Hume’s Writings on Religion

Abstract

When we are seeking to expose as insincere Hume’s occasional suggestions in his published works that he is a believing Christian, we have the great advantage of being able to test these pronouncements against the detailed reports of people who have questioned him personally on this topic. Similarly, the testimony handed down in records of Hume’s private conversations allows us to be confident that when Hume affects in the Treatise and ‘Of the Immortality of the Soul’ to believe in an afterlife, he is engaged in a policy of prudent dissimulation. Resources of this kind, however, are not available to us if we are endeavouring to construct an interpretation of Hume as seeking to defend in his writings a radically irreligious perspective lying somewhere on the spectrum from attenuated deism to outright atheism.