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Religion's ‘Foundation in Reason’: The Common Sense of Hume's Natural History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

M. Jamie Ferreira
M. Jamie Ferreira*
Affiliation:
Department of Religious Studies, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA22903, USA
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Extract

David Hume’s critique of religion reveals what seems to be a vacillation in his commitment to an argument-based paradigm of legitimate believing. On the one hand, Hume assumes such a traditional (argumentbased) model of rational justification of beliefs in order to point to the weakness of some classical arguments for religious belief (e.g., the design argument), to chastise the believer for extrapolating to a conclusion which outstrips its evidential warrant. On the other hand, Hume, ‘mitigated’ or naturalist skeptic that he is, at other times rejects an argumentbased paradigm of certainty and truth, and so sees as irrelevant the traditional or ‘regular’ model of rational justification; he places a premium on instinctive belief, as both unavoidable and (usually) more reliable than reasoning. On this view, a forceful critique of religion would have to fault it, not for failing to meet criteria of rational argument (failing to proportion belief to the evidence), but (as Hume sometimes seems to) for failing to be the right sort of instinct.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , December 1994 , pp. 565 - 581
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1987

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References

1 Terence Penelhum refers to this as the tension between Hume the secularizer and Hume the skeptic, ‘Natural Belief and Religious Belief in Hume’s Philosophy,’ The Philosophical Quarterly 33 (1983) 166-81.

2 See An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 3rd ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, ed.; rev. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1975), 55, 106; but note that instincts can be ‘fallacious and deceitful,’ 159.

3 H.E. Root, ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1956), 21; in his introduction Root asserts that the answer to the first question is the subject of the Dialogues (10) and that Hurne ‘saw fit to deal in two separate works with these two sorts of questions about religion’ (11)— but this ignores the way in which it is dealt with within the Natural History.

4 ‘The Argument of the Natural History,’ Hume Studies 17 (1991) 141-59; see 142 and 154-5. Keith Yandell too writes that ‘its foundation in human reason is nil, for herejustification is in question’ (’Hume on Religious Belief,’ in Livingston, Donald W. and King, James T. eds., Hume: A Re-evaluation [New York: Fordham University Press 1976] 109-25Google Scholar; see 116); he concludes to religion’s ‘(non-existent) foundation in human reason,’ Hume’s ‘Inexplicable Mystery’: His Views on Religion (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1990), 34 (hereafter HIM).

5 See my ‘You Can’t See Tuesday, Can You?: Hume on Religion, Universality, and Instincts.’

6 Root reads the contrast as one between ‘cause’ and ‘truth’ or ‘reasons for believing it’; he even equates ‘the truth of beliefs’ with ‘their foundation in reason’ (’Introduction to the Natural History of Religion,’ 10); there is, however, absolutely no reason to equate ‘foundation’ with ‘truth.’ Terence Penelhum reads it as ‘a clearly stated distinction between the arguments that could be offered for such a belief and the actual sources in human nature that it has’ (David Hume: An Introduction to His Philosophical System [West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press 1992], 187); there is no necessary equation between ‘foundation’ and ‘arguments,’ as will become clear, but the bigger problem with such an apparently plausible reading of the contrast is that it allows (non-argumentative) reason into the category of historical ‘actual sources in human nature.’

7 Yandell suggests that no ‘careful version of the argument from design’ is presented in the Natural History (HIM, 21), but in what seems an echo of Cleanthes’s claim, Hume writes: ‘Were men led into the apprehension of invisible, intelligent power by a contemplation of the works of nature, they could never possibly entertain any conception but of one single being, who bestowed existence and order on this vast machine, and adjusted all its parts, according to one regular plan or connected system’ (26, emphasis mine); he says too that whoever would ‘reason from the admirable contrivance of natural objects … must suppose the world to be the workmanship of that divine being, the original cause of all things’ (38, emphasis mine).

8 Although Hume uses the word ‘inference’ loosely on occasion (as when he says that passionate hopes and fears must have motivated ‘such barbarians’ to ‘lead them into any inference concerning invisible intelligent power’ [28]), such inference differs from the ‘process of argument’ which he says could not have led them into theism (42). He allows that ‘thinking,’ ‘reflection,’ and even ‘enquiry’ are prompted by the passions of fear and hope, but these differ from enquiries concerning the ‘frame of nature’ (28).

9 HIM, 22; Root claims that Hume’s account of our non-rational response to those powers ‘may be … not so far from the elegant design argument of the Deists as Hume thought. The fact that men wish to hypostatize these unknown causes, real or imaginary, could be taken as evidence for a deep human conviction in the ultimate orderliness and explicability of things. It is like a more sophisticated teleology in that it does insist upon the existence of causes and rules out the possibility of pure chance. Hume did not draw this comparison, nor, when dealing with religion, was he anxious to suppose that there might be a kind of reasonableness even in human hopes, fears, and imaginings’ (Introduction to the Natural History, 12); that is, Root allows that something like what Yandell suggests may be the case, but concludes (as I do) that Hume himself did not draw, or want to draw, this conclusion.

10 This fits his claim that ‘it scarcely seems possible, that anyone of good understanding should reject that idea, when once it is suggested to him’ (74); he also claims that a notion can ‘coincide, by chance, with the principles of reason and true philosophy,’ though one is not ‘guided to that notion’ by reason (43).

11 See n. 6 above.

12 A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, ed.; rev. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1978), 179; see too Enquiry, 108.

13 Yandell’s proposal (’Hume on Religious Belief’) about a ‘rational propensity’ needs to be understood against this background.

14 As Cleanthes suggests in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part III.

15 Yandell’s proposal that it is a propensity ‘of reason’ depends for him on the claims concerning ‘argument’ as well as the claim that such believing is ‘rational’ (’Hume on Religious Belief,’ 113).

16 Even allowing ambiguity in the word ‘genuine,’ I see no reason not to take seriously the apparent apposition between ‘primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion’ and belief in ‘an intelligent author.’

17 Yandell notes that the fact that one ‘cannot suspend judgment regarding a proposition’ is compatible with the falsity of the proposition (HIM, 21-2). Of the literature discussing a contrast between ‘natural beliefs’ and religious beliefs, works by J .C.A. Gaskin (Hume’s Philosophy of Religion [London: Macmillan Press 1978]) and Penelhum (’Natural Belief’ and David Hume: An Introduction are particularly useful.

18 Note Hume’s claims that the philosopher ‘purposes only to represent the common sense of mankind in more beautiful and engaging colours’ and that ‘philosophical decisions are nothing but the reflection of common life, methodized and corrected’ (Enquiry, 7, 162).

19 I here draw and depend on the more detailed argument and textual support in Chapter 111 of my Scepticism and Reasonable Doubt (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1986).

20 He writes to John Stewart, Feb. 1754: ‘But allow me to tell you, that I never asserted so absurd a Proposition as that any thing might arise without a Cause: I only maintain’ d that our Certainty of the Falshood of that Proposition proceeded neither from Intuition nor Demonstration; but from another Source. That Caesar existed, that there is such an Island as Sicily; for these Propositions, I affirm, we have no demonstrative nor intuitive Proof. Woud you infer that I deny their Truth, or even their Certainty? There are many different kinds of Certainty; and some of them as satisfactory to the Mind, tho perhaps not so regular, as the demonstrative kind’ (The Letters of David Hume, Vol. 1, J.Y.T. Greig, ed. [Oxford: Clarendon Press 1969 (1932)], 187).

21 Enquiry, 110, 56n; there he also claims non-demonstrative reasoning can be ‘just’ (12, 34), and desires a ‘true metaphysics’ (12).

22 For the sake of simplicity, I take the excessive skeptic to allow that we cannot suspend certain judgments (see Treatise, 187); though elsewhere the skeptic does not allow this much—e.g., Enquiry, 41).

23 The dimension of Hume’s thought which I emphasize is, admittedly, in tension with other elements in his thought, as was perceived by Thomas Reid, who charged Hume with inconsistency (see my Scepticism and Reasonable Doubt, Chs. 4-6 on Reid).

24 This applies to ‘even philosophers themselves, for the greatest part of their lives’ (Treatise, 206).

25 The Treatise account makes explicit the earlier stalemate and leaves this one implicit.

26 Gaskin, 128-9; Penelhum, ‘Natural Belief,’ 171, 174. Penelhum assesses Gaskin’s view of ‘reasonable’ belief without ever noting this aspect (’Natural Belief,’ 171); this shows how little Gaskin has brought this to the fore. Yandell too equates ‘restrained skepticism’ simply with ‘psychologically firm, shared convictions being nonetheless rationally unfounded’ (HIM, 10).

27 Gaskin, 133

28 Yandell writes: ‘It is Hume’s contention that acceptance of theism is a product of man’s rational capacities; the propensity to theism is a propensity of reason’ (’Hume on Religious Belief,’ 113). He writes too that ‘Hume’ claim is that there is a rational propensity-a propensity in part constitutive of the faculty of reason— of this sort: upon observing natural order, to ascribe that order to an intelligent cause,’ and that religion’s ‘foundation in reason is really only its origin in propensities of reason that are less fundamental to human nature than are the propensities of the imagination’ (HIM, 32, 34).

29 Hume’s suggestion that Theology or Divinity has a ‘foundation in reason, so far as it is supported by experience’ (Enquiry, 165) is commonly read as ironically implying that there is no support in experience; one could, however, read it as affirming as much (though only as much) ‘foundation in reason’ as is constituted by the ‘experience’ of an instinctive belief which is underminable only by reflection which itself has no ‘foundation in reasoning.’ This fits his account of the lack of a foundation in reasoning as lack of ‘experience of their connexion’ (Enquiry, 153).

30 Conceding a ‘foundation in reason’ stops short of his despairing conclusion at Treatise, 217.

31 Penelhum, ‘Natural Belief,’ 172; the passage continues: ‘but retain the sharp distinction between it and all forms of actual religion, since the latter are not universal.’

32 Penelhum also claims that ‘in the Introduction to the Natural History … Hume pays uncritical lip-service to the alleged fact that “the whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author’“—’we can see [this] from what he says about the quality of this foundation when he examines it in the Dialogues’ (’Natural Belief,’ 172). But since nothing said ‘in the introduction’ about religion’s foundation in reason conflicts with the critique of the design argument in the Dialogues, his position ‘in the introduction’ need not be ‘uncritical lip-service.’

33 This is usually what leads people like Yandell to read ‘argument’ passages as claims about intuitive or instinctive responses of reason to triggering circumstances.

34 The former kind of reference predominates in chapters 1, 2, 4, 6-8, the latter in chapters 3 and 5.

35 ‘Even at this day, and in EUROPE, ask any of the vulgar, why he believes in an omnipotent creator of the world; he will never mention the beauty of final causes, of which he is wholly ignorant…’ (41); ‘since the vulgar, in nations, which have embraced the doctrine of theism, still build it upon irrational and superstitious principles, they are never led into that opinion by any process of argument’ (42, emphasis mine).

36 Gaskin claims that Hume ‘does not distinguish between the historical conditions in which religious belief originated and the conditions which continue to operate to produce religious belief in subsequent periods,’ but that there will be some, ‘reasonable’ people, who are ‘not a prey to conditions Hume describes’ (146). Although Hume says in the Natural History that the ‘vulgar’ are ‘alone liable to corrupt any principle or opinion’ (26), he insists that once philosophy gets involved, ‘she is at every tum perverted to serve the purposes of superstition’ (54).

37 This is consistent with his claim that the understanding ‘entirely subverts itself’ (Treatise, 267).

38 See n. 5 above.

39 Hume allows that instinctive beliefs are not homogeneous; reasoning concerning cause and effect is ‘considerably different’ from the conclusion from the ‘coherence of appearances’ (Treatise, 197); although instinctive causal reasoning implies no reflective back and forth, the account of belief in continued, distinct existence does.

40 Yandell argues for a consistent account, claiming that the Natural History ‘expresses straightforwardly theses’ which are implied in the Dialogues and that the passages which seem to support the design argument ‘must be seen in a wide Humean context’ which precludes such support (’Hume on Religious Belief,’ 111; HIM, 16).

41 Although Cleanthes’s conclusion in Part II is more moderate, his conclusion at the end is one which ‘represents us as the workmanship of a Being perfect good, wise, and powerful; who created us for happiness; and who, having implanted in us immeasurable desires of good, will prolong our existence to all eternity .. .’ (Dialogues, Part XII).