Polemical Aspects of Hume's Natural History of Religion

Abstract

DAVID HUME'S Natural History of Religion aroused controversy even before its publication in 1757. Bishop Warburton wrote the publisher of the work, Millar, asking that it be suppressed on the assumption that its purpose was to establish naturalism, a species of atheism, instead of religion. Reverend Caleb Fleming defended Hume's work on the grounds that Hume had finely exposed superstition and popery: professeth himself an advocate of pure theism, and as far as he a theist, he cannot be an enemy pure Christianity.1 Hume's avowed purpose, in his introduction the work, purely scholarly and apparently disinterested: What those principles are, which give rise the original belief [in religion], and what those accidents and causes are, which direct its operation, the subject of our present enquiry.2 Modern commentators have accepted Hume's claim at face value. H. E. Root, though he points out the one-sidedness of Hume's presentation, says There no question here of Hume's philosophical sincerity and honesty.3 J. 0. Higgins views the work similarly: the Natural History of Religion (NHR) is what its title suggests, not anti-religious propaganda, although it contained a good deal that was critical of religion or, as Hume termed it, 'popular religion,' but a natural history in the eighteenth-century style, intended