atheism for lent, day 8
Today we’re studying David Hume, who wrote a thing his friends thought would be so incendiary and divisive, they told him he shouldn’t let it out into the world until after he was dead. His nephew, David Hume the Younger, finally published it in 1779, three years after Hume the Elder’s death. AND, initially, it didn’t name either the author or the publisher.
Speaking purely from the standpoint of an author, I would love to write something so provoking that my friends tell me “naw, the world is NOT ready for that shit.” I mean, it’s pretty much every author’s dream to write something that powerful?
Anywhich, the publication in question is Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and you can read it here. In this work, Hume gives us three characters representing three different positions on the existence of God:
Cleanthes: we can gain knowledge about the existence and essence of God by studying the world around us
Demea: God exists, but we aren’t able to comprehend God’s nature
Philo: maybe God exists; but even if so, God isn’t very good or competent
For AfL purposes, we are looking at Cleanthes’s “design” argument and Philo’s objections to it.
Via Cleanthes, Hume describes the world around us as one big machine subdivided into innumerable smaller machines, all of which function in themselves and function together so beautifully you could cry. As we look at things that humans have made, we see that every produced item has someone who produced it, and each item reflects human intelligence and wisdom. Therefore, the “machines” of the world also have someone who produced them, and each of them reflects an intelligence and wisdom similar to humanity’s but in proportion to the “grandeur” of the made things.
Cleanthes’s argument is a posteriori, arguing from experience of the universe.
Via Philo, Hume rebuts that just because something holds true for “A” doesn’t mean that the same holds true for “B”: just because a human’s circulatory systems functions a certain way doesn’t mean that a frog’s does too. Just because we know a house has a builder doesn’t mean that the universe, which is infinitely more complicated, has a Builder. To say that it does have a Builder is pretty damn broad guesswork.
Furthermore, says Philo (Hume?), if a Made Thing really does reflect aspects of its Maker, then you can’t say that a finite world points at an infinite Worldmaker. Besides, there are so many things wrong, dysfunctional, and nonsensical about our universe, you can’t point at it and call its “Maker” wholly right, supremely functional, and superlatively wise. It just doesn’t work. Maybe “God” is wholly right, supremely functional, and superlatively wise, but you can’t prove it by this universe.
Philo also notes that even if the universe were what we perceive as perfect, that still doesn’t prove a perfect Maker. We can look at a super well-designed ship and perceive it as perfect — and find out that the carpenter who built it is a clueless plagiarist of someone else’s design. We can also see that it took a whole bunch of skilled workers to build the ship — why not assume that a whole bunch of deities got together to build the universe, instead of just one deity? There’s no way we can know or even figure out anything substantial about any potential deity or deities. All we have are assumptions based on limited human intellect and experience.
Philo concludes this section by summing up: even if the universe was designed, we don’t have nearly enough information or brainpower to learn or understand anything definite about the “Designer” other than, based on the “evidence” of how our universe runs,
“…it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him.”
–David Hume (the Elder), Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
Reflecting on today’s reading, Dr. Peter Rollins points out that if Hume had made Philo an atheist, the Dialogues wouldn’t be nearly so controversial. I agree. It’s way more threatening for someone who’s “on your team” to question the existing authority/belief structure than to encounter the same doubts in someone from the “opposition.” For a theist to doubt and question the Theos really gets under the skin of other theists. “If she is asking these questions, what does that say about my beliefs? Am I wrong? Have I believed a lie this whole time?”
And that sort of self-reflection terrifies a lot of believers. They can’t sit with it. They can’t go through it in order to find out what might be on the other side. They fear the self-reflection, they fear the fear, and they fear the Wholly Unknown that might be on the other side of it all.
So, they must shut down the questions and either reject or consume the questioner. By “consume,” I mean “convert.” “I want her to stay in my life, but I can’t tolerate how uncomfortable she makes me feel about my own beliefs. I must convert her!”
But they can’t convert her. Because she knows that if their God exists, then that God is an asshole and worthy neither of our belief nor our worship.