David Hume's critique of religion and its implications for contemporary theology

Much of the previous commentary on Hume's philosophy of religion has focused on his critical treatment of theistic arguments, and particularly on his analysis of the argument from design as it appears in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Although some recent commentary has shifted away from these emphases, the longstanding preoccupation with Hume's philosophical attacks on natural theology has fostered the notion that Hume's critique of religion is largely a challenge to the truth status of assertions about God's existence or can be captured in the proposition that belief in God is philosophically insupportable.; The alternative view advanced in this dissertation is that Hume's rejection of theism was not predicated solely or even primarily upon his rejection of theistic arguments, but depended as much or more upon his theory of the psychological origins and consequences of religious beliefs. The thesis advanced here is that Hume's critique is best understood as a type of unmasking project similar in important respects to those critiques which employ what Paul Ricoeur has referred to as a "hermeneutics of suspicion." As such, Hume's critique of religion is a precursor to the type of critique commonly associated with Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. The aim of these nineteenth century critics was not so much to demonstrate the lack of a rational basis for religious belief as to explain it away as the product or symptom of underlying and unacknowledged social and psychological conditions. This same general approach to the subject of religion is reflected in much of Hume's writings on religion, most obviously in the Natural History of Religion, though Hume also extends this strategy very skillfully in the Dialogues to the subject of philosophical theology. Using an analysis of Hume's two major works on the subject of religion, this dissertation seeks to develop an account of Hume's overall treatment of the subject of religion; and to explore certain implications of Hume's treatment of religion for certain schools of contemporary theology.