David Hume (1711-76) was a seminal Scottish philosopher. I recently read a book of essays about his writings. (The Cambridge Companion to Hume.)
He was not of course the first religious skeptic. But no one before had ever tackled the subject with such methodological seriousness, making the analytical case against religious belief in a compelling, indeed devastating, way.
Yet there are odd passages in his work seeming to suggest he nevertheless remained a believer. This, one of the commentators suggests, can be taken with a grain of salt. As a kind of protection Hume donned. Because at that time a religious dissenter could still incur very severe penalty.
I found a couple of points worth talking about.
A key defense for belief in God was (and still is) the “argument from design.” The orderliness of existence seeming to require a conscious hand. People can’t quite accept that it all just happened by itself. But there are several dispositive answers.
One is that our scientific understanding does now more or less fully account for how things came to be, with no need for a creator. The development of all life on Earth is totally explained by evolution through natural selection; indeed, given its start with the simplest of single-celled organisms (naturally occurring), flowering into the richness of life we see was simply to be expected. And, more broadly, the clockwork of the cosmos is a function of the physics we know.
The second point (per Hume) is that if you still think it all somehow needs a creator, why not apply that same logic to the creator himself? What brought him into being? Indeed, the idea of a God is actually far more astonishing than the idea of the Universe, and of life on Earth, which of course we know do exist. It’s vastly dicier to posit something no one’s ever seen. While waving away the far thornier philosophical question of how he came to be.
But Hume advanced still another good point. All those religious arguments implicitly juxtapose the “ordered cosmos” we inhabit against some hypothetical alternative — call it a chaotic universe. As if that’s what we’d have, but for God’s intercession. Yet we can make no such comparison. Cannot set the ordered cosmos which does exist against some picture of chaos which does not. Cannot deem what exists somehow less probable than something that doesn’t and, for all we know, never could have existed.
Order is what we have. And having it, furthermore, makes sense in light of our understandings of physics; while some alternative chaos probably would not. Thus it makes no sense either to talk about a God somehow needed to “bring order out of chaos.”
This calls to mind the “anthropic” fallacy — the notion that if the Universe’s parameters (like the strength of gravity) were just a wee bit different, planets could not have formed — hence nor could we humans. So supposedly the Universe was carefully tailored for that purpose. But if those parameters were different, we wouldn’t be here to talk about it. That we live in a cosmos where our existence is possible is scarcely surprising.
Meantime, our Universe began with the Big Bang. Why suppose that was a unique event? We can’t know about other bangs, and hence other universes. But they’d make it even less improbable that we find ourselves in the one universe where we are possible. (It might seemingly occupy all the space there is —in our universe. But other ones could occupy other spaces. And remember too that ours began in a space infinitely small.)
All the foregoing leads to the more fundamental question of why is there something and not nothing? A truly unnerving question. Either the Universe had a start — and there was nothing before — or else there was always something, never nothing — and how could either be true? What does account for there being so much “stuff” — rather than eternal nothingness? I’ve discussed a book on this subject, whose author Jim Holt wound up attempting a logical argument explaining why eternal nothingness would be impossible. It went on for many pages, without success I think. But anyhow, just saying God somehow answers the question helps not at all.
Hume also tackled the morality issue. Basically, we don’t get morality from religion; rather, religion gets it from us. Incorporating moral ideas that come naturally to us, from three sources. One is evolution that favored groups with greater social cooperation, because that enhanced survivability and reproduction; and human groups with morality norms worked better. Secondly, our natural human sympathy and empathy for others makes us favor behaviors that cause them more happiness and less suffering. Thirdly, we do it because that’s how we wish to be treated ourselves (the “golden rule”); and if you want to live in a society where that’s practiced, it behooves you to behave accordingly yourself.
Religion merely incorporates all this. As one essayist in the book points out, this morality is “a matter of common human experience, not . . . surprising information conveyed by a God on Mount Sinai.”
But Hume went further, seeing that religion doesn’t just embody this natural morality, but actually messes with it. Screwing it up with confusions introduced by false dogmas. Hume says a genuine crime against morality (or “sin”) is something that reduces human happiness or causes suffering. But religions have the unfortunate tendency to invent rules obedience to which reduces human happiness and causes suffering.
Many sexual prohibitions fall into that category. Not at all derived from our natural morality, but meshugas superimposed on it. Certainly true of anathematizing non-standard sexual relations, over which humans in a state of nature wouldn’t have bat an eyelash. Also in this regard Hume wrote about suicide — something he didn’t dare publish in his lifetime.
I would add that Christianity in particular has caused widespread, immense psychological suffering through the ages with a moral system that includes Hell. Scaring the wits out of believers. This idea of eternal torture is itself a horrific affront to the morality that’s natural to humans, making morality not an enhancement of life, but a bane. It’s profoundly sick.