The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought

Chapter 9: Hume’s Defense of True Religion

• Chapter 9 • Hume’s Defense of True Religion   How is the deity disfigured in our representation of him! —David Hume, The Natural History of Religion On the back cover of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of David Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion we read that in these works is to be found “the most formidable attack upon the rationality of religious faith ever mounted by a philosopher .”1 This statement reflects a common view of Hume. But it is the view of many professional philosophers as well. A. J. Ayer maintains that one of the principal aims of Hume’s philosophy was the “discrediting not only of the superstitious types of theism but of any form of religious belief.”2 Manfred Kuehn claims that Hume’s philosophy of religion implies “the impossibility of any rational religious faith.”3 Sebastian Gardener holds that, in Hume’s view, “Religious beliefs, and the whole edifice of metaphysical speculation, have no ground whatsoever .”4 In his book-length study of Hume’s philosophy of religion, Keith Yandell states, “Hume is a critic of natural theology and believes that we have no good reason whatever to think that theism is true.”5 J.C.A. Gaskin, British Hume scholar, joins the chorus, claiming that since Hume took himself to have shown that there are no 251 252 • Lee Hardy rational grounds for religious belief, such belief must be explained entirely by way of natural causes.6 Philosophers looking for antitheistic arguments have found no shortage of ammunition for their assault on religious belief in the pages of Hume’s writings. At the same time, philosophers of religious conviction, who, like Nietzsche, understand the value of having enemies , have devoted a great deal of energy and attention to Hume’s antitheistic arguments. Typically, both take Hume to represent the unalloyed forces of secular rational criticism against the traditions and propriety of religious belief. In this essay I intend to challenge this picture of Hume. It represents , in my view, something of a retroactive secularization of the historical record as well as a grave distortion of Hume’s position on religious matters. It should be clear from a reading of the Natural History that Hume does not reject religion en bloc. He is careful to make a distinction between true and false religion. He attacks the latter but endorses the former. The beliefs constituent of true religion are rationally justified, in Hume’s professed view, but easily bypassed, overlaid, and perverted by the all-too-human propensities at work in false religion . Thus Hume’s criticism of religion is more akin to the prophetic tradition, in which false religion is denounced in favor of true religion, than to the wholesale rejection of religion we should expect to find in the work of an unreserved atheist. Granted, Hume’s philosophical theism is much thinner than the robust theism associated with the JudeoChristian prophetic tradition; granted, too, that much of the positive content of that prophetic tradition will fall, in Hume’s view, on the side of false religion. But Hume is still in the business of sorting out true religion from false religion. He is not invested in the project of rejecting all religion as false or irrational, as he is often represented in the philosophical dialectics of the present age. Hume was well aware of his reputation for irreligion. But he also has his own account of why he is taken for an atheist. It is not because he is an atheist; rather, it is because his theism does not match the requirements of the often vulgar and self-serving theism of those who wish to persecute him. Here Hume identifies strongly with Socrates, who, although “the wisest and most religious of the Greek Philoso- phers,” was nonetheless charged with impiety by the citizens of Athens (Letter, EHU, 117; see also NHR, 186).7 Hume thought he was experiencing a similar fate, but this time in eighteenth-century Edinburgh , the “Athens of the North.” Given that Hume’s philosophy of religion is taken up as tool or target in contemporary debates in the philosophy of religion and is highlighted only for its arguments critical of religious belief, its complexity and richness have almost entirely disappeared from the scene. Obscured is the duality in Hume’s account of religious belief; obscured too is the positive role “true religion...