"Dawkins still appears to be convinced that religion will be defeated by rationality alone. Were that the case, David Hume would have sufficed."What does this mean? What did David Hume do that should have put the nail in the coffin of Christianity? In a nutshell, he didn't succeed because Christians are not swayed by the kind of proof and evidence that philosophy and science can provide. You can't deconvert someone using logic. In general they don't believe in Christian dogma because of the evidence in support of it - they believe because they were raised believing, they want to believe it, because everyone around them believes it, or because it feels good to believe it. As Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels, put it:
"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into."So, what were Humes arguments that, as compelling and sound as they were, didn't succeed? David Hume (1711-1776) was a Scottish philosopher and empiricist (someone who thinks that knowledge comes through experience and evidence). He argued that a belief, such as Christianity should only be believed if it is supported by evidence, and he attempted to show that the evidence for Christianity was lacking.
The anti-religious works for which Hume is most remembered are found in two publications. The first is in his short book "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion". The text for it can be found here:
Text of Dialogues
A good summary of it is here:
Summary of Dialogues
The second is "Of Miracles" (found here) which is really just a single chapter from a larger work, "An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding". I will summarize the "Dialogs" first, and then follow up with "Of Miracles".
Dialogs Concerning Natural Religion
Hume pits three ficticious characters, Demea (a believer who thinks we can logically deduce god's existance, but can never know gods nature), Cleanthes (a believer who thinks we can use empiricism and evidence to draw conclusions about god's nature), and Philo (a religious skeptic) against each other in a friendly debate on the existance and nature of god. Complete descriptions of the work can be found elsewhere. Here, I will only present the briefest summary of Hume's arguments.
Hume (thought to be speaking through Philo) puts forth his most well-known arguments against Christianity (i.e., the ones that should have, but did not, work):
1) Cosmological argument
There are many forms of deductive logical arguments where a god is shown to be logically necessary - that the lack of such a god would cause a logical contradiction. These are called cosmological arguments. The core of these arguments generally centers on the idea of a "first cause" or "unmoved mover" (which would be god). The most famous of these were introduced by Thomas Acquinas, but there have been many other versions.
There are a number of problems with cosmological arguments, but Hume was among the first to begin picking holes in them. He argued, "Why may not the material universe be the necessarily existent being?". That is, if the cosmological argument assumes god is the first necessarily existent being, what can't one instead assert that the universe itself, is the first necessarily existent being (or entity). He showed that nothing can be proven to exist using only a priori (purely logical) reasoning. You could only prove God's necessary existence using logic if its opposite (non-existence) generated a contradiction (which it doesn't).
As another example, using Anselm's Ontological argument, non-existence of a perfect being is just as viable as its existence. Simply imagining a perfect being doesn't cause that being to exist. Evidence is needed to establish a claim of existence. In other words, arguing the existence of an entity in the world requires evidence - it cannot just be reasoned out.
He makes the distinction between “relations of ideas” and “matters of fact” (very much like Kant’s later analytic vs. synthetic judgments) “God exists” and “God does not exist” imply no contradiction. They are not “relations of ideas”, but are “matters of fact”, not unlike asserting that carrier pigeons exist or carrier pigeons do not exist. This expresses an assertion about a state of affairs in the world that can only be discovered through evidence, not through deduction.
On the other hand, a statement like “Triangles have 4 sides”, “2+2=5”, and “bachelors have several wives” are “relations of ideas” and cannot be possibly be conceived as true because they involve internal contradictions. One can and should use deduction to conclude whether or not these are true or false. Conversely, assertions like “It is raining” and “it is not raining” are matters of fact. Both are conceivable, and neither cause contradictions. We cannot deduce what the weather is outside, but must rely on evidence. “God exists” is also a matter of fact. All matters of fact require evidence, and cannot be deduced. Therefore all purely logical arguments about the existence of god are insufficient. A priori arguments can't be used to prove existence.
2) Argument from design
The argument from design is an argument by analogy, which is generally regarded as a very weak type of argument. In this analogy, the universe is compared to a machine or other artifact designed and built by humans. But even as an analogy, it doesn't hold water. The universe and a human-designed machine are not analogous phenomena because they are not independently existing entities. The universe is a whole and a machine is a part of it. The universe contains everything, including any human-designed machines. The "whole" is not the same as a "part" of the whole, just as a flock of sheep is not the same as a single sheep. For example, a sheep has a mother, but a flock of sheep does not have a mother. They are not the kinds of things that can be compared because they are different classes of entities.
Philo says some order, such as that found in organic bodies, is caused by generation and vegetation. There is no reason, then, to think that just because the world is ordered, it is necessarily a result of intelligent design. He says an inductive argument (that is, an argument that argues for a conclusion based on past evidence), which the argument from design is, requires repeated experience of the phenomena in question. Our universe happened just once, so no pattern of creation exists from which we can draw conclusions.
Philo takes up another line of attack. He argues that the claim that God is an intelligent designer does not even succeed in explaining why the world is ordered. It is no easier to understand how God's thoughts might set the world in order than it is to understand how the material world might be its own source of order.
He argues that even if we can infer anything from the argument from design, it is not what we want to be able to infer. Given the evidence we have from nature we have no grounds on which to conclude that God is infinite, that God is perfect, that there is only one God, or even that God lacks a physical body. Thus even if the argument from design were valid, the evidence we get from the nature of the universe provides us with no knowledge about God's nature. Rather, we might infer that there are many imperfect gods because in the real world, different objects have different creators, and many of objects that God is argued to have created have flaws and faults (such as disease, decay, death, malfunction, deformities, etc), so we might conclude that the creators also made lots of mistakes, and were imperfect, themselves. Therefore, the argument from design doesn't allow us to reach any firm conclusions about a god or gods.
Philo attempts to show that there are many other possible analogies, other than the analogy to machines, that are equally well supported by the evidence we find in nature. For instance, the universe can be analogized to an animal body and God to its soul. It is therefore arbitrary to choose the analogy between the universe and a machine. One could just as easily say that since a baby kangaroo comes out of a mother kangaroo's pouch, then the universe is like a baby kangaroo, and god is like a mother kangaroo's pouch.
Philo argues that if nature contains a principle of order within it, the need for a designer is removed. The last 250 years of science has shown (most convincingly in Evolutionary Theory) that nature does, indeed, contain principles of order. Evolution, which appears to have an intrinsic order and organization, occurs without any external guiding intelligence. The same seems to be true in all other branches of science.
The design argument (that complex order and beauty of our universe can only be explained by positing the existence of an intelligent designer) uses a faulty analogy with man-made objects (which we know are designed). Unlike man-made objects, we have not witnessed the design of a universe, so do not know whether the universe was the result of external design or not. Inductive arguments of this type need repeated observation, but we have just one example of a universe being created. We have no experience of other universes being made and so cannot discuss a single universe’s cause intelligently. Cannot make an inference based on a single occurrence.
It is not possible to argue from causes within the universe to causes of the universe as a whole. This is the "Fallacy of Composition". The analogy between machines and the universe is weak at best, and as such any reasoning based on this analogy must also be weak.
Philo's (and Hume's) conclusion
Philo (and Hume) conclude that cannot even look at the world and infer from the evidence that God is at all good, wise, and powerful. Philo attacks organized religion as morally and psychologically harmful. Instead, he argues that only true religion (that is, a philosophical belief in some higher power, that is, a "natural religion") should be accepted. So, Hume was not arguing for atheism, but was arguing against organized religion, and promoting the idea of "natural religion", which is basically a deist belief in some kind of "higher power".
Philo describes a depressing view of the world. In contrast to the perfectly harmonious machine that Cleanthes considers the universe to be, he tells us that it is actually a miserable place, filled with evil. As Philo puts it, if the universe is a machine, its only goal is the bare survival of each species, not that any species be happy. Given how much evil, pain, and destruction there is in the world, we cannot possibly look at the world and infer that God is infinitely good, infinitely wise, and infinitely powerful.
Most modern philosophers who study Hume conclude that his refusal to simply come out as an atheist must have been the result of a simple fear of the troubles such a professed disbelief would have caused him. "The great infidel" as James Boswell called him, stopped short of embracing atheism for purely pragmatic reasons.
As stated in the online Encyclopedia Brittanica:
"When we consider Hume's philosophy from the perspective of his fundamental irreligious aims and objectives it is entirely understandable why his own contemporaries did not hesitate to label him an “atheist”. What they recognized, throughout Hume's philosophical writings, was his effort to show that religion, in almost all forms that his own contemporaries would be familiar with (i.e. Judeo-Christianity), was permeated with philosophical absurdity and corrupt and confused practices. What Hume aimed at, in other words, was to “unmask” religious doctrine and institutions. It was his general ambition to expose the groundlessness of their doctrines as well as the destructive nature of their influence on human life. In pursuing this end — i.e., to free humanity from the yoke of religion, - Hume follows in a tradition that can be traced, before him, to Lucretius, Hobbes and Spinoza and, after him, to thinkers such as D’Holbach, Marx and Nietzsche. Whatever label we place on this tradition (i.e., “atheist”, “irreligious”, “anti-Christian” etc.), there is no doubt that Hume's contributions stand among its greatest achievements and, for the most part, represent it in a particularly humane and measured voice."
Of Miracles
"Of Miracles" is a single chapter from a larger work, "An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding". It, along with the chapter following it, were not originally included in the book, because Hume thought they were too controversial. This was probably a correct assessment, since the concept is still controversial today (at least it is a point of controversy between believing Christians and non-Christians). Modern editions of the book do contain this chapter, but for years it was published alone as a separate piece. He wrote at least one letter to a friend confessing that he removed it so as to not give offense to the reading public - he accurately gauged how explosive his ideas were.
He starts by explaining that facts about the world ("matters of fact" as opposed to "relations of ideas") must be supported by evidence. The statement, "God Exists" and "God does not exist" are matters of fact, just as "it is raining outside" and "it is not raining outside" are matters of fact. Logic will not answer a question about the current weather conditions. You can't deduce the weather - you need to look outside and gather the evidence. In the same way, logic alone will tell you nothing about a god's existence. You can't deduce that answer. Evidence is needed. In one of his most remembered and often cited quotes, he wrote:
"In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of ... evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence."Hume explained that the only way that we can judge a truth claim about a fact is to evaluate the evidence for it. The confidence we can have in the occurence of an event or existence of a thing is based on the quality of the evidence for it. Our belief or trust in that fact should be proportional to the quality of that evidence. The quality of evidence is a established by the its reliability, completeness, type of evidence, likelihood of the event, number/quality/gullibility/motivations of witnesses, and many other factors. With regard to religions that claim a god or savior, he thought the evidence for them was lacking.
He then went on to address miracles and supernatural events, which are at the core of most established religions. He defined a miracle as "a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent." Contrasted with miracles was the natural operation of the universe, controlled by the laws of nature, which both do not require and, in fact, exclude a resort to miracles. In another quote, he said:
"Nothing is esteemed a miracle, if it ever happen in the common course of nature. It is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should die on a sudden: because such a kind of death, though more unusual than any other, has yet been frequently observed to happen. But it is a miracle, that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed in any age or country."Well, whether it has been observed or not is not clear to some people. Christians believe that there were many witnesses to the resurrection of Christ. Hume says, though, that even if dozens or hundreds supposedly witness a miracle (and the resurrection is just one of thousands of miracles from all religions across the world), there are far more witnesses and evidence for the law of nature which the miracle violates. If sheer volume of evidence or number of witnesses is to be a deciding factor, then nature can boast far more of these than violations of nature.
Hume claims that no miracle has ever had sufficient numbers of witness of sufficient reliability, honesty, integrity, objectivity, and knowledge who can be trusted to correctly report the miracle. He has very little confidence in reports of miracles for several reasons (and these are summarized from numerous websites in which they are repeated as follows):
- People are very prone to accept the unusual and incredible, which excite agreeable passions of surprise and wonder.
- Those with strong religious beliefs are often prepared to give evidence that they know is false, "with the best intentions in the world, for the sake of promoting so holy a cause" (this has been sinced called the "pious fraud")
- People are often too credulous when faced with such witnesses, whose apparent honesty and eloquence (together with the psychological effects of the marvellous described earlier) may overcome normal skepticism.
- Miracle stories tend to have their origins in "ignorant and barbarous nations" either elsewhere in the world or in a civilised nation's past. The history of every culture displays a pattern of development from a wealth of supernatural events. Prodigies, omens, oracles, judgements" which steadily decreases over time, as the culture grows in knowledge and understanding of the world.
As Hume ends this chapter, he shows that belief in miracles leads to a logical problem. All religions have their miracle stories. No one religion has more convincing miracles than another. Since they all are equally believable (or unbelievable), it would be reasonable to either believe all of them or none of them. Since the religions are mutually contradictory, then we cannot believe all of them, so the only available option is to believe none of them.
In summary, "Hume's Maxim" summarizes his skepticism of miracles:
"The plain consequence is ... that no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact which it endeavors to establish ... When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.See also:
http://www.cengage.com/philosophy/book_content/0495094927_feinberg/introductions/part_1/The_Existence_of_God/hume.htmlhttp://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/understanding/section10.rhtml
http://reasonablefaithadelaide.org.au/miracles-weeping-statues-and-aliens/
