editor, Administrators
2,020
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
no edit summary
Hume's most ambitious skeptical attack on the possibility of theological knowledge was his ''Dialogues concerning Natural Religion'', which he arranged to have published posthumously because of its inflammatory nature. In it, Hume raised devastating objections to the claim that the universe showed evidence of purposeful design by an Intelligent Creator. This claim was then widely popular among natural philosophers associated with the Royal Society [[CiteRef::Morris and Brown (2016)]] The ''Dialogues'' is written as a conversation between three characters; ''Cleanthes'', a proponent of the design argument, ''Demea'', a mystic, and ''Philo'', a religious skeptic generally supposed to be Hume's spokesperson. Philo argues that the analogy between the universe and a designed artifact is weak. For example, we experience only one universe and have nothing to compare it to. We recognize human artifacts by contrast with non-artifacts such as rocks. He also notes that we have no experience of the origin of the universe, and that causal inference requires a basis in experienced constant conjunction between two things. For the origin of the universe we have nothing of the sort. ''Demea'' deems ''Cleanthes'' concept of God as cosmic designer to be anthropomorphic and limiting. In a discussion of the human condition, ''Philo'' asks why an infinitely wise, powerful, and good God would permit human suffering. By the end, Hume's characters arguments lead the reader to the conclude, with ''Philo'', that God's nature seems inconceivable, incomprehensible, and indefinable and therefore the question of God's existence is rendered meaningless. [[CiteRef::Hume (2007)]][[CiteRef::Oppy (1996)]][[CiteRef::Morris and Brown (2016)]]
|Criticism=Hume's skeptical arguments were troubling to many, and received a good deal of criticism. He was criticized, notably, by a fellow Scottish philosopher of his times; Thomas Reid (1710-1796) [[CiteRef::Fieser (2017)]][[CiteRef::Nichols and Yaffe (2016)]] Reid rejected Hume's theories of perception and causationbecause of their skeptical consequences. Hume supposed that our perceptual experience was of impressions in our minds. He also maintained that causal relations do not exist in the world, but are simply rather posited in our minds when two events are constantly conjoined in experience. Such a view views, taken together made it impossible to claim that our perceptual impressions are caused by objects in an external world. This would require that external objects themselves, because we have no independent and our impressions of them be conjoined in our experience of such objects. It was thus open to a devastating skepticism about the external world, which is obviously impossible. Hume accepted that his belief in an external world was merely a matter of habit, custom, or instinct, and could not be justified. Reid found this unacceptable , and supposed that our perceptual experience was directly of objects in the world, just as everyday common sense tells us. He noted that this such direct experience was consistent with everyday common sense, and no more of a mystery that mysterious than Hume's claim supposition that we were directly aware of experienced impressions in our mind. Descartes, Locke, and Hume's supposition that the direct objects of perception were mental entities such as ideas, impressions, sensations, or sense data remained widely popular into the twentieth century, [[CiteRef::Hatfield (2004)]] but had been strongly challenged by the beginning of the twenty first century [[CiteRef::Warren(2005)]][[CiteRef::Thompson (2007)]]. By that time though, the relationship between this problem and that of external world skepticism had been substantially reconfigured. [[CiteRef::Clark (2017)]] Reid likewise rejected Hume's view of causality. He noted that it a view of causality based on constant conjunctions in our experience could not give a causal account for the causality of unique events. Suppose, he posited, that an earthquake struck Mexico City for the first time in its history, resulting in the destruction of the city. Under Hume's definition, we could not claim that the earthquake caused the destruction of the city, since the two events, being unique, are not constantly conjoined in experience. He further noted that night following day and day following night are constantly conjoined in experienceexperiences, but we generally do not claim that day causes night and night causes day, but rather that both are caused by Earth's rotation.
and James Beattie (1735-1802)
