David Hume Essay Concerning Human Understanding Example For Students

David Hume Essay Concerning Human Understanding I was from the beginning scandalised, I must own, with this resemblancebetween the Deity and human creatures. Philo David Hume wrote much aboutthe subject of religion, much of it negative. In this paper we shall attempt tofollow Humes arguments against Deism as Someone knowable from the wake Heallegedly makes as He passes. This kind of Deism he lays to rest. Then, diggingdeeper, we shall try our hand at a critique of his critique of religion, ofresurrecting a natural belief in God. Finally, if theres anything Hume wouldlike to say as a final rejoinder, we shall let him have his last word and callthe matter closed. To allege the occurrence of order in creation, purpose in itsconstituent parts and in its constituted whole, regularity in the meter of itsrhythm and syncopations, and mindful structure in the design and construction ofNature is by far the most widely used and generally accepted ground forlaunching from the world belief in an intelligent and omnipotent designer god. One does not have to read for very long to find some modern intellectualinvolved in the analysis of some part of Nature come to the Aha!that theres a power at work imposing order, design, structure and purpose increation. Modern religious piety salivates at the prospect of convertingscientists and will take them any way it can. From Plato to Planck theproblematic lion of religion must be rendered safe and tame. Religion must bereasonable, after all, we are reasonable men. Einstein writes thatthe scientists religious feeling takes the form of rapturous amazement atthe harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superioritythat, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beingsis an utterly insignificant reflection. We have been struck dumb, however;we can no longer be incautious with such temptations to believe, with suchsirens sounding for sensible, systematic sureness. The Design Argument has beenmortally wounded by David Hume. The god arrive d at by arguments on the one-waystreet of effect to the cause is dead; we should never have allowed him to live. In Section XI of the Enquiry, and throughout the Dialogues Hume subjects theArgument from Design to searching and searing philosophical analysis, to thepoint in his mind that it is forever dead, and to the point in our minds that wewonder why the world has not yet received the obituary. Why did it not die fromthe exposure to which Hume subjected it? Who resurrected this false phoenix? Hasthe Design Argument been forever altered by Hume? Can it render service inpost-Hume discussions? These are the questions we should confront. David Humesphilosophy of religion is fatal to the natural revelation of Deism. Hisarguments the camp of unbelief have appropriated. It is an argument against anyinductive proof for Gods existence. What Hume seeks to show is the failure ofthis argument to establish the type of deity that belief in a particularprovidence or divine action must require one to assert. This he sets out firstand in preliminary fashion in Section XI of the Enquiry and with more plethori cattention in the Dialogues. In both books he employs the dialogue form to embodyhis attacks. The argument of the former is mistitled. Fourteen of the seventeenpages have nothing to do with immortality or particular providence.Humes argument here is from the particular effect to the existence of a causesufficient for its production. Causes are to be known from effects alone; toascribe to it any superfluous qualities goes beyond the bounds of strict logicalreasoning. The imagination must be philosophically bridled. When ten ounces areraised in a balance one can surely surmise a counterbalance exceeding tenounces, but one can hardly offer any justification for the counterbalance toweigh 100 ounces. Transferred to philosophical theology, it is impossible toderive legitimately from a natural theology any relevancy in conclusions arrivedat over and above what can be independently and directly supported by empiricalstudy of the universe. Such innocuous-sounding, even camouflaged assertion s byHume were in actuality a D-Day invasion on the Normandy Beach of the Deists. Thefirst salvo is a statement of the terms of reference: You then . . . haveacknowledged that the chief or sole argument for a divine existence (which Ihave never questioned) is derived from the order of nature, where there appearsuch marks of intelligence and design that you think it extravagant to assignfor its cause either chance or the blind and unguided force of matter. You allowthat this is an argument drawn from effects to causes. From the order of thework you infer that there must have been project and forethought in the workman. If you cannot make out this point you allow that your conclusion fails; and youpretend not to establish the conclusion in a greater latitude than the phenomenaof nature will justify. The cause must be proportioned to the effect. To Hume itis sinful to assume greater effects to an actually lesser cause. No sooner havewe engodded the gods with power and intelligence and benevolence than we summonexaggeration and flattery to supply gaps and tease out the argument. We structure an entire edifice in our imaginations while standing on the porch. Hume countered this thinking because it constructed belief and certainty out ofmere possibility. It is an exercise in uselessness: Because our knowledgeof this cause being derived entirely from the course of nature, we can never,according to the rules of just reasoning, return back from the cause with anynew inference, or making additions to the common and experienced course ofnature, establish any new principles of conduct and behaviour. Experiencemust be the true guide for philosopher and deist. The experiencing one can neverbe held hostage to those armed with theory or conjecture about the nature ofReality. Also, the experiencing one must be careful not to compromise herexperience by inflating it with false conclusions which do not fit the closetolerances of experience. Why torture your brain to justify the course ofnature upon suppositions, which, for aught you know, may be entirely imaginary,and of which there are to be found no traces in the course of nature?Then, Hume raises a n objection. If experience is our only and final interlocutorand arbiter, why can one not use ones experience and say that a half-finishedbuilding, surrounded by all the materials and tools necessary for itscompletion, will be one day complete? Or, cannot Robinson Crusoe, seeing onehuman footprint on the shore, conclude he is not alone? This objection heanswers through his dialogue partner: There is an infinite difference betweenthe human and the divine. With humans one can infer from effect to cause andthen infer anew concerning the effect because we have other corroboratingexperience about humans, from motives to operations. Our inferences aboutprobabilities in human nature and works can be experienced. Not so with thedivine, who is single, suigeneris, neither empirically obvious nor predictable. We have no experience to arbitrate here, there is no existing genus of thought. Conjecture must be arbitrary. To insist the deity is known from design is tosubstitute ourselves and our experience for the deity, and then to assume thisAgent will act as we would. This is speculation, and Hume allows it noauthority. We can never be allowed to mount up from the universe, theeffect, to Jupiter, the cause, and then descend downward to infer any new effectfrom that cause .. The knowledge of the cause being derived solely from theeffect, they must be exactly adjusted to each other; and the one can never referto anything further or be the foundation of any new inference andconclusion. If Hume is right the implications are far-reaching. The firstis embarrassing to those who wield natural proofs of God: we still have no ideaor knowledge from these proofs what this God does, what the deity values, whatIt rewards and what It punishes. We cannot in any sense of logic speak of thedeitys possible or probable attributes or actions. Such a class of topics Humerenders unwarranted. An invalid argument will not support a conclusion, notpartially, not even weakly. It supports it not at all. Hume repeats andamplifies his voice in the Dialogues with the help of three protagonists,Cleanthes, Philo and Demea. Debate still rages on whether Cleanthes or Philomost faithfully represents Hume. No one character fully presents the force ofHumes arguments; his beliefs are on the tongues of all three. Humes purpose isto vitiate the Argument from Design more completely, and to this end heskillfully balances his words among the protagonists; to let the currency of hisargument fall upon the shoulders of one person alone would not only destroy theDialogue by definition, but would also diminish that dramatic interest in itwhich also constitutes its value. Philo begins the engagement of the problem ofnatural religion: When we look beyond human affairs and the properties of thesurrounding bodies: When we carry our speculations into the two eternities,before and after the present s tate of things; into the creation and formation ofthe universe; the existence and properties of spirits; the powers and operationsof one universal spirit, existing without beginning and without end; omnipotent,omniscient, immutable, infinite, and incomprehensible: We must be far removedfrom the smallest tendency to skepticism not to be apprehensive, that we havehere got quite beyond the reach of our faculties. So long as we confine ourspeculations to trade, or morals, or politics, or criticism, we make appeals,every moment, to common sense and experience, which strengthen our philosophicalconclusions, and remove (at least, in part) the suspicion, which we so justlyentertain with regard to every reasoning that is very sub tile and refined. Butin theological reasonings, we have not this advantage; while at the same timewe are employed upon object . . . too large for our grasp. . . . We are likeforeigners in a strange country, to whom every thing must seem suspicious, andwho are in dan ger every moment of transgressing against the laws and customs ofthe people with whom they live and converse. We know not how far we ought totrust our vulgar methods of reasoning in such a subject; since, even in commonlife and in that province which is peculiarly appropriated to them, we cannotaccount for them, and are entirely guided by a kind of instinct or necessity inemploying them. Philosophically, the argument is cast thus: is religion to bethe extension of principles and ideas implicit in daily knowledge of the world?For Cleanthes early on, the purveyor of common sense, religious hypotheses, likescientific ones, are founded on the simplest and most obviousarguments, and unless it meets with artificial obstacles, has easyaccess and admission into the mind of man. Philo maintains his skepticssilence until later in the Dialogues, and speak only to facilitate honestinquiry. In Part II, Cleanthes is drawn out by Philo and by his own growingself-confidence to assert that what is t rue for religious hypotheses also ringstrue for claims about the nature of God. Cleanthes is led beyond the areas hewas able to hold within practical reasoning into areas where he is vulnerable tothe applications of his own reasoning. Ordinary experience, he claims, cansettle the question of God: Look around the world: Contemplate the whole andevery part of it: You will find it to be nothing but one great machine,subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines. All these variousmachines are adjusted to each other with an accuracy, which vanishes intoadmiration all men who have ever contemplated them. We are led to infer Poverty Point Culture EssayKeeping a mental finger on this, he then hypothesizes that in order to explainthe operation of many natural laws, we should lay them at the feet of divineactivity; they are not scientifically or empirically obvious. With thisestablished, he then proves how an analogical argument can be designed to showhow evidence confirms the hypothesis. As are caused by Bs. A*s are similar toAs. Thereforegiven that there is no more satisfactory explanation of theexistence of A*sthey are produced by B*s similar to Bs. B*s are postulated tobe similar in all respects to Bs except in so far as shown otherwise, viz.,except in so far as the dissimilarities between As and A*s force us to postulatea difference. In the Design Argument, As are regularities of succession, Bs arethe human agents who cause As. A*s are the regularities of successionexemplified by natural laws and B*s are the rational agents or causes of A*s ofdivine status. Like humans (As), A*s can be somewhat favor ably compared tohumans in terms of free choice and intelligence. The difference is in degree,not kind. The result is a Design Argument, and if true, is conditional upon thestrength of the analogy and upon how coherent empirical matters are processed toa divine cause. 2. A second objection centers in the critique of constantconjunction. Is one instance in itself of constant conjunction sufficient toknow a cause from inspection to its effect? In the Treatise Hume has urged us toconceive of events occurring without any causes at all; anything may be thecause of anything. How do these implicate his Argument from Design? Are ourobservations one-on-one with our experiences? Is the constant conjunction ofevents, which Hume says must be experienced as cause and effect, the onlylegitimate permission we possess for inferring either from the presence of theother? Why can we not infer from the simple and unparalleled fact of theuniverse an equally simple and unparalleled Deity as Cause? 3. A fi nal objectioncomes from science. Every scientific stride has come from its putting forthhypotheses which extend beyond the phenomena observed. A scientific theory thatproceeded only upon existing data would be worthless. It could not as anexplanation guide experiments and research. Scientists must venture out beyondthe already known and infer the unknown. And so do we. We look at our children,grandchildren, brothers, sisters and parents and infer heredity, or morespecifically, genes. DNA is an unostentatious reality, inexperienced, but we seeits effect. Can we not legitimately infer God as a way to account and evenforetell phenomena of the universe? Hume replies: Ok, OK, so I was not ascareful as I might have been in formulating my principle that on the other sideof experience there is no door leading to conjecture or hypothesis. I haveexpressed myself badly in places, but I think I can salvage my cause with a morecircumspect exposition. Mr. Swinburne, my respects. You have scored a goodpoint. But your chessboard of an analogy fails because you are too ready toascribe natural laws to a Deity, when they are pawns unequal to the task ofcheckmating the prize piece. Natural Laws are not empirically obvious: there isyour mistake. When inferring any particular cause, given certain effects, onecannot ascribe any qualities but what are sufficient to explain adequately thecause. Adequately is the watchword. The explanation should be keptas simple as possible. It is unscientific to ascribe certain characteristics toa postulated designer of the universe if those characteristics go beyond what isrequired adequately to explain the facts. And this god of yours, Mr. Swinburne,whence came He? Is not your God subject to creationa causeHimself? I layyour argument to rest at the feet of infinite regression. As to this secondobjection. You have divorced your arguments from the authoritative range ofexperience. My argument is not contained within that old wine skin of analogy. When we face a new species of phenomena, our observation and experience proveunequal to the task; and analogy will fail as a way of explanation as well. Asan argument from analogy the Argument from Design is on serviceable. No matterwhat Ive said elsewhere, experience leads me only to one honest conclusion:While others take their broad-jump leaps of faith and land in the quicksand ofsubjective conjecture, I stand on the rock of experience. Have you experiencedthe universe as a simple and unparalleled fact? Have you faced a new species ofsuigeneris phenomena? If you have, then you must truly be God! Of course thingswill happen without a ready Cause, but that affords you no permission to assigndivine causes left and right, willy-nilly, and certainly no license to worshipthis divinity. Now to the third argument. As some are fond of saying, Yourgod is too small. You take one realm of localized phenomena, and withoutbenefit of experience, you analogize a God. In science, how many falsehyp otheses do you come up with before you arrive at a true one? Are you willingto constitute a religion and call people to faith based on what might be a falsehypothesis? What happens when you find two true but conflicting hypotheses, aswe have with the nature of light? Is it a particle or a wave? As for the DNAmodel of analogy, it wont reward you with a larger version or vision of the godof DNA. Analogies are inductive. Inductions, we have proven over and over, arenot sufficient grounds for the certainty you would require. Induction can onlygive you a probability, and Id like to see you preach a probability! Ha Ha. Allthese slippery objections, specific textual questions and ever-more refinedpoints of logic are nothing but a series of assurances that you can never putone over on me. All reasoning, all inquiries into the nature of the Deity, restson custom and habit. There is no rational foundation for your claims offact. Your measures and claims of fact are not knowledge, objectiveand verifiable, but beliefs. You cannot make causal claims of fact whencausation itself is suspect because of necessary connection. Your DesignArguments are arrested at the very outset at the roadblock of a categorymistake. One cannot synthesize from the parts a whole that has nothing to dowith the parts themselves. This is the mental gymnastics of a finite mind, andthe finite cannot re-present the unknowable infinite. The finite has nometaphysical license to trespass its boundaries. If you do, the best you can dois bag unicorns and dragons; the worst you could do is to divinize yourpassions, lusts, cruelties, vengeance and the most heinous of vices. All yourreligious systems are subject to great and insuperable difficulties. Each willhave its day, expose itself, and die from exposure. But all of them prepare acomplete triumph for the skeptic, who reminds over and over that no system canbe embraced without some troublesome remainder. A total suspension of judgmentis my only refuge, my mighty fortress. It is the only sanctuary I dont have todefend. The purpose of my open mind regarding uncertainty is to close it on thisone thing certain: That the Cause (or Causes) of order in the universe bear noremote resemblance or analogy to humans, animals, plants or nature. What that iswe cant know, for it is parasitic on data we shall never be able tointerrogate. Philosophy