Hume, Language and God

Abstract

Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is a classic in philosophy of religion and accordingly has received considerable attention. One portion of the Dialogues , however, has bewildered scholars and is often passed over in silence; I refer to the remarks made by the character Cleanthes in Part III. Part III contains two illustrations which are claimed by Cleanthes to provide obvious grounds for asserting that there is divine design present in the universe. The illustrations, one of which invokes an imaginary voice in the clouds, the other of which asks the reader to envisage a library full of living books, may appear bizarre to a modern audience. It is not at all clear that these fantasies illuminate any interesting or striking similarities between products of human intelligence and works of nature from which the inference to a designer could be drawn; nor is it clear what other bearing these examples, portraying imaginary states of affairs, could have on the design argument. Those few commentators who have addressed these passages directly have been unable to generate an interpretation which consistently explains both of the illustrations and which permits Part III to fit comfortably with the remainder of the Dialogues. To wit, they have suggested that the illustrations appeal to different sense of 'design' (Norman Kemp Smith and George Nathan)1, or that one of the illustrations, but apparently not the other, is an attempt to introduce a new species of inference into the design argument (Nelson Pike)2, or they have completely ignored the occurrence or content of one or the other of the illustrations (Nelson Pike, Stanley Tweyman and P. S. Wadia).3 In this paper I want to suggest that the core of the discussion in Part III is the nature and explanation of verbal communication, and