An Analysis of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

An Analysis of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

ABSTRACT: Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) may be read in the way Cleanthes (and Philo as well) reads Nature, as analogous to human artifice and contrivance. The Dialogues and Nature then are both texts, with an intelligent author or Author, and analogies may be started from these five facts of Hume's text: the independence of Hume's characters; the non-straightforwardness of the characters' discourse; the way the characters interact and live; the entanglements of Pamphilus as an internal author; and the ways in which a reader is also involved in making a dialogue. These and other analogies should reflect upon the Author of Nature as they do upon Hume's authorship: They do not prove the existence of their respective authors, but may well shed some light on the nature of these disparate beings.

The bulk of Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion is given over to two discussions of "the" so-called argument from design. (1) In Part 2 Cleanthes succinctly states an "argument a posteriori" that attempts to "prove at once the existence of a Deity, and his similarity to human mind and intelligence." According to this argument, the world and its parts are (like) intricate machines or human contrivances, implying "by all the rules of analogy" that their cause, "the Author of Nature," is a designing intelligence (all 2.5.Cleanthes to Demea and Philo). Philo then subjects this argument to various and withering criticisms in Parts 2-8, although he later ends up confessing, more than once, (2) his inability to deny the powerful attraction this form of argument and its natural theological conclusion has for everyone, himself included.

In Parts 10 and...

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