Toward a Humean True Religion

We will never know what Hume's personal position was with respect to the questions that religion gives answers to. He never declares himself in his letters nor in any other text which might be taken as reporting his own views. The proper object of study when it comes to Hume on religion, then, is what he might have been trying to achieve in writing as he did about the origins of the universe, the history of religion, and the grounds for belief in specifically Christian doctrines concerning an afterlife and the possibility of salvation therein. Many have read Hume as intent on disabusing his reader of nonsensical beliefs about such matters, and as meaning to instil in their place a wholly secular way of thinking about the universe and the goals of human life. For Hume, on this reading, religion in every form was an enemy to be fought, defeated, and prevented from making any further incursions on the domains of sound reasoning, wholesome morality, and liberal politics. In Hume's own time, and in the nineteenth century, Hume was read this way by his detractors. In our time he is read this way by his most fervent admirers. Andre Willis, rightly in my view, regards this as far too crude a way of understanding what Hume was about in his writings on religion. One way of expressing dissatisfaction with it is to say that it fails to do justice to the scepticism of the Dialogues, ‘Of Miracles’, the ‘Natural History’, and Hume's other discussions of religious issues. Hume's scepticism, it might be urged, was, like ancient scepticism, a means to the end of suspension of judgement, not a way of replacing one species of dogmatism with another. Willis’ preference is to say that the standard reading closes down too quickly the question of what, on Humean terms, religion might be. Toward a Humean True Religion is, as its title suggests, an attempt to redefine religion in terms compatible with Hume's scepticism about fundamental metaphysical and cosmological questions.

Afterlife · Agnosticism · Atheism · Economic Justice · Epistemology · Meaning (existential) · Morality · Object (grammar) · Politics · Reading (process) · Skepticism · Theism · Law · Philosophy · Theology and Philosophy of Evil