Humanist Hero: David Hume by Lewis Wolpert
Lewis Wolpert considers the miraculous (or not) David Hume
David Hume
My humanist hero is David Hume (1711-1776) the Scottish philosopher and historian. He criticized the standard proofs for God’s existence, traditional notions of God’s nature, the connection between morality and religion, and the rationality of belief in miracles.
He also advanced theories on the origin of popular religious beliefs, grounding such notions in human psychology rather than in rational argument or divine revelation. He argued that “Our most holy religion is founded on Faith not reason” and he maintained that science and religion are mutually exclusive.
Religion, he argued is not even a form of knowing, it is rather a complex form of feeling. Believers could not legitimately employ material events or rational arguments to support their religious beliefs. In The Natural History of Religion he says:
Examine the religious principles, which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are anything but sick men’s dreams.
For Hume, religion simply postulated unknown causes. In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) he dismissed miracles as “no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.”
This post is the first in a series written by members, friends and Distinguished Supporters of the British Humanist Association on their own “humanist heroes”.
You can find out more at www.humanism.org.uk/humanism/humanist-tradition/heroes
Professor Lewis Wolpert is a distinguished developmental biologist and Vice-President of the British Humanist Association. He is Emeritus Professor of Biology at University College London.
Yeh, Hume’s the daddy alright. I haven’t checked but I’m pretty sure that he’s the one from whom we derive the term “Humanist”, lol ;-p It’s good that our patriarch lived in enlightened times. Scotsman as well, what more do you want?
Nice one CJ! The original hume-anist.
I think that a lot of old deists and philosophers who didn’t quite reject religion were probably atheists actually, it’s just they couldn’t quite come out and say it. Going even as far as they did was difficult enough. But respect to Hume for making it pretty clear where he stood.
It would have been nice to see more about Hume’s view on social and moral issues here, though.
Hume was indeed an admirable figure, as much for his character and the manner of his death (see http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/smitha/humedead.htm) as for his scepticism about religion (which in his lifetime he was relatively discreet about, at least in writing).
But I don’t know what “religion and science are mutually exclusive” means, and wonder if that’s really what Hume said or meant. If religion is a “complex form of feeling” as Hume is also supposed to have said, then it’s certainly different from science but not incompatible with it. Religion and science have co-existed for centuries, often within the same people, and though some religious extremists and minorities such as creationists are hostile to some aspects of science (though not usually to medical science), it is surely true that most religious believers have no trouble accommodating science into their world view, and that some scientists are religious believers. It’s only when religions pretend to explain the world better than science that the two become “mutually exclusive” – and many (most?) religions seem to have dropped that kind of claim.
Hume was courageous to express his views about the non-existence of a deity at a time when people could and were still be persecuted and killed for such views. This may explain is discretion however he was still pretty explicit.