Theopedia

David Hume

Overview

David Hume (1711-1776) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, and essayist working in the empiricist tradition, which holds that human knowledge is grounded in sense experience rather than innate ideas or pure reason. His Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion argued that the design (or teleological) argument for God’s existence rests on a faulty analogy between human craftsmanship and the natural world, and his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding argued that no testimony can rationally establish that a miracle has occurred. Reformed theologians, from Charles Hodge in the nineteenth century to more recent writers, have answered both arguments directly.1

Life and Ministry

Hume was born on 7 May 1711 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and died there on 25 August 1776.2 He entered the University of Edinburgh at an unusually young age, did not graduate, and abandoned an initial plan to study law for philosophy.2 He completed A Treatise of Human Nature at twenty-seven; it was published in 1739-1740, followed by An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751).2 Between these works he served as a merchant’s assistant in France, secretary to military and diplomatic missions, Keeper of the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh, and secretary to the British embassy in Paris, and he published a multi-volume History of England (1754-1762).2 His Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion was published posthumously in 1779. Charles Hodge later called Hume “by far the most able and influential” of the English deistic writers of his century and described the Dialogues as “the ablest work ever written in support of the Deistical, or rather, Atheistical system.”1

Theological Contribution

The design argument

The design (or teleological) argument reasons from order and apparent purpose in nature to an intelligent designer, on analogy with human artifacts: a watch implies a watchmaker, so an ordered universe implies a cosmic maker. Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion argued that this analogy fails because it goes beyond what experience can support. Hodge summarized the objection: “We have often seen houses, ships, engines, and other machines made, and therefore, when we see similar products of human skill we are authorized to infer that they too were constructed by an intelligent author. But the world belongs to an entirely different category; we have never seen a world made.”3 Hodge quoted Hume’s own statement of the point: “When two species of objects have always been observed to be conjoined together, I can infer, by custom, the existence of one whenever I see the existence of the other… But how this argument can have place, where the objects… are single, individual, without parallel, or specific resemblance, may be difficult to explain.”3 Archibald Alexander Hodge, citing the same argument from Dialogues, part VII, put Hume’s case as two claims: that the human maker of an artifact is “antecedently known to us as an intelligent contriver” while the maker of the world is not, and that “the processes of nature are all unlike the processes by which man executes his contrivances.”4

Charles Hodge answered that the design inference does not, in fact, rest on the artifact analogy at all: “It is an intuitive truth, self-evident from its nature, that design cannot be accounted for on the ground of chance or necessity.”3 A. A. Hodge answered Hume’s first claim on similar grounds, that neither a human maker’s mind nor the world’s Maker is known to us directly but only through the character of what each produces, “and precisely in the same way and to the same extent is the Author of nature known”; he answered the second claim by denying that the conviction that “order and adaptation imply intelligence” was ever grounded in the artifact analogy to begin with, calling it instead “a universal and necessary judgment of reason.”4

Causation and induction

Hume also argued that the causal principle, that every effect must have an adequate cause, cannot itself be established by reason or experience, only assumed as a habit of the mind formed by repeatedly observing one kind of event follow another. James P. Boyce’s Abstract of Systematic Theology took up the objection directly: “there is no such thing as causation, and… all of which we have any experience is mere antecedence and consequence,” noting that “Hume and Kant have simply attempted to confine the law of causation to our experience.”5 Boyce replied that causes “must exist independently of our experience” and that the causal principle is better understood as “an intuitive conception of the human mind,” on the grounds that whole branches of scientific inquiry (he named geology, astronomy, and medicine) proceed by inferring unknown causes for observed effects without first having experienced those specific causes.5 Herman Bavinck likewise credited “the criticism of Hume and Kant” with unsettling the cosmological argument’s inference from the world’s existence to a cause, though he judged the inference itself “perfectly legitimate”: “If we may no longer apply the law of causality, all science is impossible.”6 A more recent engagement, Craig Carter’s Contemplating God with the Great Tradition, points to Edward Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God for an extended answer, remarking that it is “contradictory and inappropriate for an empiricist, of all people, to question the principle of causality.”7

The argument against miracles

Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding argued that belief in miracles can never be rational, because a miracle report is always testimony, and testimony is only ever as reliable as the uniform experience it rests on. Since our uniform experience is that the course of nature does not vary, Hodge summarized the case: “It will… always be more probable that the witnesses were mistaken than that the course of nature has been violated.”8 Hodge called this “Hume’s famous argument” and noted the mathematician Charles Babbage’s judgment that it, “divested of its less important adjuncts, never has and never will be refuted” by ordinary reasoning, only (in Babbage’s own attempt) by the mathematics of probability.8

Hodge answered the argument on three points. First, he argued it “rests on the false assumption that confidence in human testimony is founded on experience, whereas it is founded on a law of our nature.”9 Second, he argued Hume’s case depends on treating any miracle as improbable in the first place apart from any question of God’s existence and purposes: “Theism being granted, the difficulty about miracles disappears.”9 Third, he argued that Christian belief in a given miracle does not, in fact, rest on testimony alone but on its place within the larger evidenced system of biblical revelation: “The miracles recorded in the Scriptures are a competent part of the great system of truth therein revealed. The whole stands or falls together.”9

Historical Significance

Charles Hodge answered both the design argument and the miracles argument at length in his Systematic Theology. A. A. Hodge answered the design argument independently in Outlines of Theology, and Boyce answered the causation objection in his Abstract of Systematic Theology, a founding textbook of Southern Baptist theological education. Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics places Hume’s criticism, together with Kant’s, among the arguments that unsettled natural theology’s older confidence in the cosmological and teleological proofs. The causation objection is still being answered in recent Reformed philosophical theology: Carter’s Contemplating God with the Great Tradition points to Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God, arguing it is inconsistent for an empiricist, who reasons from experience, to reject the very principle of causality that experience depends on.7

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 42-43. ↩ ↩2

  2. Wikipedia, s.v. “David Hume,” accessed September 3, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume. The Theopedia Library holds no dedicated biography of Hume; this entry was the only source available for these uncontroversial biographical facts (dates, education, posts, publication dates). ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:228-229. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology, rev. ed. (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 37-38. ↩ ↩2

  5. James Petigru Boyce, Abstract of Systematic Theology, 2nd printing (Baltimore: H. M. Wharton & Company, 1887), 26-27. ↩ ↩2

  6. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 7, “Knowing God.” ↩

  7. Craig A. Carter, Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 9, n. 60, citing Edward Feser, Five Proofs of the Existence of God (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017), 40-42. ↩ ↩2

  8. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:633-634. ↩ ↩2

  9. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:634-635. ↩ ↩2 ↩3