7 - Empiricism and religious belief

Summary

We have been examining some of the problems faced by empiricism: the nature of experience, the a priori and skepticism. In this chapter, we shall turn to the application of empiricism to religious belief. As we have seen, all of the empiricists reject a priori arguments for the existence of God, such as Descartes's argument that he must exist because he is infinitely perfect and existence is a perfection. Hume's response to this is typical of empiricists. He says that “there is an evident absurdity in pretending to demonstrate a matter of fact, or to prove it by any arguments a priori”, since “Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent” (DNR: IX, 189). But this is not the most interesting application of empiricism to the question. The main epistemic question is whether there are empirical grounds for beliefs about God's intentions. We shall consider three arguments: (i) the argument from design, which claims to prove that the universe was created by an intelligence; (ii) the argument that we can know his intentions from religious books such as the Bible or Koran because they report miracles that can be supported by empirical evidence; and (iii) arguments from religious experience and mystical states. The first three sections will deal with design, Hume's criticisms and the effect of Darwin's theory of natural selection on the question.