RANDALL STYERS
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw dramatic social and intellectual change in Europe. In the wake of the bloody Wars of Religion following the fifteenth-century Reformation and also in response to the dramatic increase in new information arriving from the non-European world demonstrating the range of human cultural diversity, many important European thinkers turned new attention to the notion of “natural religion,” a concept of religion freed from particularistic dogma and rituals. While many of the arguments supporting natural religion can be traced back far in ancient and medieval philosophy, a number of early modern theologians and natural philosophers rejuvenated efforts to find a grounding for religion in the natural order, sometimes as a “natural theology” that served to bolster Christian apologetics (by formulating rational proofs for the existence of God or other key theological claims) and sometimes as part of efforts to identify a common conceptual core underlying the range of different religious systems (such as Deist attempts to prune back religious particularity in favor of a more universally acceptable set of “common notions”).
It is in this context that we come to the work of the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76), one of the key figures in European intellectual history. Hume is commonly regarded as the greatest philosopher to write in English and one of the chief intellectual progenitors of modern empiricism. In a series of key works such as his Treatise of Human Nature and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,1 Hume rejected the pretensions of metaphysics in favor of what he saw as a constrained empirical inquiry into “the science of man,” focusing particularly on the nature—and limitations—of human understanding. Hume’s brand of empiricism, stressing the proper bounds of rational inference, led him to a bold new approach to questions of religion.2
Over his life Hume produced a range of important texts dealing with key religious issues. His Natural History of Religion (written between 1749 and 1751 and published in 1757) opens with this assertion: “As every enquiry, which regards religion, is of the utmost importance, there are two questions in particular, which challenge our attention, to wit, that concerning its foundation in reason, and that concerning its origin in human nature.”3 Hume addressed this first question—the foundation of religion in reason—in a number of texts as he responded to important developments in eighteenth-century theology and philosophy. And Hume addressed the second question—the origin of religion in human nature—in The Natural History of Religion, where he marked out a decisive new program for the scholarly study of religion.
Hume was a bitter critic of the superstition and emotionalism he saw in the popular religion of the “enthusiasts,” but throughout his work he was also a particularly harsh opponent of efforts by rationalist philosophers and Deists to formulate a rational defense for religion. In the Treatise, he attacked contemporary a priori arguments for the existence of God (such as the “cosmological” version put forth by Samuel Clarke in his A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God in 1704) by rejecting the theories of causality underlying these arguments. In the Treatise and his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (published posthumously in 1779), Hume also challenged the foundational element of Descartes’s version of the ontological argument for the existence of God—that the creator must be self-existent. Any attempt at logical deduction concerning the existence of God, Hume concluded, takes us beyond the capacities of human experience and understanding.
Hume was also sharply critical of a posteriori arguments for the existence of God, a mode of argument that might appear more aligned with his basic empiricism. In the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, one of the Hume’s characters, Cleanthes, mounts a strenuous defense of the argument from design, asserting that there is an order to be found in the universe—“the curious adapting of means to ends”—and that the most coherent explanation for this order is that it derives from an intelligent creator with a mind analogous to the human mind.4 Cleanthes goes on to claim that human beings can also infer important attributes concerning the nature of this creator by attending to the evidence within the created order.
Through the ensuing dialogue, though, Cleanthes’s interlocutors—particularly Philo—raise a number of challenges to Cleanthes’s argument, focusing on the weakness of the analogy between the order of the universe and that found in the products of human contrivance. The cosmos, Philo argues, is so different from the specific products of human design that Cleanthes’s basic analogy holds little weight. And, Philo continues, even on its own terms this mode of reasoning can shed little light on the nature of the creator. (In section 11 of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Hume voiced a similar conclusion, that God differs so radically from human nature and experience that human beings are unable to form any clear or distinct idea of God’s nature or attributes.) In The Natural History of Religion Hume acknowledged that the argument from design is the most plausible of the arguments for the existence of God, and the interchange in the Dialogues appears to conclude that the argument from design might lead one reasonably to infer that a creator exists. But Hume was adamant that despite this thin conclusion, human beings can have no meaningful knowledge of that creator’s nature or attributes. As Philo states it, the very most that can be inferred through the argument from design is that “the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence.”5 And Philo voices Hume’s basic skepticism concerning the claims of natural theology to draw grand conclusions about the creation and its creator: “A very small part of this great system, during a very short time, is very imperfectly discovered to us: and do we thence pronounce decisively concerning the origin of the whole?”6
To support his skepticism, Philo also invokes one of the classical philosophical arguments against theism, the argument from evil. The evil in the world, Philo asserts, affirmatively thwarts human attempts to draw meaningful conclusions about the attributes of the creator (such as divine power, goodness, or morality). Philo rejects the various attempts at theodicy put forward by his interlocutors, and he argues that if our logical directive is to proportion the cause to the effect, the flawed nature of the creation bars us from attributing any type of perfection to the creator: “there is no view of human life, or of the condition of mankind, from which, without the greatest violence, we can infer the moral attributes” of God.7 As Philo concludes, “these subjects exceed all human capacity”; any attribution of perfection to the divine must be arrived at purely through “the eyes of faith alone”—not through reason.8 Through these various arguments, Hume sought to dismantle the core rational arguments on behalf of natural religion.
Unlike rationalistic natural religion, theistic religious orthodoxy invokes special divine revelation as an additional basis for its religious truth claims, and Hume’s attack on this mode of religious knowledge appears in his essay “On Miracles.” Earlier philosophers (most notably Hobbes and Spinoza) had expressed skepticism about the notion of miracles, but others (including the great empiricist John Locke) had invoked miracles as evidence authenticating the claims of special revelation and the authority of the Christian scripture. Hume, in turn, rejected any effort to give miracle stories rational legitimacy. He begins his argument by defining a miracle as “a violation of a law of nature,” and he proceeds to assert that since the evidence in support of a law of nature is uniform and pervasive (this is what makes the law a law), there can never be sufficient reliable evidence to give rational support to the claim that a law has been broken and a miracle has occurred.9 Further, Hume catalogues the specific factors in human psychology and sociology that should make us skeptical about reports of miracles (such as the allure of the uncanny or the self-interested nature of such reports). As Hume states it: “No testimony for any kind of miracle has ever amounted to a probability, much less to a proof; and … even supposing it amounted to a proof, it would be opposed by another proof; derived from the very nature of the fact, which it would endeavor to establish. It is experience only, which gives authority to human testimony; and it is the same experience, which assures us of the laws of nature … no human testimony can have such force as to prove a miracle, and make it a just foundation for any such system of religion.”10 Thus, while Hume never goes so far as to assert that miracles are impossible, he concludes that there is never a rational basis for accepting reports of miracles. This leg of theistic orthodoxy falters.11
Hume attacked one additional element of the rational defense of religion in the Treatise and in his essay “Of the Immortality of the Soul” (published posthumously), as he considered traditional metaphysical arguments for the existence of an immaterial and immortal soul, a belief at the heart of doctrines of life after death. Against such claims, Hume argued that human identity lacks sufficient stability to constitute some type of substance; as he states it in the Treatise, consciousness is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”12 And further, if consciousness is simply a bundle of perceptions, and if perception ends at death (with the destruction of the sense organs), death entirely annihilates human identity. Hume also argues that since human thought and consciousness always appear in conjunction with matter and motion, and since thought itself involves bodily existence and experience, there is no basis for the claim that thought is the product of an immaterial soul. In any event, Hume asserts, religious accounts of life after death are so abstractly distant from the current human condition that they lack practical effect. In part 11 of the Enquiry he further argues that our experience in the present world provides no meaningful evidence to support the claim that eternal rewards and punishments will be fairly distributed in some future life after death. And in both the Treatise and his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals Hume argues that a naturalistic account of human moral sensibilities demonstrates that religion and its teachings concerning an afterlife are unnecessary for the establishment and maintenance of morality. In fact, he says, religion often exerts a detrimental effect on morality, leading to moral and social decay and fanaticism.
Through these various arguments, Hume rejected all the prominent eighteenth-century theological and philosophical efforts to provide religion with a rational grounding, and these arguments illustrate a number of elements in Hume’s thought that will be extremely significant in later methodological approaches to the study of religion. A double gesture is in play as Hume works to police the relation between religion and rationality. On the one hand, he agrees with his rationalist and Deistic opponents that the core of religion lies in assent to a set of coherent propositions. But Hume seeks to limit the scope of rationally defensible religion to one single principle: the “Assent of the Understanding to the Proposition that God exists.”13 Beyond this thin claim, he argues, any human effort to add content to religion becomes “absurd, superstitious, and even impious.”14 So Hume is here defining a mode of secular rationality (built on properly trained and refined passions) within which the only form of “rational” religion is one that abandons any relevance to meaningful human endeavor. To the extent religion exceeds that narrow bound, it also places itself beyond the realm of properly cultivated rationality.
The implications of this fundamental approach to religion become more explicit when we turn to Hume’s The Natural History of Religion, a text that has exerted great influence on the scholarly study of religion. The central feature of Hume’s Natural History is signaled in its title; religion is here to be studied as a phenomenon with a “natural history.” While advocates of natural religion had sought to identify an innate grounding for religious belief, Hume aggressively rejected those efforts. Instead, he set out to explore the natural development of the human aspects of religion—its origins and change over time—without basing religion in either rationality, human instinct, or supernatural revelation. This deliberate effort to replace what Hume saw as quasi-theological modes of inquiry with a purely empirical method had extraordinary impact on the scholarly study of religion. Religion becomes one more object of study for Hume’s broader “science of man.”
Hume has multiple objectives in The Natural History. He begins by challenging the supposition that religious ideas are somehow innate or instinctive to human nature. In this regard, his “natural history” works to denaturalize religion by emphasizing its historical contingency and variability. He invokes the heterogeneity of religion to argue that since all human ideas derive from experience, even religious concepts are historical rather than innate. As he explains, there is a “universal propensity to believe in invisible, intelligent power,” but while this propensity is “a general attendant of human nature,” there are circumstances where it is lacking, and even when it does appear it is highly variable.15 As Hume states it, “no two nations, and scarce any two men, have ever agreed precisely in the same sentiments.”16 Since religion is so irregular, it cannot be “an original instinct or primary impression of nature.” Instead, it is a “secondary” development that “may easily be perverted by various accidents and causes.”17 So, he explains, in this text he will explore the origin of religious principles and consider the historical accidents and causes that can affect religion’s development.
Hume then proceeds to formulate an account of the development of religion using various types of historical and psychological evidence (drawing particularly on classical sources). He argues that the initial stage of religious development is “polytheism or idolatry” (since the mind must move from inferior concepts toward superior ones).18 This initial polytheism has its origins, he explains, in human weakness, fear, and ignorance. Religion arises from “the anxious concern for happiness, the dread of future misery, the terror of death, the thirst of revenge, the appetite for food and other necessities.”19 Fueled by this amalgam of unrestrained emotion and ignorant of the principles of cause and effect, early human beings come to suppose that the world is animated by invisible agents, and through the human tendency to anthropomorphize, these agents become personified in the “imagination.” As religion develops, human beings seek to control fate by placating or cajoling these invisible agents through prayers or sacrifices. In line with his opening insistence that religion is not innate, Hume here argues that properly basic human experiences and emotional responses are given secondary religious interpretations.
As religious development proceeds, monotheism evolves from this initial primitive polytheism. Out of selfish interests, the votaries of a particular deity exaggerate their god’s status (particularly in periods of distress or fear), and as one god comes to predominate the local pantheon, eventually these votaries conclude that their god is infinite. These followers arrive at that conclusion, though, “not by reason, of which they are in great measure incapable, but by the adulation and fears of the most vulgar superstition.”20 While theism is a significant achievement, its origin in human emotions makes it unstable, so that “men have a natural tendency to rise from idolatry to theism, and to sink again from theism into idolatry” as they seek to address their competing fears and anxieties.21 And while theism is in many ways more intellectually advanced than polytheism, it also results in new tendencies toward religious intolerance and persecution, new corruptions of the human spirit, and new threats to rational thinking. Hume details a long litany of the moral and intellectual harm caused by theistic religion.
Through this account of religion, Hume works to identify what he sees as “the essential and universal properties of human nature” at work within the course of religious development.22 He concedes that rational reflection might lead one to acknowledge a divine creator demonstrating “one single purpose or intention” in the natural order. But at the same time, this creator’s intention remains “inexplicable and incomprehensible,” and religion constantly disfigures the simple truth of the creator’s existence.23 As Hume states it: “Examine the religious principles, which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are any thing but sick men’s dreams: or perhaps will regard them more as the playsome whimsies of monkeys in human shape, than the serious, positive, dogmatic assertions of a being who dignifies himself with the name of rational.”24 So, Hume concludes, “The whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspense of judgment appear the only result of our most accurate scrutiny, concerning this subject.” The only escape from the mystery and confusion of religion is to be found in “the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy.”25
Throughout The Natural History, religion is framed primarily as a conceptual matter (involving the belief in invisible power), but religious development is driven not by reason or rational deduction, but by fear and ignorance. This mode of religion is deeply individualistic, a matter of the individual psyche with no accounting for human social interaction. At the same time, though, Hume also assumes that all human beings share a fundamentally common human nature; it is this supposition that makes cross-cultural comparisons relevant to his argument.
Hume’s Natural History marks the transformation of religion into an object of historical and cultural study divorced from questions of any sort of supernatural truth or revelation. He sets out instead to utilize an empirical, comparative method in order to identify the origins of religion within human nature, to chart its development through human history, and to examine its consequences for human life. Rejecting the claim that religion is innate or instinctive (as maintained by advocates of natural religion and Deism), he argues instead that religion is characterized by heterogeneity and irregularity. His role as a scholar is to map the emotional conditions that give rise to religion and the various factors that affect its development. Through this very procedure, questions of religious truth have been supplanted by matters of contingency.
In his other works on religion, Hume rejects most every rational argument put forward in defense of religion, and he argues that morality needs no religious base. In The Natural History, he argues that religion can be accounted for by recourse to more fundamental, identifiable principles of human nature and that religion often exerts harmful effects on human life. In making these arguments, Hume works to define and exercise a mode of secular rationality utterly distinct from religious presuppositions, and he gives this secularized, scientific method jurisdiction over the study of religion. With this dramatic shift in method, Hume sets the stage for major new developments in the naturalistic study of religion over the coming century.
NOTES
1. See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed., ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 10.
2. On Hume’s significance more broadly, see J. Samuel Preus, Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Ivan Strenski, Thinking About Religion: An Historical Introduction to Histories of Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006); and Stanley Tweyman, ed., Hume on Natural Religion (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes, 1996).
3. David Hume, “The Natural History of Religion,” in Principal Writings on Religion Including “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” and “The Natural History of Religion,” ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 134.
4. David Hume, “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,” in Writings on Religion, ed. Antony Flew (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1992), 203.
5. Ibid., 291.
6. Ibid., 201.
7. Ibid., 265.
8. Ibid., 264–65.
9. David Hume, “An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding,” in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3rd ed., ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 114–15.
10. Ibid., 127.
11. See also Stanley Tweyman, ed., Hume on Miracles (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes, 1996).
12. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 252.
13. David Hume, “Letter To William Mure of Caldwell (1743),” in Writings on Religion, 17.
14. Hume, “Dialogues,” 290.
15. Hume, “Natural History,” 184.
16. Ibid., 134.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 135.
19. Ibid., 140.
20. Ibid., 155.
21. Ibid., 158–59.
22. Ibid., 183.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 184.
25. Ibid., 185.