Christianity & Western Thought, Volume 1: From the Ancient World to the Age of Enlightenment: 001 by Colin Brown

Author:Colin Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-03-05T09:06:00+00:00

The Existence of God

The theme of causes and effects continued to play a part in Hume's reflections on religion in the writings of his later years. Despite his reservations on the subject, Hume still found it useful to appeal to the notion to defend himself against religion. Large parts of Hume's History of England were concerned with the moral and political effects of religion. Hume's brief study of The Natural History of Religion addressed the question of the causes and effects of religion on a broad canvas. In attacking the view that the original religion of humankind was a rational, moral monotheism, Hume was undermining the foundations of Deism and also a belief that many Christians attributed to the book of Genesis. The work was presented as a kind of study in religious anthropology, although Hume was no more of an anthropologist than his adversaries. What he did was suggest a kind of evolutionary hypothesis. By dint of drawing on his knowledge of the classics, Hume argued that the gods and goddesses of polytheism (who were simply magnified human beings) were progressively credited with different attributes until they were eventually rolled into one and credited with fidelity. Side by side with this process went a growth in fanaticism. The more unique God became, the more bigoted were his devotees (whether Mohammedan or Christian). Religion presented an enigma from which philosophy provided an escape, as Hume's closing remarks suggest.

What so pure as some of the morals, included in some theological systems? What so corrupt as some of the practices, to which these systems give rise?

The comfortable views, exhibited by the belief of futurity, are ravishing and delightful. But how quickly vanish on the appearance of its terrors, which keep a more firm and durable possession of the human mind?

The whole is a riddle, an aenigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspence of judgment appear the only result of our most accurate scrutiny, concerning this subject. But such is the frailty of human reason, and such the irresistible contagion of opinion, that even this deliberate doubt could scarcely be upheld; did we not enlarge our view, and opposing one species of superstition to another, set them a quarrelling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy.49

Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion were a kind of modern version of Cicero's dialogues On the Nature of the Gods.50 This is indicated not only by the form of the work, but also by its theme. Like Cicero, Hume professed to be concerned not with the existence of God but with "the nature of the divine Being; his attributes, his decrees, his plan of providence."" Moreover, Hume gave his protagonists classical names. Philo was the name of the skeptical founder of the New Academy, the teacher of Cicero and also of Cotta, the skeptic in Cicero's work. Cleanthes was the successor of Zeno as head of the Stoic school, and in Cicero's work he is the teacher of Balbus, the representative of Stoicism.

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