David Hume: Empiricism, Miracles, and the Critique of Design

David Hume: Empiricism, Miracles, and the Critique of Design

David Hume (1711–1776) is one of the most important philosophers in the Western tradition and arguably the most significant critic of religious belief in the history of philosophy. A Scottish empiricist, historian, and essayist, Hume mounted devastating challenges to the rationalist arguments for God’s existence, to the credibility of miracles, to the design argument, and to the very possibility of establishing religious truths through reason or experience. His philosophical works — especially A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (published posthumously in 1779) — remain essential reading for AQA A-Level Religious Studies.

Hume’s Empiricism

Hume’s entire philosophy rests on the principle of empiricism — the view that all genuine knowledge of matters of fact is derived from sensory experience. In the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume divided all objects of human inquiry into two categories:

• Relations of ideas: Propositions that are true by definition and can be known a priori (without experience). Examples include mathematical truths (“2 + 2 = 4”) and logical tautologies (“all bachelors are unmarried”). These are necessarily true but tell us nothing about the world.
• Matters of fact: Propositions about the world that can only be known a posteriori (through experience). Examples include “the sun rose today” and “water boils at 100°C.” These are contingent (they could be otherwise) and their denial is never self-contradictory.

This distinction — later called Hume’s Fork — has devastating implications for religious philosophy:

• Claims about God’s existence are not relations of ideas (they are not true by definition — the denial of God’s existence is not self-contradictory). Therefore, God’s existence cannot be established by a priori reasoning. This undermines the ontological argument.
• If God’s existence is a matter of fact, it can only be established through experience. But God is not an object of sensory experience. We do not see, hear, touch, taste, or smell God.
• Any proposition that is neither a relation of ideas nor a matter of fact verifiable by experience is, Hume argued, meaningless — “nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” — Hume, Enquiry, XII.3

Hume’s Critique of Causation

Hume’s analysis of causation is central to his critique of the cosmological argument and has profound implications for all arguments that reason from effects to causes (including arguments for God’s existence).

Hume argued that we never directly perceive a necessary connection between cause and effect. What we actually experience is:

• Constant conjunction: One type of event (e.g. striking a match) is regularly followed by another (e.g. the match lighting).
• Temporal priority: The cause precedes the effect in time.
• Contiguity: The cause and effect are spatially adjacent.

But we never observe the power or force by which one event necessarily produces another. Our belief in causation is a habit of the mind — a psychological tendency to expect the future to resemble the past — rather than a rational insight into the necessary structure of reality.

The implications for theistic arguments are severe:

• The cosmological argument reasons from the existence of the universe (an effect) to God as its cause. But Hume’s analysis suggests that we have no rational basis for claiming that the universe must have a cause. We have no experience of universes being created; we cannot apply our ordinary causal reasoning to unique, unprecedented events.
• Even if the universe has a cause, we cannot infer from the effect alone what the cause is like. The cause might be a single God, multiple gods, an impersonal force, or something entirely beyond our comprehension.

The Problem of Induction

Hume’s analysis of causation leads to the problem of induction — one of the deepest problems in all of philosophy. Inductive reasoning involves inferring general conclusions from particular observations (e.g. “the sun has risen every day in the past; therefore, it will rise tomorrow”).

Hume argued that induction cannot be rationally justified:

• Induction assumes that the future will resemble the past (the “uniformity of nature”).
• But this assumption is itself based on induction (“in the past, the future has resembled the past; therefore, in the future, the future will resemble the past”).
• This is circular reasoning: we are using induction to justify induction.
• Therefore, we have no rational basis for any inductive inference — including scientific laws, predictions about the future, and arguments from experience to the existence of God.

The problem of induction is relevant to the philosophy of religion because it undermines any attempt to reason from observed regularities in nature to a divine designer. If we cannot rationally justify our assumption that nature is uniform and orderly, we cannot use the order of nature as evidence for God.

Hume’s Critique of Miracles

Chapter X (“Of Miracles”) of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding contains Hume’s famous argument against the rational credibility of miracle reports. This is one of the most discussed arguments in the philosophy of religion and is a core topic for AQA A-Level.

Hume defined a miracle as “a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.” He then argued that it is never rational to believe that a miracle has occurred, on the following grounds:

The “In Principle” Argument

• A law of nature is established by uniform experience — a vast, consistent body of evidence from countless observations. The law of gravity, for example, is supported by the entire weight of human experience.
• A miracle, by definition, is a violation of a law of nature. The evidence against a miracle (the entire weight of uniform experience supporting the law) is therefore as strong as evidence can possibly be.
• A wise person proportions their belief to the evidence. Since the evidence against a miracle will always outweigh the testimony in favour of it, it is always more rational to believe that the testimony is mistaken than that the miracle occurred.
• In short: “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact which it endeavours to establish.”

The “In Fact” Arguments

Hume supplemented his “in principle” argument with four practical considerations that further undermine the credibility of miracle reports: