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At last we have a thinker who draws the conclusion from the assumptions of the new science that we can have no reason to think there is a God.
Hume attacks on three fronts: On the arguments from miracles, on the argument from design, and on the origin of the idea of monotheism. Some of these arguments are found in Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and not in the text we are working with. I will concentrate on those that are in our text.
(Read Hume's Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding, Section X, 'Of Miracles'.)
Miracles are often invoked in support of the validity of religious beliefs.
Hume took the argument to be of the form: something has happened which violates the laws of nature. The only way this can have happened is for someone with the appropriate power or authority to have 'overridden' the law.
For example, a stone statue of Christ is said to be issuing blood from the hands and feet.
The church may say: it is impossible in the ordinary run of nature for stone to ooze blood. But we observe such a thing to happen. Therefore the ordinary laws are suspended in this instance.
But why not say the laws which we had thought ruled out blood coming from a stone are not quite universal? Usually, blood doesn't come from a stone. But if we accept these reports we shall have to accept that there are some exceptions to the general run.
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When scientists find anomalies to their theories don't they accept that their theories have to be altered?
The difficulty then is in showing there is enough evidence to prove
(a) there is a universal law of nature; and
(b) x, which would, if it had happened, be an exception to the universal law, has in fact happened.
A reminder of what a law of nature
looks like.
Buzz: Is this argument of Hume's valid?
Hume attacks the teleological argument that had dominated the 18th Century: If we looked at nature, the evidence of a designing intelligence lay all around. William Paley (1743-1805) was the most well-known representative of this argument, and it was he who drew for us the analogy of the man walking along and finding a watch among the pebbles. If we make such a find, argued Paley, we would conclude that here was something that could not have been assembled by chance.
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From Paley's Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature, first published in 1802.: . . . when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive. . . that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, or placed after any other manner or in any other order than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it. . . . the inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker -- that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer, who comprehended its construction and designed its use. Further excerpts from Paley's Natural Theology kindly made available by Gary Varner.
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Note and pic courtesy Berkeley.edu More from this source on his argument here.
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One of Hume's points against this so-called argument from design was that if things weren't well-adapted to their environment, they wouldn't be there at all, and so of course all the things that were available to be inspected were well-adapted.
There is a variant of the argument from design that achieved widespread popularity in the 18th Century:
Things in nature always appear well-adapted to human convenience. But all things which are well-adapted have a designer behind them. Therefore, there must be a designer behind the adaption in nature.
But, Hume says:
There are plenty of things in nature which are not helpful to human beings.
Once again Hume's scepticism derives its great power from his analysis of causation.
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Hume's main discussion of the basis for our prephilosophical belief in an world independent of our perceptions is in the Treatise, which you might on this topic like to savour. Jonathan Bennett offers an incisive commentary in chapter XII of his stimulating Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Oxford, 1971. Donald L.M. Baxter has a concise discussion in The Blackwell Guide to Hume's Treatise, Chapter 7. H.H. Price's Hume's Theory of the External World is I woud say unsurpassed. Barry Stroud in his commentary Hume, London, 1977, Routledge, has a clearly stated interpretation |
Did Hume believe there was an external word, or did he not?
From what we have considered, the implication would be I think that he couldn't have.
Hume inherits the Cartesian legacy of human experience being a sequence of mental events - a sequence of what some of these writers call 'ideas' - taken as an umbrella term to cover visual experiences, feelings, notions, sensations and so on - which are supposed to parade through the mind.
This is the Cartesian bedrock, the conception Descartes bequeathed of the human being.
Hume accepted also the legacy of Locke, which was that none of these 'ideas' came with any special authority. We had no 'ideas' that carried any kind of independent guarantee. There were none, for example, which came directly from God, none carrying the Almighty's guarantee of 'authenticity'.
Hume thought like Locke that they all derived ultimately 'from the senses' .
He has a different terminology.His umbrella term is 'perceptions'. Perceptions are of two sorts, 'impressions', which appear to us as the basic deliverencies of our senses (including inner sense or introspection) and what he calls 'ideas', which are all derived from 'impressions'.
But if we speak of 'the basic deliverences of our sense', as I do here, we get started on a line of thought that Hume does not want to follow.
If ideas come via impressions from the senses, don't we have to think of them as being generated by the external world? Isn't that what you suggest if you suggest they come from the senses? Don't you suggest that stimulation, starting in the external world, impinges on the senses, which in response to this stimulation somehow create ideas in the mind? That is Locke's account. Things in the external world have qualities, and these qualities impact on our sense organs, which generate ideas in the mind. Some of those ideas are like the qualities which give rise to them - when those qualities are primary - and some qualities - secondary - give rise to ideas which are unlike themselves.
Berkeley thought this account of Locke's was indefensible. One way of putting the difficulty is this: if all we are aware of is our perceptions, the contents of our mind, how can we ever have reason to think there is something other than our perceptions? If we try and check up on the 'validity' of an perception, all we can ever do is encounter other perceptions! We can never get behind our perceptions and see what might be there. The proposal that there are things out there which give rise to our perceptions - this proposal Berkeley treats with derision. How can we ever have reason to think there are such things? All we have to go on, all we can ever have to go on, are the mental items in our minds.
| [A]s no beings are ever present to the mind but perceptions; it follows that we may observe a conjunction or a relation of cause and effect between different perceptions, but can never observe it between perceptions and objects. It is impossible, therefore, that from the existence or any of the qualities of the former, we can ever form any conclusion concerning the existence of the latter, or ever satisfy our reason in this particular. Hume, Treatise, I, II, p.204. |
Hume accepted Berkeley's analysis on this crucial point.
So that when he says that all our perceptions derive ultimately from the senses he does not want to be committed to the view that stimuli impinge on the senses from an external world. We can't know about any such proposal.
Hume thinks that we cannot reach outside the circle of our perceptions and talk about a world beyond. If there is a world beyond, we could never know that there was. All our knowledge - and all our opinion - has to be built on the things of which we are aware, namely our perceptions.
But, as in the case of causation, Hume acknowledges that in ordinary prephilosophical thought, we seem to think there is something which philosophising renders indefensible. We seem to think there is an external world, in which exist enduring physical objects, just as, prephilosophically we seem to think there are necessary connections between some pairs of events.
'It seems evident, that men are carried, by a natural instinct or prepossession, to repose faith in their senses; and that, without any reasoning, or even almost before the use of reason, we always suppose an external universe, which depends not on our perception, but would exist, though we and every sensible creature were absent or annihilated. ...
It also seems evident, that, when men follow this blind and powerful instinct of nature, they always suppose the very images, presented by the senses, to be the external objects, and never entertain any suspicion, that the one are nothing but representations of the other. ... But this universal and primary opinion of all men is soon destroyed by the slightest philosophy, which teaches us, that nothing can ever be present to the mind but an image or perception ...
It is a question of fact, whether the perceptions of the senses be produced by external objects, resembling them: How shall this question be determined? By experience surely; as all other questions of a like nature. But here experience is, and must be entirely silent. The mind has never anything present to it but the perceptions, and cannot possibly reach any experience of their connexion with objects. The supposition of such a connexion is, therefore, without any foundation in reasoning.'
Hume, Enquiry concerning human understanding, Section XII Part 1
Hume tries to account for the naive belief in the external world in the same way that he tries to account for the naive belief in causal necessity.
Remember that his account of that was that our minds get into the habit of passing from the idea of one event of a conjunct to the idea of the second event, and that we project that habit onto nature.
His suggestion is that much the same sort of thing happens to give rise to our confused thought that there are physical objects. Our mind, basing all its processes on the perceptions that pass through it with almost instantaneous rapidity, somehow generates for us the beliefs that we belong to a world that is indepenedent of us and our perceptions, that this world we think we belong to is furnished with objects which, in stark contrast to our perceptions, exist for extended periods of time.
'Somehow' I say Hume thinks, the mind does this. But how? In an exciting and revolutionary stretch of argumentation, Hume seeks to address this question.
So the question is: If all we have to go on are sequences of fleeting impressions, how do we come by our belief that we live in a world furnished with enduring objects?
It is such a good question, one that drew from Hume his best, deepest thinking, and one which is I think still an excellent question today. (Though today we would want to explore how the brain generates the requisite distinctions and beliefs, not the mind, if that is thought to be different.) Let me offer a simplified version of what I take to be Hume's answer. (I enter more into the subtleties here.)
Human experience, according to Hume, is a sequence of perceptions.
"The only existences, of which we are certain,
are perceptions, which being immediately present to us by consciousness,
command our strongest assent, and are the first foundation of all our
conclusions." Hume, Treatise,
I, II, p.204 |
Yet somehow, though this is all we have to go on, we think of ourselves as belonging to a world which is other than us - we make a distinction between ourselves and things that are not ourselves - and, moreover, we think of the world in which we think of ourselves as existing as having in it, besides ourselves, objects which endure. That is, we believe that, unlike our perceptions, which appear in the mind in rapid succession, there are objects in the world about us which go on existing for varying but sometimes extended periods of time - months, years, millenia.
So two questions - which Hume says are often not kept apart. If all we have to go on are a sequence of perceptions, all of which enjoy only momentary existence, what brings it about that we believe in a world distinct from us, and what brings it about that we believe there are objects in that world which last?
"We ought to examine apart those two questions, which are commonly confounded together, viz. Why we attribute a continued existence to objects, even when they are not present to the senses; and why we suppose them to have an existence DISTINCT from the mind and perception." Hume, Treatise, Book I, Part IV, Section II.
Hume has a very confusing way of giving his answers, because in doing so he appears to be assuming the existence of enduring objects which are independent of us. What he appears to be saying is this:
Think of what I might report as 'seeing the ocean' as I gaze out from the clifftop. Imagine that I 'see the ocean', then turn away (eg to the cornfield stretching out to my left), and then turn back to gaze at the ocean again. So I experience at least three perceptions: the perception of the ocean, then the perception of the cornfield (as it may be), and then, as I turn back, the perception of the ocean again. The two perceptions of the ocean, says Hume, are exactly like each other: they are not numerically the same perception, but they are entirely similar perceptions.
Hume has a separate thesis that he then calls into play. It is that in general the mind has a tendency to mistake two closely resembling perceptions for just the one.
Back on the clifftop then we have two perceptions of the ocean. These two perceptions are separated from one another. But because they are exactly like each other, we mistake them for a single continuing perception.
At the same time, however, we know, because of the interruption, that the two perceptions of the ocean are actually not one and the same, but rather two perceptions which resemble each other.
The result is that we are inclined to believe two things which contradict each other - that the two perceptions are one, and that they are two.
Hume says that what the mind does in such a situation is to seek to resolve the conflict.
It does this by camouflaging the fact that the two sequences of perceptions are separated by an interruption. The camouflage is provided by the belief that the perceptions which are interrupted actually continue to exist during the interruption. The mind generates this belief for us. The resolution is thus that there is one continuing perception: only some of the time it is not being 'perceived'...
Thus we acquire two beliefs: (a) that some of our perceptions endure and (b) some of our perceptions are independent of us.
QED
I try and do more justice to the compelling detail and great subtlety in Hume's full discussion here. (I draw heavily on the marvellous study by H.H.Price, Hume's Theory of the External World.)
Another attempt to catch the spirit of Hume's argumentation: 'When some of our sense perceptions resemble each other, or when some of them occur together, and this happens repeatedly, Hume holds that the mind has a tendency to associate them together, and to consider them as unified. And it tends to project this unity beyond the period in which we actually perceive the impressions in question to be connected, and to regard them as having an enduring continuity and identity.' Schacht, Classical Modern Philosophers, Routledge, London and New York, 1984, p. 200. |
Hume's approach to the problem of how we come by our unshakable conviction that we live in an objective world (furnished with objects which (a) are not ourselves and (b) endure through time) itself makes the assumption that the answer must lie somehow in the 'workings of consciousness'. The habit we form which means that when we receive one set of impressions we form a second set without further prompting the mechanism invoked is mental, one of 'association'. It is an associative effect that is a product of the workings of our mind. Hume is here sharing a perspective with early Enlightenment thinkers: associationist psychology was a matter of establishing what our mind-workings were.
The question Hume had identified was later answered, schematically at any rate, by those pursuing a different perspective, cognitive science. Cognitive science asks: from the data streaming in through our senses, taken in conjunction with the information that is already there in our computing resources, how does the brain software build for us a model which makes a distinction between input which is to be thought of as coming from independent enduring objects and input which is thought of as not originating in this way.
From this perspective Hume's explanation is not completely helpful, because an explanation in terms of mental mechanism is not necessary in this case. The question is how we gain our (unshakable) belief that we live in an objective world furnished with enduring objects, and the answer developed by cognitive science is, broadly, that this sense is created for us by the software running on our brains. It is this software that creates our way of thinking of ourselves and our experience out of the data streaming in.
I am keen to say here that Hume is raising a question to which cognitive science supplies a possible answer, different from the one he himself gave. In offering the answer that he did, in Associationist terms, Hume himself clearly thought of his question as one for empirical psychology. He did not think of it as somehow 'philosophical', if that is construed as different from empirical psychology.
Was Hume wrong? Is there a distinctively philosophical question here?
Kant recognised the validity of Hume's question but developed a completely different approach to it, one that attempted to take it out of the domain of empirical science. His approach is prized by philosophers, who were given new definition in large part by this very enterprise of Kant's, but from the point of view of understanding how organic systems could develop appropriate 'maps by which to steer' the elegant avenue of thought paved by Kant proved to be a cul de sac. More of this later.
A possible metaphor (though not Hume's) for the Modern perspective is this:-
We are patients surrounded by screens, upon which patterns move and change. It may be that some of these patterns are shadows thrown on the screens of objects beyond them: but we don't know, and, unable in principle to leave our beds, will never be able to tell.
You may say: he should be saying that all talk of the possibility of things behind the screen is mistaken, and you would probably be right.
Show that we have no grounds for thinking there are any real connections between things in nature and the bottom falls out of pretty well everything.
We have no reason to think there is a world, or a God, or 'anyone' in here at all.
Hume drives the conception of the human being created for the Modern world by Descartes, to what one might call its logical conclusion: no world, no Creator, no self.
Kant tried to build on Hume's idea that some of these things - the objective world, causality, time, space - were projections onto the world of something that belonged to the rational mind.
But I'm not clear myself that Kant's was an attempt to break the Cartesian mould in its fundamentals, the foundational distinction between inner and outer worlds.
You could say there have been two serious attempts to do that: by Husserl (phenomenology) and Wittgenstein.
But these have stories of their own.
| A..If a miracle happened, we couldn't have sufficient evidence to prove that it had | B. The notion of a miracle is incoherent | ||
| C. Miracles can't happen | D. Not even God can break the necessary connexions in nature | ||
| A. It is not true in fact to say that all animals are adopted. | B. If an animal wasn't well-adapted to its environment it wouldn't be there to be inspected. | ||
| C. Animals and plants get to be adapted to their environment through evolution - no need to invoke God. | D. Animals and plants are no more adapted to their environment than watches. | ||
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A. There is a world of enduring objects existing independently of our ideas. |
B. The objects which we prephilosophically assume exist continuously independently of our ideas even when we are not perceiving them in fact have an intermittent existence only. | ||
| C. We have no reason for believing that there is a world of enduring objects existing independently of our ideas. | D. We have no reason for doubting the existence of the external world. | ||
| A. The pockets of order that we see about us and which constitute our environment developed without any influence from outside from a soup of 'elementary particles' buzzing about, at an earlier stage of the Universe, in a state of complete disorder. | B. Natural selection produced the natural world as we see it today, but the process of natural selection cannot have got underway on its own: so the teleological argument in fact survives the Darwinian revolution. | ||
| C. The argument from design may work for the world as a whole but it doesn't work for stones or watches. | D. The argument from design assumes the existence of God | ||
| A. Nobody in their right mind believes this. |
B. You can't help believing this. |
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| C. Everyone believes this to begin with, but philosophising cures them of it. | D. You only have to play a game or two of billiards to see how true this is. | Ask a friend | |
Header: David Hume Tower, Edinburgh University, to whom thanks
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Last revised 03:01:05 |
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The incorrupt body
of St Bernadette Soubirous in the convent of St.Gildard in Nevers, France.
Courtesy 
William Paley