Philosophy of Religion

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

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David Hume

1779

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is Hume's most radical and carefully crafted work — a devastating philosophical examination of the arguments for the existence of God and for divine attributes, presented as a dialogue between three characters: Cleanthes (the natural theologian who argues from design), Demea (the orthodox fideist who insists on God's incomprehensibility), and Philo (the sceptic, generally taken to be Hume's own voice). Written over three decades and published posthumously in 1779, three years after Hume's death, the work subjects the design argument to sustained and systematic critique: Philo argues that the analogy between the universe and a machine is weak and imprecise; that the universe might equally well be explained by other principles (chance, generation, vegetation); that the inference from design to a designer provides at most an argument for a finite, imperfect, possibly multiple or anthropomorphic deity; and that the argument from evil — the existence of suffering and imperfection — is not convincingly defeated by any appeal to divine purposes we cannot fully comprehend. The Dialogues also critique the cosmological argument and the argument from miracles, and raise the problem of what religious language means if God is utterly unlike anything in human experience. The work is a masterpiece of philosophical prose and dramatic irony — Cleanthes often speaks most eloquently, but Philo always gets the better of the argument — and has set the terms for the philosophy of religion ever since.