Religious Skepticism Research Articles

Hume’s Philosophy of Religion

ABSTRACT David Hume was a great philosopher of religion and of common life. In this essay, I interpret him as making extreme religious skepticism one part of his overall rhetorical form. In all his religious writings, however, Hume always takes a step back from Pyrrhonian style results to a position that is more compatible with common life. The great twentieth-century religious studies scholar, Ninian Smart, offers seven dimensions of religion which show the extent to which it is thoroughly entwined with the practices and beliefs of ordinary human life, and this connection to ordinary life makes Smart’s divisions a nice match for Hume and his philosophy of common life. I elucidate the ways in which Hume’s philosophy contributes to our understanding of religion in terms of Smart’s dimensions, and in each case, I argue that Hume treats religion not from the perspective of a hostile enemy, but as a student of religion who grounds it in common life and seeks to correct it from that vantage point.

Study of Jane Eyre’s Rebellion Spirit from the Feminist Perspective

The novel Jane Eyre is a monumental work penned by the esteemed British female author, Charlotte Bronte. The present analysis delves into Jane Eyre’s indomitable spirit of rebellion and the underlying factors that fuel her defiance, adopting a feminist lens. The protagonist, Jane Eyre, owing to her orphaned status, education-induced intellectual awakening, and religious skepticism, and moral autonomy, experiences a burgeoning, stirring, and eruptive feminist consciousness. Thus, throughout her life’s journey, she persistently combats various social injustices, strives for her economic self-sufficiency and marital independence.

CLASSIFYING JOHN STUART MILL’S RELIGIOUS BELIEFS –WAS MILL A RELIGIOUS SCEPTIC?

This paper seeks to provide context in the effort to accurately classify the religious views of John Stuart Mill. The philosopher, not commonly known for his thoughts on religion, has nevertheless contributed to this topic with his three posthumously published essays, titled Three Essays on Religion, which have sparked some controversy and prompted various interpretations since they were first published in 1874. Mill’s many interpreters have used differing terms in order to describe him in respect to his religious thinking. He has been described as a militant apostle, as an atheist, a theistic humanist, an agnostic, while Mill himself, in his writing, has provided an alternative, by speaking about religious scepticism as the most pertinent attitude for a rational thinker. Each of these terms is discussed separately in this paper, as the merits and suitability of using any of these terms is considered, with reference to the wider context of interpretative texts, Mill’s own writings, and correspondences.

The Mechanism Underlying the Relationship Between Positive References to God and Sobriety in Alcoholics Anonymous in Poland

Spiritual struggles are common for religion-affiliated and non-affiliated individuals, religious skeptics, agnostics, and atheists. They gain particular importance for people under significant stress, such as those who are alcohol dependent. This study examined the role of positive religious coping and God’s support in the spiritual growth and recovery of alcohol-dependent individuals participating in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). The study was cross-sectional. The participants were 115 alcohol-dependent individuals from Poland who were members of AA. A path analysis statistical method was used. The research emphasized the beneficial role of strong God’s support in the relationship between positive religious coping and spiritual growth, abstinence, and happiness. The mechanism underlying the relationship between positive religious coping, God’s support, spiritual growth, and recovery was confirmed. God’s support was a moderator in the relationship between positive religious coping and spiritual growth. In a group with stronger God’s support, positive religious coping was positively related to spiritual growth, which in turn was associated with a happy and alcohol-abstinent life for alcohol-dependent individuals participating in AA. Among individuals with weak God’s support, positive religious coping was not directly related to spiritual growth, nor was it indirectly related to recovery through spiritual growth. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.

Why you should be a religious skeptic

AbstractMost philosophers of religion subscribe to some variety of religious realism: they believe that religious statements aim at capturing a mind‐independent reality and are true precisely if they successfully do so. Curiously, most religious realists also believe that at least some of our religious beliefs are rationally justified. In this paper, I argue that these positions are actually at odds with each other. Religious realists should rather be religious skeptics. I first argue that realism always implies the possibility of our beliefs being false. Then, I develop a Copernican argument to show that we have no reason to believe that we are in an epistemically privileged position where we could be confident that our particular belief is justified while all competing beliefs are not. This seems impossible for two reasons: (a) From a probabilistic point of view (adopting a principle of mediocrity), it is highly unlikely that current humans have the maximum of epistemic capacities possible. Rather, our ability to understand reality is limited, so we should expect at least some parts of religious reality to remain unknown to us. (b) From a deep‐time perspective, humanity has not pondered religious questions for long. We are probably still in the early stages of our cognitive evolution, and so we should treat our religious beliefs as provisional and open to revision.

Berlin’s Savoyard Vicar: Religious Skepticism and Toleration in Mendelssohn and Rousseau

While both Mendelssohn and Rousseau were deeply spiritual thinkers whose writings continually reflect a profound belief in a benevolent God, they both still used religious skepticism in order to undermine the logic of religious intolerance. In doing so, these religious thinkers reflect a critical assumption they share with the far less religiously inclined David Hume, namely, that skepticism is a critical tool for the promotion of tolerance. This paper analyses the skeptical and tolerant similarities in Mendelssohn’s and Rousseau’s religious thought. It explores Mendelssohn’s reception of Rousseau, before focusing on Rousseau’s arguments for religious tolerance and showing both how they reflect a skeptical undercurrent and how Mendelssohn uses many similar skeptical arguments for the same purpose. Finally, this analysis will lead to concluding thoughts on the dialectic between skepticism, faith and tolerance in the Enlightenment, and more generally, for skeptical believers ever since.

Explaining Rationalist Weak Conciliationism: A Challenge

Abstract In his book, Disagreement, Deference, and Religious Commitment, John Pittard presents and critiques what he calls the “master argument for disagreement-motivated religious skepticism.” This argument purports to show, using only higher-order reasoning and facts about religious disagreement, that nobody’s religious outlook is justified (at least, nobody aware of the argument). The master argument presupposes that any attempt to vindicate one’s religious outlook must employ dispute-independent reasons. Pittard objects to this assumption and argues, instead, for rationalist weak conciliationism: the view that partisan justification can be had when (and only when) one has rational insight into the claim in question. In this paper, I raise a challenge for rationalist weak conciliationism; in short, it is difficult to explain why only rational insight provides partisan justification while maintaining that a wide range of beliefs, including religious beliefs, can be justified in a partisan way.

Physiology, Vitalism, and the Contest for Body and Soul in the Antebellum United States.

In the early nineteenth century, physiology became an increasingly popular and powerful science in the United States. Religious controversy over the nature of human vitality animated much of this interest. On one side of these debates stood Protestant apologists who wedded an immaterialist vitalism to their belief in an immaterial, immortal soul - and therefore to their dreams of a Christian republic. On the other side, religious skeptics argued for a materialist vitalism that excluded anything immaterial from human life, aspiring thereby to eliminate religious interference in the progress of science and society. Both sides hoped that by claiming physiology for their vision of human nature they might direct the future of religion in the US. Ultimately, they failed to realize these ambitions, but their contest posed a dilemma late nineteenth-century physiologists felt compelled to solve: how should they comprehend the relationship between life, body, and soul? Eager to undertake laboratory work and leave metaphysical questions behind, these researchers solved the problem by restricting their work to the body while leaving spiritual matters to preachers. In attempting to escape the vitalism and soul questions, late nineteenth-century Americans thus created a division of labor that shaped the history of medicine and religion for the following century.

Anatole France, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce A Queer Genealogy of “The Dead”

This essay re-situates James Joyce’s story “The Dead” in the alternative intellectual genealogy of late-nineteenth-century European religious skepticism, its reexamination of the historical origins of Christianity, and its fresh reinterrogation of the epochal transition between the pre-Christian and the Christian worlds. Taking a cue from Richard Ellmann’s suggestion that it was Anatole France’s “The Procurator of Judea” that inspired “The Dead”, the essay argues that just as France had written a revisionist story about the disappearance of Jesus from the history, so did Joyce write a similar story, about a failed Annunciation and the death of God. Further, the essay identifies Oscar Wilde’s Salome as a twin text of France’s and triangulates it with France and Joyce, showing how Wilde’s play had excavated this same territory and provided a recent Irish precedent for restaging a New Testament dialogue, for redramatizing the contest between female pagan voice and prophetic Christian voice, and for reviving a sustained pagan rhetoric of “the dead”.

Критика религии в философии софистов

The article deals with the socio-historical conditions of the formation of criticism of religion in the philosophy of sophists. It is shown that there were two directions in the religious criticism of the sophists. The first direction was associated with religious agnosticism. Protagoras defended the idea of the incomprehensibility of the gods. The statements of Gorgias and Xeniades contributed to the strengthening of religious skepticism. The second direction was connected with the development of theories of the origin of religion. Prodicus and his idea of the deification of useful things by ancient people is one of the first attempts at a rational explanation of the origin of religion. Critias’ idea that the gods were invented in order to maintain public order challenged the entire religious consciousness of the Greeks. The theories of Prodicus and Critias contributed to the development of ancient atheism. It is established that the sophists adhered to an ambivalent position on the question of attitude to religion. On the one hand, the sophists did not seek to destroy religious institutions. They recognized the value of religion because they considered it one of the benefits of civilization. According to sophists, religion plays an important role in the life of society. It supports moral norms, laws and order. On the other hand, the views of the sophists posed a great danger to traditional religious beliefs. The views of the sophists contributed to the doubt of the existence of gods and the weakening of religious beliefs. It is established that the Peloponnesian War played an important role in the formation of the religious criticism of the sophists. The destructive nature of the Peloponnesian War led to the decline of moral and religious norms. The plague in Athens, the cases of genocide, the triumph of brute force and lawlessness contributed to the growth of distrust of public institutions and disillusionment with religion. All this created favorable conditions for the development of moral and ethical relativism and religious skepticism in the philosophy of sophists.

엘리자베스 비숍과 기독교에 대한 회의주의

This paper aims to re-read Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Brazil, January 1, 1502” from the viewpoint of religious skepticism. Containing a number of Biblical and religious connotations, this poem depicts the Portuguese colonizers arrived at Brazil in the past. Bishop criticizes those who tended to appropriate Christian religion for their selfish benefits and ends to their worldly taste. The religious secularization portrayed in the poem would be usually alluded through natural things, particular words and colors. To discuss Bishop’s skeptical view of Christianity in this poem, I cite some Biblical stories and Christian materials and go on exploring the symbolic meanings of colors in relation to Christianity. Analyzing the poem in terms of religious skepticism, I try to invite readers to re-consider and expand the critical scope of the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop that didn’t garner the critical attention in terms of religion. I conclude that religious skepticism for Bishop becomes an angle of viewing and speculating the world and her age, hoping to broaden the horizon of Bishop studies and the landscape of modernism.

The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States' First Forgotten Celebrity by Carolyn Eastman

Reviewed by: The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States' First Forgotten Celebrity by Carolyn Eastman Sandra M. Gustafson The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States' First Forgotten Celebrity. By Carolyn Eastman. Williamsburg, Va., and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 358 pages. Cloth, ebook. The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States' First Forgotten Celebrity is an impressive achievement. Carolyn Eastman's reconstruction of the life and career of the Scottish cultural entrepreneur James Ogilvie is at once deeply researched, expertly situated in several bodies of scholarship, and a delightful reading experience. From the title forward, The Strange Genius of Mr. O aims to appeal to both experts in the field of early American history and interested general readers. Eastman's study also has broad implications, engaging questions concerning the historical nature of celebrity, the place of opium in the transatlantic world, responses to religious skepticism in the early republic, constructions of masculinity both in the classical world and on the North American frontier, the different valences of oratorical and print culture, and the relationship of historical maladies to present-day understandings of mental illness. Tracing all these themes as they radiate from the core narrative of Ogilvie's life, Eastman provides her readers with a tale of postrevolutionary America that underscores central tensions between the classical republican thought that fueled the revolution and the emerging realities of a modern commercial republic. The "strange genius" that Ogilvie possessed was a talent for oratory, which he transformed into a lucrative performance art while advocating for its central role in a republican system of education. Ogilvie's choice of form has a distinctly antiquarian flavor today, when people give speeches, addresses, sermons, or lectures but not "orations." Ogilvie, though, belonged to a world where oratory was not only a recognized practice; it was celebrated as the preeminent republican genre. Ogilvie made a name for himself as a celebrity orator starting late in the first decade of the nineteenth century. But he sank into oblivion within a few years, in part because of his lingering association with atheism. This too reflected specific features of the early republic; as Eastman notes, the modern sense of "celebrity"—that is, one who is fashionable or popular—emerged [End Page 315] later in the United States than in Britain or France. In Ogilvie's day, the term retained the sense of an "exemplary" (129) figure, a meaning that complicated his reception, particularly after his religious skepticism came to public attention. A relevant body of scholarship that Eastman overlooks is the work of the historians who analyzed early American political culture through the lens of "classical republicanism"—Bernard Bailyn, Gordon S. Wood, J. G. A. Pocock, and Joyce Appleby, among others—emphasizing the Renaissance-era recovery of Greek and Roman thought and its impact on Europe's North American colonies.1 As one influential aspect of this movement, classical oratory was elevated to a place of eminence in the political imagination and given a central role in higher education. Students were trained in classical rhetoric, read orations by Demosthenes and Cicero, and practiced to become great orators themselves. The republican enthusiasm for oratory shaped a public culture in which Dr. Joseph Warren's decision to wear a toga while delivering the annual Boston Massacre Oration in 1775 evoked, as Eastman notes, "the classical opposition to tyranny" (146).2 By the time Ogilvie donned a toga for his lecture tour of the United States in the 1810s, his mode of dress had become such an unremarkable feature of modern republican iconography that reviewers rarely mentioned it; indeed, Eastman notes that by the early 1800s, the toga no longer conveyed a revolutionary spirit but rather signified "the social stability of a culture that would not succumb to extralegal violence, as had the French Revolution" (146). The common thread linking these two meanings of the toga was devotion to the preservation of the republic, whether from foreign tyranny or internal disorder. The significance that Eastman assigns to Ogilvie's Roman attire captures...

The Binding of Ikus–Reimagining the Akedah inXena: Warrior Princess

Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son Isaac, known as the Akedah (Genesis 22), is one of the more puzzling events in the Hebrew Bible. Most rabbinic commentaries and elaborations (midrashim) take an apologetic stance, defending Abraham and drawing spiritual lessons from his disturbing actions. A surprisingly sensitive treatment is found in “Altared States,” a first-season episode of the fantasy television series Xena: Warrior Princess, which reimagines the Akedah as a cautionary tale of sibling rivalry, coercion, and religious zealotry gone awry. This paper examines the Xena episode in the context of the show’s religious skepticism, 1990s spiritual eclecticism, and classical interpretations of the biblical story.

Estebanillo González - A New Perspective on the Last Pícaro

ABSTRACT Estebanillo González is the last Spanish picaresque novel, but its eponymous protagonist rarely features in the discussions on the genre in the way other male characters, Lazarillo, Guzmán or Pablos do. In this article, drawing on earlier literary criticism and historical research concerning religious diasporas in Early Modern Europe, I offer a new analysis of the protagonist’s possible converso origins. The protagonist’s attitude towards his alleged hidalguía questions the relevance of social status. In the second part of the article, I argue that behind the protagonist’s jokes and puns hides religious scepticism aimed in particular at Counter-Reformation techniques of casuistry. Both hidalguía and Catholic practices, fundamental aspects of Spanish society, are therefore undermined. Estebanillo, as the last picaro, offers his own original vision of the self in the world and as such should join the picaresque trio.

Margaret Fuller, Faithful Female Sceptic: The Politics of (Not) Publishing the 1842 "A Credo"

Margaret Fuller, Faithful Female Sceptic:The Politics of (Not) Publishing the 1842 "A Credo" Caitlin Smith (bio) In 1842, Margaret Fuller sent William Channing a text nine years in the making: her personal formulation of belief, "A Credo."1 Building on Fuller's investigation of biblical authority during her 1833–34 Groton retreat, as well as her 1840–41 intensive reading period in Romantic religion, "A Credo" articulates Fuller's own religious beliefs. Fuller explains how she arrived at the "I believe" statements that structure "A Credo." She defines what she is not (a Christian, an irreligious infidel), and embraces an idiomatic definition of religion shaped by Romantic idealism. "A Credo" concludes by staking out a new religious identity for its author. Margaret Fuller would henceforth be a "faithful skeptic."2 But Fuller never publicized either her rejection of institutional Christianity, her self-created Romantic religion (which anticipates the cosmology of American spiritualism), or her new identity as a "faithful sceptic."3 Religious skepticism had been a blurrily defined but much-invoked bugbear in early American political rhetoric since the 1780s.4 Public concern over religious skepticism only increased in the 1810s–40s. Early nineteenth-century print culture documents a consistent anxiety about a vast amount of ambient infidelity. If not properly managed by religious [End Page 383] authorities, this imagined reservoir of doubt could erode shared religious values, thereby destroying the sociable bonds of trust between individual citizens and between citizens and institutions.5 In fact, religious institutions were undergoing significant reorganization in this period, as America's religious marketplace diversified and radically pluralized.6 And political distrust was on the rise, thanks to growing polarization over the morality of the South's "peculiar institution," visible tensions between state and federal orders of governance, and anxiety about economic volatility following the Panics of 1819–21 and 1837. For polemically minded ministers and partisan politicians alike, ambient infidelity provided a powerful rhetorical figure to focus and direct national anxieties. Discussions about skepticism and faith, unbelief and belief, went beyond baldly opportunistic attacks on imagined skepticism. They appeared in published journal debates between opponents termed Christians and Skeptics; theological treatises on the future of specific Christian traditions; new explorations of comparative religion; arguments between moderate, enlightened Deists and reform-minded atheists; and didactic fiction that staged dramatic conversions or deconversions to articulate what true religion meant.7 Transcendentalism emerged from and through these intellectual debates about religion and its future in American life. Though notoriously diverse in terms of philosophy and activism, American Transcendentalism was largely held together by an attempt to reconstitute essential religious sensibilities outside the calcified forms of outmoded creedal Christianity.8 Many of Fuller's male Transcendentalist peers argued that faith and skepticism (or belief and unbelief) were incorrectly construed as opposites and actually worked together to keep religion dynamic and alive. These arguments furnished ammunition to their critics, who (in)famously identified Transcendentalism as "the latest form of infidelity."9 Though Transcendentalist [End Page 384] thinkers disagreed considerably about what was meant by faith and by skepticism, and about the specifics of the merging process, they advanced structurally similar arguments about the nonoppositional nature of faith and skepticism. Given her male Transcendentalist peers' open advocacy of a faith-doubt synthesis, Fuller's decision to keep private her solution to the conflict is telling. "A Credo" embraces elements of the same German Romantic tradition that Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker found attractive. Emerson saw skepticism as a temporary obstruction of both individual and universal-historical growth, and argued that overcoming doubt through action could help young men develop courage, valor, and conviction. Fuller's statement elevated obstructive skepticism to half of a mutually constitutive, dialectical dualism. And "A Credo" was not incidental to Fuller's developing thought. As she embraced and redefined gendered antiskepticism, she invented the figure of dynamic polar dualism that would later structure her idea of gender in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Finally, "A Credo" creates a feminine solution to obstructive skepticism. Fuller advocates an inward turn and mystical awakening over the heroic leap into world action advised by Goethe, Carlyle, and Emerson.10 Though Fuller's private writings record a consistent...

The "Irreligion of Thinking Men": Melville's Materialist Genealogy

The "Irreligion of Thinking Men":Melville's Materialist Genealogy Elizabeth Adams (bio) On 20 November 1856, after spending an afternoon with his friend Herman Melville at the sand dunes near Southport, England, Nathaniel Hawthorne penned his famous journal description of Melville's religious uncertainty: Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had "pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated"; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists—and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before—in wandering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.1 Despite his Christian upbringing in the Dutch Reformed Church and his later affiliation with the Unitarian Church [End Page 1] following his marriage to Elizabeth Shaw, Melville continually struggled with religious belief, unable, as Hawthorne so eloquently observes, to either fully embrace or denounce Christian faith. Melville's religious struggle has long fascinated scholars who study his writing's various religious and philosophical underpinnings. Most agree that, throughout his life, Melville experienced a religious skepticism that significantly informed his work, fueling, for instance, his meditation on the problem of evil in Moby-Dick (1851) and his earnest quest after faith in Clarel (1876). This skepticism fed his philosophical roving, preventing him from settling upon any one explanation of truth and resulting in the philosophical eclecticism that so characterizes his work. Regarding the final years of his life, however, some scholars have searched for an ultimate resting point in Melville's religio-philosophical wanderings and have turned to Billy Budd, Sailor (1924), a tale written near the end of Melville's life and published only after his death, for answers about his "last will and spiritual testament."2 Several foundational critics have interpreted Billy Budd as Melville's final "testament of acceptance," or testament of Christian faith, while subsequent interpretations have alternately read Billy Budd as Melville's final, ironic refutation of Christian theology.3 More recently, however, scholarship has conveyed the extent of Melville's ongoing and wide-ranging search for truth, linking him to such diverse belief systems as Calvinism, Unitarianism, Buddhism, Paganism, and Stoicism.4 Perhaps Brian Yothers best encapsulates Melville's religious and philosophical multiplicity when he connects Melville to "the sort of rebellious religious individualism that we associate with Captain Ahab, and that pushes an individual at once toward martyrdom for a personal understanding of the truth and toward a ferocious denunciation of those falsehoods and half-truths that the individual sees as being in conflict with this transcendent vision."5 Rather than passively accepting [End Page 2] any one belief system, Melville continually sought his own individual truth from among multiple creeds. My study contributes to this almost century-long conversation about Melville's religio-philosophical doubts and beliefs by arguing that the Greek philosopher Lucretius' materialism is a hereto-overlooked philosophical source that preoccupied Melville throughout his life, particularly in his final years. Recognition of Lucretius' influence on Melville's late work proves important to this conversation, for it questions the claim that he found religious certainty at the end of his life, supplements current understandings of his philosophical pluralism, and provides an explanation for his attraction to the idea of annihilation. More broadly, when considered alongside recent studies discussing his work's materialist aspects, Melville's engagement with Lucretius provides source evidence that complicates straightforward notions of him as a romantic idealist, and, when considered alongside examinations of Lucretius' influence on other nineteenth-century authors, Melville's engagement with Lucretius appears as one instance of a wider cultural struggle to face the simultaneously Classical and thoroughly modern idea of a purely material world. After discussing Lucretius' materialism and demonstrating Melville's awareness of Lucretius' philosophy through his reading of Bayle's dictionary and...

Dennis C. Rasmussen. The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship that Shaped Modern Thought.

Dennis C. Rasmussen. <i>The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship that Shaped Modern Thought</i>.

Recent Articles

Recent Articles

From Impulse to Action—Noah (2014) and Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014) as Secular Bible Epics

Several large-scale Bible epics have been produced in the decade after the revival of epic cinema at the turn of the millennium. Yet, while many biblical films of this period were primarily aimed at religious audiences, Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (2014) and Ridley Scott’s Exodus:Gods and Kings (2014) stand out due to their broader epic appeal and religious skepticism. Using Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of the impulse-image and the action-image as framework, this article analyses some of the nuances and complexities of both films. It argues that although both films offer scale and spectacle consistent with older biblical epics, the portrayal of their lead characters as a man determined on destruction (Noah) and religious skeptic and warrior (Exodus) differentiates them from traditional biblical cinema. Additionally, comparing both films helps articulate nuances within Deleuze’s movement-image that are often overlooked. Having proclaimed that modern cinema brings with it a crisis of truth that challenges the certainties of classic American cinema and its clear ideas on morality and belief, Deleuze ultimately calls for a leap of faith to reinstate the possibility of action. The article concludes that Noah and Exodus offer us a bit of both—spiritual uncertainty and a return of classic epic cinema.

The Miracle in Christianity According to David Hume

This article examines the views of David Hume on miracles in Christianity in his book “An Inquiry ‎Concerning Human Understanding”. Using a literature ‎approach and systematic analysis of David Hume's writings, this research generates ‎several ideas. David Hume wrote that any miracle that happens in this world is a ‎violation of the laws of nature. Miracles destroy the natural order ‎and are not in line with the existing law of nature. David Hume opposed the idea of miracles ‎because he was a religious skeptic, against all things metaphysical and non-natural to ‎humans. Thus, David Hume rejected the truth filled with doubts and questions. David ‎Hume's skepticism leads to the theory of deism, that God is a product of human thought ‎and He does not interfere with what He created.