Hume, Tillotson, and Dialogue XII
Rent from DeepDyve- Hume, Tillotson, and Dialogue XII
Footnotes
1. 'Natural religion' in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries denoted knowledge of the divine which could be had via reason or instinct, independent of any purported special revelation.
2. Of the two best works on Hume's philosophy of religion, J. C. A. Gaskin, Hume's Philosophy of Religion (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, 1988); and K. Yandell, Hume's "Inexplicable Mystery": His Views on Religion (Philadelphia, 1990), only the first examines Hume's critique of the argument from prudence at all (see Hume's Philosophy of Religion, 194-203); but Gaskin's treatment of Hume's critique leaves untouched several important elements of the critique.
3. B. Pascal, Pensées, ed. L. Lafuma, trans. J. Warrington (1670; reprint, London, 1960), 92-96.
4. On Locke, see Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), bk. 2, chap. 21. On Leibniz, see Die Philosophischen Schriften, 3:621. On Craig, see Theologiae Christianae Principia Mathematica (1699), chap. 6. On Paley, see A View of the Evidences of Christianity (1795), pt. 3, chap. 8.
5. Tillotson, "The Wisdom of Being Religious," Sermon 1 in Works of Tillotson (London, 1820), 1:317-89 (hereafter cited as W).
6. I do not mean to suggest that Hume was aware only of the sermon "The Wisdom of Being Religious," but that Hume was aware of Tillotson's claims and arguments as found in several of his sermons. "The Wisdom of Being Religious" is important because (i) it is explicitly mentioned by Hume in his A Letter From A Gentleman to His Friend in Edinburgh (1745; reprint, Edinburgh, 1967), 23, so we know that Hume had read this sermon; (ii) it was one of the best known of Tillotson's sermons; and (iii) it contains all of the elements of Tillotson's argument from prudence.
7. T. Birch, "Life of the Author," in Works of Tillotson, 1:xix-xx. See also L. G. Locke, Tillotson (Copenhagen, 1954).
8. Tillotson may have been aware of the Port Royal Logic version of the wager through Locke with whom Tillotson was in correspondence. See Tillotson, 83.
9. Tillotson's case for (1) is treated extensively in his sermon, "The Advantage of Religion to Societies," Sermon 3 in Works of Tillotson, 1:409-23.
10. In the passage quoted (W 361-62), Tillotson claims that the atheist will naturally dread a superior being who can defeat one's plans and judge one's actions.
11. See also "The Efficacy, Usefulness, and Reasonableness Of Divine Faith," Sermon 223 in Works of Tillotson, 9:258-79. The idea of a grand lie is first found in Plato; see Republic 3:389, 414, 5:459.
12. "Pascalian Wagering," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 16, no. 3 (1986): 437-54.
13. Though Tillotson mentions "odds" and "hazards," he does not incorporate probability values in his version of the wager. His wager is a decision under uncertainty and not a decision under risk: he does not, that is, calculate the expected utility of theistic belief. Pascal was the first to formulate the wager as a decision under risk where the probability-weighted averages of the utility values (the expected utility) determine the right choice.
14. Of course, these principles were not stated explicitly until much later. See Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (London, 1975).
15. For an example of the many-gods objection, see M. Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification (Philadelphia, 1990), 232-34. For a response to the many-gods objection see my "Pascal's Wager and the Many-Gods Objection," International Philosophical Quarterly 31, no. 3 (1991): 309-17.
16. See David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. N. Kemp Smith (1778; reprint, Indianapolis, 1947), 214, 218 (hereafter cited as "D").
17. It should be noted that Philo's first point is interrupted by the second and is not completed until after the second is completed.
18. I will assume that Philo speaks for Hume in this exchange with Cleanthes (D 219-27). Of the three points asserted by Philo in this exchange all three are asserted elsewhere by Hume. On the first point, see The Natural History of Religion (1757), secs. 9 and...
