David Hume for Novice Philosophers. Part II: Religionism in The Academy, Sceptical Limits on Naturalistic Empiricism, and Backgammon

Hume

At the beginning of his academic career, Hume spent time debating Jesuits of the college of La Flèche, where he spent much of his savings during the 4 years there writing “A Treatise of Human Nature”. This marked the beginning of Hume's career of undermining religious thought and belief. Hume is understood to have been opposed to religious enthusiasm, but otherwise often taken to be a believer. 

However, he was later in his career defended against charges of heresy by claims that, as an atheist, Church law did not apply to him. Moreover, his scepticism clearly targets any claims that a god being could be known in any other way than by repeated sense based experience, such that ontological arguments for the existence of a god relying upon a-priori concepts and reasoning cannot stand.

In contrast to Hume's scepticism about certainty about objects of faith, the other two famous Empiricist philosophers were Hume's predecessor John Locke, and his contemporary Bishop George Berkeley, both of whom were also Christians and theologians - particularly Berkeley. This gives one a sound impression of the ongoing strength of representation of Judeo Christian religion in the academy and academic institutions of the time. Hume was all but surrounded by clerics and devouts who thought that the character of God in the Christian Bible represented a real being, and whose peers and allies would tend to aggressively undermine any alternative narratives and commentaries as explanations of life and human existence, and with no real regard for strength of argument or reason.

Berkeley's Empiricism was also underpinned by scepticism. However, Berkeley's scepticism about the reliability of the senses was even stronger than that of Descartes. It led him to Idealism, according to which ideas and the mind are all that exists, and according to which there is in fact no external world at all outside of the mind. All of existence was in fact an idea in the mind of the Biblical character of God - whom Berkeley believed to be a real supernatural entity. (It is not difficult to trace Descartes commitment to the existence of an external world as the creation of the god being that he also believed to exist, since his brain-mind dualism is based upon a metaphysical dualism that regards mind as constituted of real 'spooky mind stuff' that is not the same as the real material stuff that the body is made of.)

Berkeley

Berkeley and Hume were both interested in John Locke's dictum that ideas are representations of objects that cause them via either sense or internal reflection, but that there is no way to know that the objects exist: only the representing ideas. So as with Hume after him, Locke assumes the existence of the external mind-independent world, but recognises that ideas are what is apparent to the mind, and that the mind cannot get past the representing idea to the actual object.

Locke

Unlike Hume and Locke, Berkeley bites the bullet on the inability of the mind to directly perceive any external object, and simply asserts that such things don't really exist apart from perceptions/ideas of persons and in the mind of the Biblical God character whom he believed to be real. (It is somewhat of a puzzle how it can be the case even for Berkeley that the god being he believed existed would not have to be an external entity and not an idea in Berkeley's own mind, but that is another matter). This leads him to his principle of Idealism - esse est percipi: existence is perception or to be is to be perceived. This involves a much stronger scepticism about the senses and their role in knowledge production than that of even Descartes who simply doubts the ability of the senses to provide reliable information and thence knowledge.

Hume rejects Berkeley as effectively solipsistic, and regards that experience is of some external reality, and does not see the entire concept of experience and sense experience as meaningful otherwise. A keystone of both Descartes, Locke, and Berkeley's view is the impression and idea of the reality of the self, and Hume attacks any certainty about this concept outright as circular in A Treatise:

“If any impression gives rise to the idea of a self, that impression must continue invariably the same through the whole course of our lives, since the self is supposed to exist in that manner. But there is no impression constant and invariable. Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other and never all exist at the same time. It cannot therefore be from any of these impressions or from any other that the idea of the self is derived, and,consequently there is no such idea. (
A Treatise of Human Nature, 164. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4705/4705-h/4705-h.htm)

More devastatingly, as indicated in parentheses two paragraphs above, Hume points out that there does not seem to be any way that Berkeley can claim that the god being whose mind is supposed to sustain all of existence is not in fact just an idea in Berkeley's mind. A vicious circularity in both explanatory, conceptual, and metaphysical terms arises, which circularity is arguably simply not recoverable for Berkeley.

However, Hume's scepticism as expressed in both the problem of induction and the inability to truly know the real fact of the matter in causal relations was strong enough to cause his empiricist conclusions serious difficulty. He can't get past his simple and complex sense impressions to causal relations or to external objects either. He has dispensed with a-priori reasoning for the task, and has only probable knowledge based upon regular experiences, which cannot present the detailed nature of causal relations or give the mind access to external objects except by assumption that there is an external nature to be experienced and that the information intuitively associated with it could not come from anywhere else. Any real regularities in nature - and perhaps nature itself - have to remain the consequence of an intuitive assumption supported by and about repetitive experiences. This overpowering of even synthetic a-posteriori reason by his scepticism di not dislodge Hume's naturalism, but did lead Hume to openly brood darkly:

The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another. Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have, I any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron'd with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv'd of the use of every member and faculty. (Treatise 1.4.7.8)

Hume's response is to distract himself with living, eating, and playing backgammon so that the darkness fades. (Treatise 1.4.7.9)

In his attacks on the doctrines of Descartes and Berkeley, Hume takes some care not to bruise theological and general religious sensibilities too openly, although as we will see in part III not so carefully as to avoid expulsion and lifetime exclusion from the academy as a working and tenured philosopher. He clearly places empirical detection of entities as a necessary condition for existence claims:

The existence, therefore, of any being can only be proved by arguments from its cause or its effect; and these arguments are founded entirely on experience. If we reasonà priori, any thing may appear able to produce any thing. The falling of a pebble may, for ought we know, extinguish the sun; or the wish of a man controul the planets in their orbits. It is only experience, which teaches us the nature and bounds of cause and effect, and enables us to infer the existence of one object from that of another035. Such is the foundation of moral reasoning, which forms the greater part of human knowledge, and is the source of all human action and behaviour. (Hume, D. Enquiry Section XII Part 3, http://www.davidhume.org/texts/ehu.html, E 12.29)

Hume's rejection of Descartes' certainty about self and about the existence of the Christian god character as real, his rejection of Berkeley's idealism, and his emphasis on the impossibility of knowing about anything except for a-posteriori synthetically on an empirical basis: these were probably enough to see his end as an endorsed philosopher in the academy. However, as has been alluded to already, Hume launched a concerted philosophical attack on human testimony - especially religiously inspired testimony, which is of course the stuff of religious texts.




In An Enquiry, after delivering four arguments that human testimony about miracles must be regarded as unreliable, he concludes:

The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention), “That 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: And even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force, which remains, after deducting the inferior.” (Hume, D. An Enquiry Concering Human Understanding Section XII Part 3, http://www.davidhume.org/texts/ehu.html, E 12.29)

In short, not only does Hume’s empiricism say that even if there was really a god of kind claimed in Judeo-Christian texts it would be impossible to have any knowledge about them as a fact on a probable basis (the only available basis) since they are unavailable to experience, but human testimony about miracles or supernatural intervention is dramatically less reliable than empirical observation of nature. In fact it is wholly unreliable where the falsity of the testimony would be more surprising than the miracle claimed on an empirical basis.

The intention is that since all miracles are more miraculous than the prospective falsehood of their testimonies, the testimonies are probably false. In other words, if using reason related to our empirical knowledge of how flawed the testimony of human beings is, the miracle testified to is less surprising than the falsehood of the testimony would be, then reject the testimony. In still other words: reject testimony all the time if it is about a miracle that requires us to override knowledge based upon our empirical experience of nature - even if that is only probable in nature.

Put yet another way: we can know facts of the world and nature as probably the case only, and testimony that contravenes or contradicts that empirical knowledge - claiming miracles for example - is unlikely to be true since it is less probable by dint of empirical understanding of the reliability of human testimony about unlikely events. This is, of course, applicable to entire religious texts that are taken to be miraculous and supernaturally inspired.

A direct consequence of Hume’s skeptical empiricism is that you couldn’t know anything about any kind of supernatural god by testimony, and you can’t rely on any written or spoken reports of miracles. Theses are not happy outcomes for theists and Hume’s theological sparring partners. As we will see – they preferred to torpedo his career rather than deal with the arguments.