editor, Administrators
2,020
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
no edit summary
==== Hume's skepticism about theological knowledge ====
In the early modern Christian Europe, theology and natural philosophy were not deemed foreign to one another, but rather seen as compatible parts of an integrated [[Scientific Mosaic|mosaic]] of knowledge. [[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 65]] Theological knowledge derived from observations of nature and its supposed design, the divine revelation of the Bible, and supposed miraculous events where God had intervened directly in human affairs. [[CiteRef::Fieser (2017)]] As a thoroughgoing empiricist, Hume questioned all these sources of knowledge, and rejected theological knowledge as impossible.
In a letter to Henry Home (1696-1782) published in 1737, Hume confessed that he intended to include a skeptical discussion of miracles in his ''Treatise'' but left it out for fear of offending readers. Critics of religion in eighteenth century Europe faced the risk of fine, imprisonment, or worse. [[CiteRef::Fieser (2017)]] Hume did later publish his critique in the ''Enquiry''.
By the eighteenth century ''a priori'' rational arguments for the existence of God,that sought to demonstrate God's existence with mathematical certainty and without appeal to experience, were widely recognized as problematic. Descartes argument, for example, had been exposed as circular. [[CiteRef::Cottingham (1992)]] A dominant progressive strain of theological thought, largely associated with the British Royal Society, instead sought to demonstrate God's existence with probability by showing that the universe possesses the order and purposefulness of a designed artifact created by an all-powerful Intelligence. In his ''Dialogues concerning Natural Religion'', published posthumously because of its inflammatory nature, Hume raised devastating objections to this design argument. [[CiteRef::Morris and Brown (2016)]]
