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By Hume's time, [[Aristotle]]'s (384 BC-322 BC) teleological account of causation had been rejected in favor of the '''corpuscular mechanistic''' view of causation espoused by Descartes, Locke, and the Royal Society. In this view, derived from ancient atomism, material bodies are made of invisibly small particles, called corpuscles. The only form of causation is mechanical, by direct physical contact of bodies or their constituent corpuscles [[CiteRef::DePierris (2006)]] Natural philosophers continued to accept Aristotle's distinction between scientific knowledge and belief. Scientific knowledge was taken to be knowledge of causes and consisted of '''demonstration'''; proving the necessary connection between cause and effect. Locke supported this view of knowledge and made the popular notion of a hypothetical hidden corpuscular microstructure and the associated notion of a metaphysically necessary connection between cause and effect central to his system. He nonetheless viewed demonstrative knowledge as seldom attainable because of the unobservability of corpuscles [[CiteRef::DePierris (2006)]][[CiteRef::Kochiras (2014)]] Although many early eighteenth century thinkers regarded Newton's theories and Locke's empiricism to constitute a unified system, there was a distinct tension between them, which Hume recognized. Newton had been unable to explain his gravitational force in terms of a corpuscular mechanism. He saw his inductive method as an alternative to the demands of a corpuscularism that stood in the way of the acceptance of a mathematically lawful gravitational force on its own terms. Hume's Newton inspired skepticism of speculative metaphysical hypotheses led him to reject corpuscularism, and his enthusiastic championing of Newton's inductive method led him to challenge Locke's concept of causation, and Aristotle's taxonomy of knowledge and opinion. Hume translated this latter distinction into a distinction between relations of ideas, which are discoverable by thought (for example, mathematical truths), and matters of fact, which depend on how the world actually is. This distinction became known as '''Hume's Fork'''. Rejecting necessary causation, his careful analysis of Newton's inductive method led him to identify '''Hume's Problem of Induction''', questioning our ability to rationally justify knowledge of causation obtained by induction. [[CiteRef::Hume (1975)]][[CiteRef:: Morris and Brown (2016)]]
By the time he started work on ''A Treatise of Human Nature'' at the age of 23, Hume had become skeptical of religious belief. [[CiteRef:: Morris and Brown (2016)]] The term '''atheism''' was coined by Sir John Cheke almost two hundred years earlier in 1540, to refer to a lack of belief in divine providence. The term assumed its modern meaning of disbelief in the existence of God, as divine non-existence emerged as a disquieting possibility in the seventeenth century. [[CiteRef:: Hyman (2007)]] Although Descartes' rationalism had a proof of God's existence at its foundation, it was nonetheless a challenge to the theological methodology established by Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). This methodology stressed the limitations of human reason, and the necessity of reliance on divine revelation and the text of the Bible. Descartes instead stressed the human capacity to know God and nature through reason alone. Descartes' rationalist argument for God's existence and guarantorship of the certainty of scientific knowledge was soon rejected as circular. [[CiteRef:: Hyman (2007)]][[CiteRef::Cottingham (1992)]] It was supplanted by Newton's experimental philosophy and Locke's empiricism, both of which stressed experience and observation as sources of the limited knowledge to which humans could aspire. It eschewed metaphysics and speculative hypotheses. [[CiteRef::Rogers (1982)]] Though they held non-standard beliefs, both Newton and Locke were devoutly religious. Like many natural philosophers associated with the Royal Society, they rejected traditional rationalist proofs of God's existence and instead espoused the '''design argument''', supposing that the experimental method could demonstrate that the universe was an artifact crafted by a cosmic Designer. Hume's ''Dialogues on Natural Theology'' (1779) was a response to such hopes, and was to raise devastating objections to them. Unlike Locke, Hume saw that empiricism must place God's existence among those speculative questions to be eschewed. [[CiteRef::Hyman (2007)]] Doubts about God's existence also arose among French intellectuals in the mid-eighteenth century, with the first to openly proclaim himself an atheist being Denis Diderot (1713-1784). [[CiteRef:: Hyman (2007)]][[CiteRef::Bristow (20172010)]]
|Major Contributions=Hume's main philosophical contributions were made via several works. The first was ''A Treatise of Human Nature'' published in three volumes in 1739 and 1740, when Hume was 29 years old. It was not a success in his own time. Hume wrote that the work fell "deadborn from the press", [[CiteRef::Morris and Brown (2016)|p. 4]] and he lamented that "I was carry'd away by the Heat of Youth & Invention to publish too precipitately So vast an Undertaking, plan’d before I was one and twenty, & compos’d before twenty five, must necessarily be very defective. I have repented my Haste a hundred, & a hundred times”. [[CiteRef:: Norton (2009)|p. 25]] It is however, today regarded as a major and important work. Hume recast the material into two later publications, ''Enquiries concerning Human Understanding'', published in 1748, ''concerning the Principles of Morals'' published in 1751. Because of its controversial nature, Hume had ''Dialogs concerning Natural Religion'' published posthumously in 1779, three years after his death. [[CiteRef::Morris and Brown (2016)]][[CiteRef:: Norton (2009)]]
