“No long time of expectation”: Hume’s religious scepticism and the apocalypse

Abstract

Hume never explicitly attacks the many detailed apocalyptic theories of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries but his arguments against the possibility of certain knowledge about the future implicitly subvert the entire scriptural foundation for any apocalyptic expectation.1 It is the essence of Hume’s religious scepticism to destroy the view that anyone can know for certain either that God has been providentially involved in human and natural history in the past or that He will be again in the future. So sweeping is Hume’s rejection of the “religious hypothesis” and so destructive are Hume’s sceptical arguments regarding certain knowledge about the future course of events to the rooted apocalyptic expectation among the Millennialists of his (and of our own) day that it is quite surprising to discover an important basic affinity of outlook between Hume and the Millennialists.