Hume, David

Hume, David (1711–76). Philosopher, religious sceptic, historian, and leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment.

His most important philosophical works were: A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748), and An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). In them Hume took the empiricism of Locke and Berkeley a stage further, reaching sceptical conclusions about the foundations of our knowledge of the external world, about inductive reasoning and rational ethics (he pointed to the logical gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought’), and about the existence of the self and a necessary causal nexus in nature.

A similar scepticism is seen in his works on religion. His Natural History of Religion (1757) foreshadows later anthropological accounts of religion in its investigation of the psychological and environmental factors influencing religious belief.

His essay ‘Of Miracles’ argues that an appeal to miracles cannot serve as the foundation of a religion, for it is always much more probable that our evidence for the universal and regular laws of nature will preponderate over the evidence for putative miracles, which Hume defines as violations of such laws.

Hume's most substantial work on religion is his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (written in 1751–7, revised later, and published post-humously in 1779), much of which consists of a critique of Enlightenment natural theology, especially the teleological argument for the existence of God.

Thus already in the 18th cent. there is a radical questioning of the Enlightenment project of rational theism. Unlike many of the French philosophes of his own time, however, and also his own later followers, Hume did not claim to be an atheist, for he regarded atheism too as going beyond the available evidence.