A CRITICAL EVALUATION OF DAVID HUME'S CRITIQUE OF NATURAL RELIGION

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

BACKGROUND TO STUDY

Hume’s philosophy of religion is generally interpreted against the background of a broader interpretation of his philosophy and the historical context in which it arose. One of the most familiar and deeply entrenched perspectives on Hume’s philosophy is that he belongs in the “British Empiricist” tradition – the last member of the great triumvirate of “LockeBerkeley-Hume”. Viewed this way, Hume’s philosophy is understood as an effort to draw out the systematic sceptical implications of empiricist principles, whereby even our most common sense beliefs are brought into doubt and shown to lack rational credentials. Hume’s sceptical critique of religion is, according to this account, just one dimension of his overall empiricist-sceptical program. It is argued, moreover, his concern with religion was a later development in his thinking, one that eventually culminates in his posthumous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). An alternative understanding of Hume’s philosophy, takes religion to be more fundamental in the development of this thought. More specifically, according to the irreligious interpretation, Hume’s first and most ambitious work, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), is deeply rooted in debates between “religious philosophers” and “speculative atheists” that dominated British philosophy throughout the late 17th and early 18th centuries. It is this debate - not the anachronistic, post-Kantian empiricist/rationalist divide - that shaped and motivated Hume’s most fundamental concerns throughout his philosophy, continuing from the Treatisethrough to the Dialogues  (Russell 2008; Russell 2016). Both Hume’s sceptical and naturalistic principles, it is argued, are carefully crafted to serve his core irreligious aims and objectives. With respect to both these elements of his philosophy, Hume’s objective is to challenge and discredit the doctrines and dogmas of the Christian religion. Read this way, Hume should be understood as belonging to an irreligious tradition of thought of which the most celebrated representatives were Hobbes and Spinoza. His primary targets, consistent with this, were a set of apologists for the Christian religion, the most prominent of whom included Descartes, Locke and, especially, Samuel Clarke (a close associate and ally of Isaac Newton). It was Hume’s concern, according to this reading, to show that religion received little or no support from philosophy and, paired with this, that morality required little or no support from religion. These two issues were fundamental to the core debate between religious philosophers and speculative atheists. On both issues Hume sides decisively with the latter party on both