of this necessary development our disposition to form general rules was an indispensable component; at later stages, sympathy enables many individuals to pursue the artificial virtues from a combination of self-interest and a concern for others, thus giving the fully developed artificial virtues a foundation in two kinds of motivation. Hume’s Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and his Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals represent his effort to ‘recast’ important aspects of the Treatise into more accessible form. His Essays extend his human-centered philosophical analysis to political institutions, economics, and literary criticism. His best-selling History of England provides, among much else, an extended historical analysis of competing Whig and Tory claims about the origin and nature of the British constitution. Hume’s trenchant critique of religion is found principally in his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Natural History of Religion, and Dialogues. In an effort to curb the excesses of religious dogmatism, Hume focuses his attention on miracles, on the argument from design, and on the origin of the idea of monotheism. Miracles are putative facts used to justify a commitment to certain creeds. Such commitments are often maintained with a mind-numbing tenacity and a disruptive intolerance toward contrary views. Hume argues that the widely held view of miracles as violations of a law of nature is incoherent, that the evidence for even the most likely miracle will always be counterbalanced by the evidence establishing the law of nature that the miracle allegedly violates, and that the evidence supporting any given miracle is necessarily suspect. His argument leaves open the possibility that violations of the laws of nature may have occurred, but shows that beliefs about such events lack the force of evidence needed to justify the arrogance and intolerance that characterizes so many of the religious.
Hume’s critique of the argument from design has a similar effect. This argument purports to show that our well-ordered universe must be the effect of a supremely intelligent cause, that each aspect of this divine creation is well designed to fulfill some beneficial end, and that these effects show us that the Deity is caring and benevolent. Hume shows that these conclusions go well beyond the available evidence. The pleasant and well-designed features of the world are balanced by a good measure of the unpleasant and the plainly botched. Our knowledge of causal connections depends on the experience of constant conjunctions. Such connections cause the vivacity of a present impression to be transferred to the idea associated with it, and leave us believing in that idea. But in this case the effect to be explained, the universe, is unique, and its cause unknown. Consequently, we cannot possibly have experiential grounds for any kind of inference about this cause. On experiential grounds the most we can say is that there is a massive, mixed effect, and, as we have through experience come to believe that effects have causes commensurate to them, this effect probably does have a commensurately large and mixed cause. Furthermore, as the effect is remotely like the products of human manufacture, we can say ‘that the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence.’ There is indeed an inference to be drawn from the unique effect in question (the universe) to the cause of that effect, but it is not the ‘argument’ of the theologians nor does it in any way support sectarian pretension or intolerance.
The Natural History of Religion focuses on the question of the origin of religion in human nature, and delivers a thoroughly naturalistic answer: the widespread but not universal belief in invisible and intelligent power can be traced to derivative and easily perverted principles of our nature. Primitive peoples found physical nature not an orderly whole produced by a beneficent designer, but arbitrary and fearsome, and they came to understand the activities of nature as the effect of petty powers that could, through propitiating worship, be influenced to ameliorate their lives. Subsequently, the same fears and perceptions transformed polytheism into monotheism, the view that a single, omnipotent being created and still controls the world and all that transpires in it. From this conclusion Hume goes on to argue that monotheism, apparently the more sophisticated position, is morally retrograde. Monotheism tends naturally toward zeal and intolerance, encourages debasing, ‘monkish virtues,’ and proves itself a danger to society: it is a source of violence and a cause of immorality. In contrast, polytheism, which Hume here regards as a form of atheism, is tolerant of diversity and encourages genuine virtues that improve humankind. From a moral point of view, at least this one form of atheism is superior to theism. See also BUNDLE THEORY, CAUSATION, EMPIRICISM , ETHICS , PHILOSOPHY OF RELI – GION , PROBLEM OF INDUCTION , SKEPTICIS. D.F.N.