The Book of Books by Melvyn Bragg

Author:Melvyn Bragg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Counterpoint Press
Published: 2011-08-16T04:00:00+00:00

Its use and its purpose could appear to have come to an end. The weapon of destruction, of course, was a book, by the leading star in the constellation of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume. In 1757, he wrote The Natural History of Religion. Hume seems to put the cap on it. All religions, he implied, were no more than made or socially constructed artefacts based on acceptable superstitions. For Hume, there was no primary religious sentiment or predisposition.

He went back to the early Greeks who saw religion as best accounted for by the need to explain natural phenomena: thunder, lightning, storms, famine, plague, death – all, in days of limited natural science, most satisfyingly explained by imagining gods ‘up in the sky’ venting their wrath and, less often, displaying some kindness at the antics of mere humans. Hume wrote that ‘polytheism was the primary religion of man’.

Reason, Hume argued, played no role in the development of religion. The origin of religion could be explained fully in ‘natural’, non-religious instincts – primarily fear and the ‘universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious’. In short, God was no more than a human father blown up to gigantic size and significance by fallible human beings who, at that stage, needed a simple explanation for complicated phenomena.

For many intellectuals religion was all over. Yet, in a quite extraordinary comeback, the full power of the King James Bible was yet to be unleashed.

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