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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 (1514-1557) 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)]] In early modern Christian Europe, theological knowledge was deemed to derive from two sources. '''Natural religion''' attempted to demonstrate God's existence and nature through reason, logic, and observation of the natural world. '''Revealed religion''' was based on the premise that the text of the Bible was divinely inspired and thus a source of reliable theological knowledge. [[CiteRef::Fieser (2016)]]
Descartes' rationalism had a proof of God's existence at its foundation, but it was also a challenge to the theological methodology established by Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), which stressed the limitations of human reason, and the need to rely on Biblical revelation. Descartes instead claimed a human capacity to know God and nature through reason alone. However, his 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, and eschewed metaphysics and speculative hypotheses. [[CiteRef::Rogers (1982)]] Both Newton and Locke were nevertheless devoutly religious, though they held non-standard beliefs. Newton authored an entire volume on Biblical prophesies. [[CiteRef::Mandelbrote (2004)]] Like many natural philosophers associated with the Royal Society, they supported a form of natural religion that sought to use the experimental method to demonstrate that the universe exhibited the order and purposefulness of a designed artifact crafted by an all-powerful Intelligence. Hume's empiricism led him to express skeptical doubts about doubted both revealed religion and natural religion as sources of knowledge. In his ''Enquiries concerning Human Understanding'' (1748) In Hume's ''Dialogues on Natural Theology'' (1779) was a response to such hopes, and was to raise devastating objections to thempublished strong arguments against both. 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 (2017)]]
|Major Contributions=Hume was one of a number of eighteenth century British philosophers whose work was inspired primarily by Newton's physical theories and experimental philosophy. Hume and Colin MacLaurin (1698-1746) believed that the mind's operations could be studied by broadly Newtonian observational methods, and in both cases this led them to forms of local skepticism. Joseph Priestly (1733-1804) and David Hartley (1705-1757) applied Newtonianism to both the operations of the mind and to its substance, becoming materialists. George Turnbull (1698-1748) and his pupil Thomas Reid(1710-1796) sought to ground Newtonian empiricism in a common-sense understanding of the world. [[CiteRef::Nichols and Yaffe (2016)]]