Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: The Posthumous Essays of the Immortality of the Soul and of Suicide [Paperback]

David Hume (Author), Richard H. Popkin (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0872204022 | ISBN-13: 978-0872204027 | Publication Date: March 1, 1998 | Edition: 2nd

This is an electronic edition of the complete book complemented by author biography. This book features the table of contents linked to every part. The book was designed for optimal navigation on the Kindle, PDA, Smartphone, and other electronic readers. It is formatted to display on all electronic devices including the Kindle, Smartphones and other Mobile Devices with a small display.

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Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is a philosophical work written by the Scottish philosopher David Hume. Through dialogue, three fictional characters named Demea, Philo, and Cleanthes debate the nature of God's existence. While all three agree that a god exists, they differ sharply in opinion on God's nature or attributes and how, or if, humankind can come to knowledge of a deity.

In the Dialogues, Hume's characters debate a number of arguments for the existence of God, and arguments whose proponents believe through which we may come to know the nature of God. Such topics debated include the argument from design -- for which Hume uses a house -- and whether there is more suffering or good in the world (argument from evil).

Hume started writing the Dialogues in 1750 but did not complete them until 1776, shortly before his death. They are based partly on Cicero's De Natura Deorum. The Dialogues were published posthumously in 1779, originally with neither the author's nor the publisher's name.

- Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 129 pages
• Publisher: Hackett Pub Co; 2nd edition (March 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0872204022
• ISBN-13: 978-0872204027
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,120 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Does God exist?, February 11, 2005

By 

FrKurt Messick "FrKurt Messick" (Bloomington, IN USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: The Posthumous Essays of the Immortality of the Soul and of Suicide (Paperback)

David Hume, a philosopher of the period often classified as British Empiricism, is the intellectual associate of philosophers John Locke and George Berkeley. Born in Edinburgh in 1711, he attended the University of Edinburgh but did not graduate. He went to France during his 20s, and spent time there working on what would become his most famous work, 'An Enquiry into Human Understanding', first published under the title 'Treatise of Human Nature'. However, Hume was a prolific writer, and dealt with many areas of philosophy, including politics and ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. He wrote in the area of history as well, and had a politic career as British ambassador to France and a post as a minister in the government for a few years. His final work, 'Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion', was published posthumously in 1779, although work had begun on it as early as the 1750s.

Hume was very concerned about rationality. Hume was never publicly and explicitly an atheist, but his rational mind, concerned about sensory and intelligible evidence, led him to question and doubt most major systems of religion, including the more general philosophical sense of religion and proofs of the existence of God. The primary arguments in his 'Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion' deal with the Argument from Design, and the Cosmological Argument. There is an assumed distinction here between natural religion and revealed religion, an especially important distinction in the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophical structure.


- Natural Religion and Revealed Religion -

Natural religion is the idea that we come to know and understand God (and, consequently, what God wants or expects of us, if anything) simply from nature and our sensory perceptions, as well as our interpretations (emotion and rational) of this kind of understanding. From very early in his writing career, Hume attacked the idea of natural religion and most of its conclusions, drawing a sharp line between what we can actually know and what ends up being fanciful extrapolations based on other-than-rational ideas and evidence. Revealed religion is primary what most religions base themselves upon - the burning bush to Moses, the resurrection and post-resurrection appearances to the Apostles, the Buddha's enlightenment under the tree - these are examples of revelation. While Hume does take on the idea of revealed religion in his other works, this particular text does not concern itself with that topic, and stays in the domain of addressing natural religion.


- The Argument from Design -

Arguments from Design have always had a strong appeal to believers within religious frameworks; they have often been used as tools of evangelism, as attempts to show that beyond the revealed doctrines, the very nature of things points to a creator. In very short order, the Argument from Design in Hume's newly-industrial time might have read like this:

- Machines are designed by beings with intelligence.
- The world and the universe it is in resembles a machine.
- Therefore, the world must have been created by means of intelligent design.

This is an argument by analogy, and is convincing to some, but often more convincing to those already inclined to believe in the existence of God.


- The Cosmological Argument -

The Cosmological Argument is at once both more subtle and more simple. The most simple way of stating it would be that God is the 'first cause' of everything. If everything has to have a cause (even the whole universe), then that first cause must be God. In the twentieth century era of thinking of a universe that began with a Big Bang, it seemed to some that the Cosmological Argument was confirmed.

Hume would have been familiar with Leibniz's more subtle form of the Cosmological Argument, which argues for a world of infinite contingent causes. However, there has to be something outside of this system of infinite causes that produced the series - thus, even in a universe with no set beginning or ending, there would still need to be an overarching cause.


- Hume's Arguments -

Hume argues on many levels. His first criticism of the Argument from Design is that this analogy (as are most arguments from analogy) is faulty and not exact; we have no idea if the universe is like a machine. Even if it was, machines are often designed and built by several designers - why argue for one God rather than several? How do we know that matter and the universe don't have their own, internal self-organising principles?

With regard to the Cosmological Argument, the argument is a little more strained. Hume argues that, in any series of causality, once one knows about each cause, it makes no sense to inquire beyond the sequence of causes to some other effect. This is a very Empirical argument, to be sure, and while perhaps not entirely satisfying, it still has merit in philosophy to this day.


- Hume's Structure -

This is a dialogue, set up in the classical way of people talking with each other about the subjects. Hume draws primarily from Cicero, whose work 'On the Nature of the Gods' uses characters of the same names. However, whereas Cicero was concerned about the nature of the Gods (their attributes, powers, etc.) and not their existence, it is the very existence of God that occupies Hume's thoughts.

Hume, despite many years of work on this text, probably never quite thought it was finished. He left the work to Adam Smith (the noted economist, and friend of Hume in Edinburgh), who also thought the arguments against the existence of God were too strong, and likely too damaging to Hume's overall reputation. The tug-of-war over the publication makes for interesting reading in and of itself.

These are important arguments, worthy of discussion and dialogue in philosophy classes, theology classes, and among others who ponder the existence of God.

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Paradigm of Philosophy, June 2, 2004

By 

ctdreyer (NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: The Posthumous Essays of the Immortality of the Soul and of Suicide (Paperback)

With the possible exception of his incalculably influential A Treatise of Human Nature, this, I think, is Hume's finest work. The Dialogues is a paradigm of sustained philosophical argumentation on a single subject, and I can't think of a more inspiring work of philosophy. Another reason to read this book is that Hume is one of the few philosophical figures whose work is worth reading as literature. His prose is, of course, lovely and clear as can be; and the Dialogues is packed with the sort of evocative passages that readers of Hume except to find in his work. Furthermore, he's clearly mastered the dialogue format as a way of writing philosophy. He never turns his interlocutors into ciphers spouting the details of their respective positions. Each characters has a forceful and distinct personality, and each of them comes to the debate with a well-defined position and adequate means of defending it. In short, I can't recommend this book highly enough.

Most of the Dialogues is devoted to discussion of a posteriori arguments for the existence of God. The main argument considered here is the classical argument from design, which Hume seems to understand as an analogical argument of the following sort: the complexity and order of the universe show that it is similar to artifacts created by human intelligences; similar causes have similar effects; therefore, the universe must have been created by a being with something like a human intelligence; therefore, the universe must have been created by God.

Hume's objections to this argument are legion, and many of the individual objections are both ingenious and forceful. He provides reasons for thinking that the universe isn't all that similar to artifacts created by human beings. He argues, for instance, that at least in some respects, the universe resembles animal or vegetable life more than it resembles artifacts created by human beings. Hume also provides for thinking that, even if we think the universe is similar to a human artifact, we ought to think the universe was created by a being quite unlike God. The relevant empirical evidence, he argues, provides us with no good reason to think that the universe wasn't created by multiple beings (large human artifacts are usually created by multiple beings), or that the being(s) who created it are still alive (human creators die), or that the being(s) who created it were infinite (it's not clear that creating the finite universe would have required infinite power), or that the being(s) who created it were morally perfect (the universe, with all its misery and despair, certainly isn't what one would expect from a perfect being). Furthermore, he proposes certain alternative naturalistic explanations of the existence and nature of the universe; and he claims that it's unclear why an appeal to divine creation is to be preferred to these speculative naturalistic stories of the universe's creation.

As I hope this all-too-brief synopsis suggests, Hume's cumulative case against the argument from design is quite impressive. It is, of course, possible to avoid some of these criticisms in various ways, and his speculative naturalistic explanations leave quite a bit to be desired. But the total case is a philosophical demolition par excellence. Indeed, I'm pretty sure that Hume has shown that the argument from design is more or less worthless as support for anything resembling traditional theism. So, if you're enamored of that argument, I suggest you pick up book and wrestle with the criticisms found here.

Where, then, does Hume come down on the issue of theism? It's hard to tell, as it's not clear that any of the particular characters speaks for him. Philo, the character who often appears to be speaking for him, never denies the existence of a deity; he simply denies the ability of human reason to discover anything substantial about what such a being is like. That Hume agrees with this is, I think, the most we can glean from this text about Hume's own religious views. It seems clear that he has no sympathy for organized religion, or for any religious views that purport to describe the nature of God, His intentions, or how and why He created the universe as He did. And the only positive religious claim that is given respectful treatment here is the bare claim that we have reason to think that the cause of the universe as a whole is somewhat similar to a human intelligence.

But does acceptance of this minimal thesis amount to his being a theist? Again, it's very hard to tell. First, of course, one might wonder whether this fairly vague positive view is enough to amount to some form of theism. But let's put that issue to one side. Even if it is enough to support some form of theism, it's often difficult to tell whether Hume means to be advocating such a position here. The problem is that it often seems Hume's explicit advocation of this position amounts to little more than a description of what he thinks is an inevitable human tendency to think this way. Given how our minds actually work, he seems to think, we're bound to think something like this about the origin of the universe. Yet it's somewhat unclear that he thinks forming beliefs in this way is reliable. It may simply be that we have a brute instinct to think in a way that insures we'll see the world as resulting from some human-like intelligence, and it's at least not clear that that isn't a debunking account of the plausibility of theism. (For more support that this is a debunking explanation, see his The Natural History of Religion, where the explanations of various religious beliefs certainly seem to be one's that suggest those beliefs simply aren't plausible.)

Popkin's edition of the Dialogues, which is fine for students and the general reader, also includes the famous section on miracles from Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding along with his posthumously published essays on suicide and on immortality. And there's a short introduction that focuses on both Hume's intentions in these works and historical details concerning their creation, publication, and influence. Finally, the reader should be aware that spelling and capitalization have been modernized in this edition.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Profound and disturbing, November 12, 2003

By 

Gulley Jimson (Bethesda, MD) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: The Posthumous Essays of the Immortality of the Soul and of Suicide (Paperback)

I've never really been particularly religious or spiritual, but the argument that the organization of the world seemed to have a tremendous intelligence behind it always bothered me. Dismissive explanations that matter can have it's own organizing principle that, through trial and error, could result in what we have today, were never completely satisfying. How does randomness lead to something like, for example, the human eye? (I think this question is supposed to have puzzled Darwin too.)

This book doesn't answer those questions, but it does point out that they are incorrectly asked to lead to certain comforting conclusions about the existence of god. The operation of the world doesn't really point to an intelligent creator, the book points out, as much as a self-sustaining vegetable intelligence, the type that allows nutrients to go up the roots of a plant or that controls the cell division of an amoeba.

This is presented in an elegant and frankly airtight argument by Philo who, as much as I could tell, is Hume's mouthpiece-even though Hume throws in some lame sidesteps to pretend that he's actually on the side of natural religion, perhaps to sneak this incredibly dangerous little book into the hands of people who might not otherwise read it.

I read this book in one sitting, and my head had a strange throbbing sensation at the end. I actually laughed a couple of times because too many ideas were bouncing around in there at once. I press this book into the hands of all my friends who regard the evidence of god as self-evident, not to destroy their faith but to destroy the foundation of lies that it often rests on.

Kant regarded this book as the last word on the subject, and I agree. Faith and reason are different things, and the only convincing proof of god's existence that this book leaves one with is: I just know that it's true, because I feel it. The myriad other reasons that are put forth by people who don't really feel the presence of god, but want too-that losing religion destroys morality, that is gives people nothing to live for-are demolished with disturbing precision. Hume has no tolerance for sloppy thought.

The other essays aren't as profound (Hume spend years and years working on the Dialogues, although the format of it makes it seem more spontaneous and less labored over) but still worth having. This is the edition I have, and it's the cheapest; the notes that one gets from other publishers aren't really essential. Whatever parallels exist between this book and Cicero's dialogues strike me as of secondary importance.

A book of philosophy for everyone: I can't think of another one that addresses more universal concerns with such clarity.