Promise and Ritual: Profane and Sacred Symbols in Hume's Philosophy of Religion

Abstract

1. A brief outline of Hume's views on religion 1 With French Enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire and d'Holbach, Hume shared a strongly negative outlook on religion. He saw it as a socially and politically dangerous force because of its dogmatism, extreme moralism or revolutionary fervour, all upsetting normal human life. But unlike these 'philosophes', Hume did more than just deride and criticize religion; he also tried to understand it. He even realized that religion was here to stay, even though in his view it was, unlike the family and other social phenomena, not a 'natural', i.e. , inevitable consequence of human nature in all circumstances. In practically all these respects, Hume seems close to someone like Spinoza. The latter's genealogical explanation of religion in terms of characteristics and processes of the imagination in combination with the emotions ( Ethics I Appendix; Tractatus Theologico-politicus ) is also found mutatis mutandis in Hume (Popkin 1979). Hume-scholars, especially philosophers, overwhelmingly concentrate on Hume's discussion of the rational justification of religious beliefs (in God's existence, moral goodness, etc. ) or of the rational acceptability of revelation and miracle. In Hume's day, these were the two lines of defence of (especially Christian) religion and so it is not surprising that he paid so much attention to these topics. In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Hume critically discussed the thesis that basic religious views were in fact rationally grounded, 'natural' beliefs, part of a 'natural theology' (against Bishop Butler). In his Of Miracles he tried to demolish the possibility of a justification of religion via the acceptability of revelation and miracle (against Pascal). Yet, his critique of the rational justification of religion is at best only half the story. For intellectuals it may be what is most fascinating, but from the Humean point of view it is not the most important. If religion is not rationally grounded and yet not given up and, especially, if it is a dominant body of beliefs and practices among common people who do not or could not care about rationality, then another kind of investigation forces itself upon the 'human scientist': a Natural History of Religion 2 . This is an investigation of religion as a cultural, socio-political phenomenon which, as all human phenomena, is susceptible to change, i.e. , to taking successively different forms as human society develops. Scottish Enlightenment thinkers shared a theory of human development in four stages: hunting, gathering, farming, commerce; the development was supposed to be a 'natural progression' from the crude to the cultivated, from the simple to the complex