to reflect Hume's own views on the topic. When other pieces on religion by Hume are taken into consideration, it may be noted that they all end with (apparently) ironic statements reaffirming the truth of Christian religious views. While the irony may be less readily evident in the Dialogues, this would suggest a similar reading of this work's ending.[2] Cicero used a similar technique in his Dialogues.

Cleanthes is an "experimental theist"--"an exponent of orthodox empiricism"[3]--who bases his beliefs about God's existence and nature upon a version of the teleological argument, which uses evidence of design in the universe to argue for God's existence and resemblance to the human mind.
Philo, according to the predominant view among scholars, is the character who presents views most similar to those of Hume.[4] Philo, along with Demea, attacks Cleanthes' views on anthropomorphism and teleology; while not going as far as to deny the existence of God, Philo asserts that human reason is wholly inadequate to make any assumptions about the divine, whether through a priori reasoning or observation of nature.
Demea "defends the Cosmological argument and philosophical theism..." He believes that the existence of God should be proven through a priori reasoning and that our beliefs about the nature of God should be based upon revelation and fideism. Demea rejects Cleanthes' "natural religion" for being too anthropomorphic. Demea objects to the abandonment of the a priori arguments by Philo and Cleanthes (both of whom are empiricists) and perceives Philo to be "accepting an extreme form of skepticism.

Ratings and reviews

It's a bit dry by modern standards. I understand the dialogue is considered a classic method to bring new ideas to a reading audience, I found myself occasionally getting lost over who was defending a particular idea. I'll probably have to read it over again sometime.

You absolutely have to read this book if you're interested in religion and secularism. Hume does a brilliant job at demolishing the religious arguments by pretending to be religious. I love the endings when Demea realises what Cleanthes has been saying all along, that Philo is trolling them and thus Demea walks away. At first this is a hard read but if you continue to read and then go back to the pages you didn't understand, you'll find that you have acquired the knowledge to understand the last pages.

About the author

David Hume (born David Home; 7 May 1711 NS (26 April 1711 OS) - 25 August 1776)[9] was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, scepticism, and naturalism.[1] Beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume argued against the existence of innate ideas, positing that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley, as a British Empiricist.[10] Hume argued that inductive reasoning and belief in causality cannot be justified rationally; instead, they result from custom and mental habit. We never actually perceive that one event causes another, but only experience the constant conjunction of events. This problem of induction means that to draw any causal inferences from past experience it is necessary to presuppose that the future will resemble the past, a presupposition which cannot itself be grounded in prior experience.[11] An opponent of philosophical rationalists, Hume held that passions rather than reason govern human behaviour, famously proclaiming that Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.[10] Hume was also a sentimentalist who held that ethics are based on emotion or sentiment rather than abstract moral principle. He maintained an early commitment to naturalistic explanations of moral phenomena, and is usually taken to have first clearly expounded the is-ought problem, or the idea that a statement of fact alone can never give rise to a normative conclusion of what ought to be done.[12] Hume also denied that humans have an actual conception of the self, positing that we experience only a bundle of sensations, and that the self is nothing more than this bundle of causally-connected perceptions. Hume's compatibilist theory of free will takes causal determinism as fully compatible with human freedom.[13] His views on philosophy of religion, including his rejection of miracles and the argument from design for God's existence, were especially controversial for their time. Hume influenced utilitarianism, logical positivism, the philosophy of science, early analytic philosophy, cognitive science, theology, and many other fields and thinkers. Immanuel Kant credited Hume as the inspiration who had awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers.