Justified True Belief

(●) The critic who wrote the objections to Christianity that are still being answered, and who was gentler in person than anything he put on paper. + If you have ever heard someone say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, or that you cannot get from the way the world is to the way it ought to be, or that the order in nature might have any number of causes and a good God is only one guess among them, you have heard David Hume. He did not invent unbelief. He gave it arguments, and he gave them in prose so clear that they have never needed restating. He is the reason a great deal of Christian thinking looks the way it does. Before Hume, defending the faith often meant proving it the way a geometer proves a theorem. After him, it meant weighing evidence, and the best Christian answers to him (from George Campbell in his own lifetime to the probability arguments of the last few decades) are answers on that ground. A Christian reader who has never met Hume has never met the strongest form of the questions his neighbours are actually asking. Here is the fact that surprises everyone. In his own century he was famous as a historian. His History of England made him rich and stayed in print for a hundred years, while the philosophical masterpiece he wrote before he was twenty-six sold so badly that he said it fell dead-born from the press. The book that would have caused him the most trouble, the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, he kept in a drawer for a quarter of a century and left instructions for its printing after he was safely dead.

(●) 1711 AD: Born in Edinburgh to a Berwickshire family with an old name, a small estate, and no money to spare for a second son. + He was born on 26 April 1711 by the Old Style calendar, the older way of reckoning dates that Britain still kept in those years and that ran eleven days behind the calendar most of Europe had already adopted. He was the second son of Joseph Hume, laird of Ninewells in the parish of Chirnside. A laird is not a lord: the word means the owner of a small landed estate, a country gentleman with a house, some fields, and tenants who work them. His father died while David was still an infant, and his mother Katherine, a daughter of Sir David Falconer, who had been Lord President of the Court of Session and so the head of Scotland’s highest civil court, raised three children alone. Hume put it plainly in the short autobiography he wrote at the end of his life: his family was not rich, and as a younger brother his patrimony, the share of the family property that came down to him, "was of course very slender." The name is worth a sentence, because people still argue about it. He spelled it Hume; the family also appears in the records as Home, and the Edinburgh matriculation book has him down as David Home. He piqued himself on Hume as the older spelling of the two. He was not inventing a new name. He was keeping the one that matched how Scots said it. He matriculated at the University of Edinburgh on 27 February 1723, entered in the Greek class of Professor William Scott, which would have made him about eleven. That sounds impossible to a modern ear, and at the time it was perfectly ordinary. Boys went young and left young, the usual Scottish college course ran out around fourteen or fifteen, and Hume left without a degree, as most of them did. The family expected law, which was the sensible profession for a younger son with an old name and no money behind it. He had other plans, and for a while he kept them to himself.

(●) 1729 AD: At eighteen a new way of thinking opened up to him, and within months his mind simply stopped working. + We know what happened because he wrote it down, at length, for a doctor he did not name, in a letter he kept a copy of and probably never sent. Around his eighteenth year, he says, "there seemed to be opened up to me a new scene of thought, which transported me beyond measure." Law now "appeared nauseous" to him. He threw over everything else and read. Then, "about the beginning of September, 1729, all my ardour seemed in a moment to be extinguished." He could not lift his mind to the pitch that had given him such pleasure. The flatness lasted nine months at first, and the trouble behind it went on for years. Scurvy spots broke out on his fingers; his heart palpitated; in May 1731 a ravenous appetite arrived and, in six weeks, turned a tall, lean, raw-boned young man into what he called the sturdiest, most healthful-looking fellow you ever saw. The prescribed cure was bitters, anti-hysteric pills, an English pint of claret every day, and eight or ten Scotch miles on horseback. Anyone who has watched a student burn out at twenty will recognize the shape of it. He thought part of the cause was his own project. He had been reading Cicero, Seneca and Plutarch, taken with their pictures of virtue, and had set out to remake his temper and his will by daily reflection, "continually fortifying myself with reflections against death, and poverty, and shame, and pain." Fortifying against everything at once, with no active life to spend it on, helped break him. It is a young man’s mistake, and worth remembering when the mature Hume writes that reason on its own moves nobody.

(●) 1734 AD: He tried the merchant’s life in Bristol for a few months, gave it up, and went to France to write. + With slender means and broken health, he did what an unemployed philosopher does: he took a job. Letters of recommendation got him into a Bristol counting house in 1734, a counting house being a merchant’s office, where clerks kept the books and wrote the letters that carried a trading firm’s business across the sea. Within a few months, in his own dry summary, he "found that scene totally unsuitable to me." So he went abroad, where a small income went further. First Reims, then two years at La Flèche in Anjou, a country town whose Jesuit college had educated René Descartes a century before. There, before he was twenty-six, he wrote A Treatise of Human Nature, the book that contains almost everything he is remembered for. One conversation from those cloisters shaped the rest of his career, and he told the story himself, years later, in a letter to the very man who had written a book against him. Walking with a learned Jesuit who was pressing on him some miracle lately worked in the convent, Hume was "tempted to dispute against him," and out came the argument that became the most famous ten pages he ever wrote. He thought it "very much gravelled" his companion, gravelled being the old word for stuck fast, the way a boat runs aground and stops. Then the Jesuit answered that the argument could have no solidity, since it worked just as well against the Gospel as against Catholic miracles, an observation Hume said he "thought proper to admit as a sufficient answer." That exchange, in a Jesuit garden in Anjou, is the seed of everything he would afterwards write about Christianity.

(●) 1739 AD: His masterpiece, A Treatise of Human Nature, was published, and nobody read it. + Books I and II of the Treatise appeared anonymously in 1739, Book III in 1740. The sentence he wrote about it near the end of his life is the most quoted in the history of publishing disappointments: "Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction, as even to excite a murmur among the zealots." He was, characteristically, a little unfair to himself. A long review did appear in The History of the Works of the Learned for November and December 1739, mocking in places and grudging at the close, granting that the book "bears indeed incontestable marks of a great capacity, of a soaring genius, but young, and not yet thoroughly practised." And Hume, aged twenty-eight, wrote to his friend Henry Home from Ninewells on 1 June 1739 that he had "received news from London of the success of my Philosophy, which is but indifferent, if I may judge by the sale of the book, and if I may believe my bookseller." Then, in the next breath: "I am now out of humour with myself; but doubt not, in a little time, to be only out of humour with the world, like other unsuccessful authors." The joke is doing exactly the work jokes do at that age. He tried again in a different key. An anonymous Abstract of his own book, published in 1740, summarized it in thirty pages as though written by a stranger who admired it. Then came Essays, Moral and Political in 1741 and 1742: short, worldly, easy to read, and a hit. He had learned the lesson that shaped the rest of his authorship. If you want to be read, meet the reader where the reader is.

(●) 1745 AD: Edinburgh refused him a professorship for irreligion, and he spent the next years as a nobleman’s keeper and a general’s secretary. + The chair he wanted was ethics and pneumatical philosophy at Edinburgh. Pneumatical philosophy is an old name for the study of spirits: God, angels, and the human soul, roughly what a modern syllabus would split between philosophy of mind and natural theology. Natural theology is worth stopping on for a moment, because the phrase runs through the rest of his story. It means whatever can be worked out about God from the world itself, by looking at nature and reasoning from it, with no appeal to Scripture or to any revelation. It was the ordinary fare of a British university in 1745, and Hume was about to spend his life taking it apart. He did not get the chair. His opponents went through the Treatise the way a quarryman goes through a hillside, pulling out sentences that could be carried round the town as heresies, and the charge of infidelity did its work. He answered them in print with A Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend in Edinburgh, taking the accusations one at a time and never once admitting that he was the gentleman. It did no good. The post went to William Cleghorn. The same thing happened again a few years later on the other side of the country: in the winter of 1751 and 1752 his friends put his name forward for Glasgow’s chair of logic, the post Adam Smith was vacating, the clergy there objected as loudly as the Edinburgh clergy had, and the university chose James Clow. He never held a university post in his life. Back in 1745, meanwhile, what he was doing instead of teaching was odd and rather sad. He accepted an invitation from the young Marquess of Annandale to live with him in England as companion and minder, since, as Hume put it, "the state of his mind and health required it." He lived with him a twelvemonth. A Chancery inquest, the proceeding by which an English court decided whether a man was fit to manage his own affairs, found the marquess a lunatic in 1748, and found that he had been one since the December before Hume ever met him. The engagement ended in dismissal in April 1746 and then a lawsuit over arrears of salary. Then, in 1746, a lucky appointment: secretary to General James St Clair, first on a botched raid against the Brittany coast, later on embassies to Vienna and Turin, where Hume wore a uniform and, by several accounts, did not look well in it. In the middle of all this he rewrote the unread first book of the Treatise as something shorter and sharper, and published it in 1748 as Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding, later renamed An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Into it, for the first time in print, went the ten pages on miracles that he had thought up at La Flèche.

(●) 1752 AD: A library job made him a historian, the history made him famous, and the Church of Scotland came within one debate of putting him on trial. + In 1752 the Faculty of Advocates, the professional body of the lawyers who plead in Scotland’s higher courts, chose him keeper of their library. The salary was nearly nothing and he said so. What the post did give him was the largest collection of books in Scotland, strong in British historical material, and he began at once on the History of England. It came out backwards over eight years: the Stuarts first, in 1754, then the Commonwealth and the later Stuarts, then the Tudors, and only in 1762 the long stretch from Julius Caesar to Henry VII. The first volume disappointed him badly and he said so. The series as a whole was attacked from both political sides, sold enormously, and by the time the last volumes appeared in 1762 the money the booksellers paid him had made him, in his own word, opulent. Fame brought the reckoning. In 1755 an anonymous pamphlet, generally credited to the Reverend John Bonar of Cockpen, worked through the writings of Hume and of Lord Kames proposition by proposition and laid the result before the reverend and honourable members of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. It was called An Analysis of the Moral and Religious Sentiments Contained in the Writings of Sopho, and David Hume, Esq., Sopho being the pamphlet’s name for Kames, and it ranged its quotations under headings like "All distinction betwixt virtue and vice is merely imaginary." The Assembly of that year denounced the immorality and infidelity "openly avowed in several books published of late in this country." The following spring it went further. In May 1756 a committee took up an overture, which is what the Scottish church calls a formal motion sent up to the Assembly from the presbyteries beneath it, and this one named him outright: "there is one person styling himself David Hume, Esq. who hath arrived at such a degree of boldness as publicly to avow himself the author of books containing the most rude and open attacks upon the glorious gospel of Christ, and principles evidently subversive even of natural religion, and the foundations of morality, if not establishing direct atheism." It proposed a committee to examine his writings and call him before it. The overture was rejected, fifty votes to seventeen. The Moderates, the party in the Scottish church that prized learning and good manners and kept a light hand on doctrinal discipline, had held the numbers in the Assembly since 1752, and several of them were his friends. It is worth pausing on that vote. The most effective critic of Christianity in Britain was protected from a church court by churchmen who read him, argued with him in print, and invited him to dinner.

(●) 1763 AD: Paris made him a celebrity, and the friend he rescued there turned on him in public. + Sent to Paris in the ambassador’s train as private secretary to Lord Hertford, and later secretary to the embassy in his own right, the fat, plain, awkward-spoken Scot became, to his own astonishment, the most petted man in the city. Duchesses competed for him. The philosophers took him in as one of their own, and he dined at the table of the Baron d’Holbach, whose circle had gone past deism into open atheism. Deism was the respectable unbelief of that century, and it is worth having the word clear: a deist keeps God as the maker of the world and the author of its laws, then quietly removes him from the running of it. No miracles, no revelation, no prayer that is answered. A watchmaker who winds the watch and walks away. D’Holbach and his friends had left even that behind. Diderot told the story of that dinner, and it is the best single anecdote about Hume’s temperament. The talk turned to natural religion, and Hume remarked that as for atheists, he did not believe any existed and had never met one. His host replied that he had been a little unlucky, and that he was at that moment sitting at table with seventeen of them. Hume, who had made a career of doubting, had walked straight into a room of men more certain than he was. Diderot was reporting the evening from memory years later, and the count varies in the retellings, but the sting of it never has. In 1766 he did a good turn that cost him dearly. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, hounded out of France and Switzerland, needed refuge, and Hume brought him to England, found him a house, and got him the offer of a royal pension. Within months Rousseau had convinced himself that Hume was the head of a conspiracy against him and said so publicly. Hume, stung and badly advised, published the correspondence, and regretted it afterwards. The public years ended quietly enough after that. In the early months of 1767 he took office in London as Under-Secretary of State for the Northern Department under General Conway, which meant handling the government’s correspondence with the northern courts of Europe, and he held the post until January 1768. Then he went home. He settled in Edinburgh in 1769, built himself a house in the New Town, and among the people who knew him there he was famous less for his philosophy than for his cooking.

(●) 1776 AD: He died cheerfully, with everything arranged in advance, and his composure unsettled people more than anything he had written. + He knew for months what was killing him, a cancer somewhere in the abdomen that he described, in the spring of 1775, as a disorder in his bowels. In April 1776 he wrote My Own Life, four pages, ending with a description of his own character offered as a funeral oration he would not be there to hear. He bought a plot on the Calton Hill and asked in his will for a monument carrying his name and the years of his birth and death, leaving it to posterity to add the rest. Boswell came to see him on 7 July 1776, hoping, by his own account, to find that the great unbeliever had changed his mind with death in front of him. He had not. Boswell found him thin and cheerful, talking easily, and recorded the exchange afterwards: asked whether there might be a future state, Hume answered that it was possible a piece of coal put upon the fire would not burn, and added that it was a most unreasonable fancy that he should exist for ever. Boswell went away shaken and never quite got over it. The physician William Cullen wrote his own account of those last weeks to a colleague in London, and it draws the same picture from the other side of the bed. Cullen had attended many deathbeds, and said so: he had been "so often shocked with the horrors of the superstitious on such occasions" that the calm of this one was a relief to him. He died on Sunday 25 August 1776, about four in the afternoon, sensible to the last and, in Dr Joseph Black’s words, "in such a happy composure of mind, that nothing could exceed it." Crowds came to the funeral out of curiosity as much as respect. Adam Smith, his closest friend, published a letter about that death, and its final sentence made half of literate Britain furious: he had always considered Hume "as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as, perhaps, the nature of human frailty will permit." The round Roman-looking tower on the Calton Hill, designed by Robert Adam, still says only what he asked it to say.

What He Taught

(T1) Every idea in your head is a faded copy of something you once felt, and an idea with no original is empty. + Try to picture a colour you have never seen. Not a mixture of two you know, an entirely new one. You cannot do it, and the failure is Hume’s starting point. He divides everything in the mind into two kinds. There are impressions, which are what you get when you actually see the red apple, feel the cold, or lose your temper: forceful, vivid, present. And there are ideas, which are the fainter things you have afterwards when you remember the apple or imagine losing your temper. His claim, in his own philosophical language, is that "all our ideas or more feeble perceptions are copies of our impressions or more lively ones." Later writers gave that claim a name, the copy principle, and it is the foundation everything else in Hume rests on. You can build with copies, which is why nobody has to have met a golden mountain to think of one; you have seen gold, and you have seen a mountain. But you cannot get a genuinely new simple idea out of nothing. So Hume has a test, and it is the sharpest tool he owns. Take any word a philosopher or a theologian is using. Ask which impression it was copied from. If no impression can be produced, the word is doing no work, however grand it sounds. He then sorts every real claim into two boxes, a division later writers called Hume’s fork. Either a claim is about the relations of ideas, like the truths of arithmetic and geometry, which you can establish by thought alone and whose denial is a contradiction; or it is a matter of fact, like the claim that it rained in Edinburgh yesterday, which you can only settle by experience and whose denial is perfectly conceivable. Nothing else counts as knowledge. You can probably see where this is pointed. Statements about God, the soul, and substance are not arithmetic, and no one has an impression of them, which leaves them in an uncomfortable place.

(Q) "Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." + Source: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding XII, Part III, paragraph 132 (Selby-Bigge text). The last paragraph of the book, and its most quoted line. Hume has just asked what we should do when we run over a library holding his principles in mind: take down any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, and ask whether it contains abstract reasoning about quantity or number, or experimental reasoning about matter of fact. If not, burn it. Nearly two centuries later the logical positivists took this sentence as their charter (T1). They were a group of philosophers, first in Vienna and then in Britain and America, who held that a statement says nothing at all unless it can either be checked against experience or shown true by the meanings of its own words, and everything else, including the whole of theology, they counted as noise.

(T2) Nobody has ever seen one thing make another happen, and the expectation that the future will be like the past cannot be proved. + Watch one billiard ball roll into another. You see the first ball approach, you see the two touch, you see the second move off. Now look again for the making, the little arrow of force running from the first ball into the second. It is not there. You saw a sequence and nothing more. Hume’s point is not that causes are unreal; it is that our idea of a necessary connection between them is not copied from anything we observe, so by his own test (T1) it needs explaining. His explanation is habit. Having seen thousands of such collisions, the mind slides from the sight of the first ball to the expectation of the second, and it is that felt slide, that little inner shove of anticipation, which we then read back into the world and call necessity. The connection is real enough. It is just in us, not visibly out there. That leads to the harder problem, the one philosophers still call the problem of induction. Every argument from experience assumes that unobserved cases will resemble observed ones. Bread has always nourished; therefore this loaf will. How is that assumption itself established? Not by logic, since a world where bread stopped nourishing tomorrow involves no contradiction. Not by experience, since to argue that nature has been uniform so far and therefore will continue so is to assume the very thing in question. Hume is honest about where this leaves him. He is not recommending that anyone stop expecting the sun to rise. He is saying that the whole of practical life runs on something other than proof, and that if you want to call that something reason you will have to change what the word means.

(Q) "Custom, then, is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past." + Source: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding V, Part I, paragraph 36 (Selby-Bigge text). Custom here means habit, the settled disposition a mind acquires by repetition, not social convention. Hume has just argued that no reasoning gets us from past experience to future expectation, and this is the substitute he offers. Without it, he adds, we would be ignorant of every matter of fact beyond what is immediately before our senses or in our memory (T2).

(T3) No human testimony can establish a miracle unless the testimony being false would itself be more miraculous than the event. + Ten pages of Section X of the Enquiry made him more notorious than everything else he ever wrote put together. The cartoon version of them, that miracles are impossible so no report of one is worth listening to, is not what he said, and the real argument is a good deal harder to get around. Hume starts with a rule nobody wants to reject: "A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence." Testimony is one kind of evidence, and its weight comes from experience, since we have learned that people usually tell the truth. But a miracle, as he defines it, is a violation of a law of nature, and our confidence in a law of nature rests on the most uniform experience there is. So when someone testifies to a miracle, two bodies of experience collide: everything we know about how often witnesses are mistaken, deceived, or lying, against everything we know about how often the dead stay dead. Belief should follow whichever is less surprising, and the surprising thing about people making false reports of wonders is that it is not surprising at all. Then, in Part II, he presses four further points, and they are still the four a sceptic reaches for today. The first is that miracle reports never come with enough witnesses of unquestioned good sense, education, and reputation to put the matter beyond doubt. The second is that human beings positively enjoy the marvellous, and the enjoyment is contagious, so that a story swells in the telling the way a rumour swells in a small town. The third is that such stories cluster among ignorant and barbarous peoples and thin out as learning spreads. The fourth is that the miracles of rival religions cancel one another, since every faith has them and they cannot all be establishing incompatible systems at once. His own worked example is telling, and Christian readers should notice it. The best-attested miracles he can find are not the resurrection accounts but the cures reported at the tomb of the Abbé Paris in his own century. Paris was a Jansenist, which is to say a member of a strict reforming party inside the French Catholic church, one the crown and the Jesuits were busy suppressing; after his death in 1727 crowds gathered at his grave in a Paris churchyard, and sick people said they had been healed there. Those cures, Hume grants, were proved on the spot before judges of unquestioned integrity, attested by witnesses of credit, in a learned age, and never distinctly refuted even by the Jesuits who wanted to refute them. His verdict on them is that their miraculous character alone is a sufficient refutation. That is the argument at its boldest, and it is what makes the section either a demolition or a piece of question-begging, depending on whether you think the maxim was fixed before the evidence was examined.

(Q) "That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish." + Source: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding X, Part I, paragraph 91 (Selby-Bigge text). Hume calls this "a general maxim worthy of our attention" and applies it immediately: when a man tells him he saw a dead man restored to life, he asks whether it is more probable that this person deceives or is deceived, or that the event really happened, and always rejects the greater miracle. The rest of Section X is the case that the first branch always wins (T3).

(T4) The order of the world will not carry an infinite, perfect, and good Creator, and the suffering in it points the other way. + In the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion three characters argue through part of a summer in Cleanthes’ library, with a young pupil listening. Natural religion in that title is the older name for natural theology: what a person could learn about God from the world alone, without a Bible, without a prophet, working only from what the eyes can see and the mind can reason out. Cleanthes holds the design argument in the confident form Hume’s century loved: the world is a great machine of fitted parts, machines have designers, so the world has one. Demea holds that God is past our comprehension altogether, wants the case for him made without any appeal to experience, and hates the comparison to a machine. Philo, the sceptic who gets the best lines and much of Hume’s own thinking, does not deny that the world looks ordered. He asks how much weight that appearance will bear. His first move is a rule Cleanthes himself accepts: a cause may only be credited with what the effect requires, since "the cause ought only to be proportioned to the effect." The world is finite, mixed, and imperfect, so the inference reaches a finite, mixed, imperfect maker. Why one maker rather than a committee, given that human machines are built by teams? Why a perfect one, when apprentices produce botched work before they learn? Why a living God rather than a world that grows like a vegetable? The argument, run honestly, ends not in the God of Abraham but in a proposition so thin that Philo can accept it in the last part of the book: that the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear "some remote analogy to human intelligence," a sentence with no consequences for how anyone should live. The second move is suffering. In Part X, Philo makes Demea list the miseries of the world and then turns the list against the argument. He is not claiming that pain disproves God outright; he grants that a God already known to be good and powerful might have reasons. He is claiming something more careful and more damaging: that if you are trying to infer the divine character from the world as you find it, this world is not the evidence you would want. Nature is careless with individuals, generous only to species, and full of animals eating one another. That is why the Epicurean questions he quotes have kept their edge (Q).

(Q) "Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?" + Source: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 10, in the 1779 posthumous text. Philo is speaking, and he introduces the lines as Epicurus’s old questions, still unanswered. The dilemma is ancient, and it survives because a Christian writer preserved it: Lactantius set it out early in the fourth century, in The Anger of God chapter 13, crediting Epicurus and answering it on the spot. Whether Epicurus himself ever put it in this form nobody can now show, since Lactantius is the only witness. What is certain is that Hume gave it the phrasing every later discussion of the problem of evil has used (T4).

(T5) You cannot argue from how things are to how they ought to be, and morality rests on feeling rather than on reason. + Take a deliberate murder and look for the wrongness in it, the way you would look for the blood or the weight of the weapon. Examine it from every angle, says Hume, and you will never find a matter of fact called vice. You find passions, motives, volitions, thoughts. The wrongness turns up only when you turn your attention inward and notice the sentiment of disapproval that arises in you when you contemplate the act. Morality, he concludes, is more properly felt than judged of. That is the background to the short passage everyone quotes. Writers on morality, he observes, proceed for a while in the ordinary way of reasoning, establishing the being of a God or making observations about human affairs, and then, without warning, every sentence starts containing an ought instead of an is. The change is imperceptible and, he says, of the last consequence, because the new relation is entirely different from the old and somebody should explain how it was deduced. This is what is now called the is-ought gap, or Hume’s law, and it is the reason a modern ethicist will not let you move from "this is natural" to "this is right" without extra work. None of this made Hume a relativist in practice, and it is a mistake to read him as one. He thought the sentiments in question were remarkably uniform across humanity, that we approve what is useful and agreeable to ourselves and to others, and that a person who felt no sympathy at all would be a monster rather than a philosopher. The Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, which he thought incomparably the best thing he ever wrote, is a warm and generous book. The question a Christian will want to put to it is not whether Hume was a decent man but what happens when the sentiments themselves need correcting, and where the standard for that correction is supposed to come from.

(Q) "Instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence." + Source: A Treatise of Human Nature III, Part I, Section I (Project Gutenberg text, spelling modernized from the 1740 original). A copulation here is simply the joining verb in a sentence, the "is" that links a subject to what is said about it. Hume adds that he presumes to recommend the precaution to his readers, and that this small attention would subvert all the vulgar systems of morality (T5).

(Q) "I was, I say, a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions." + Source: My Own Life, written 18 April 1776 and printed in 1777 as The Life of David Hume, Esq. Written by Himself. He wrote this knowing he had months to live, calling it, with a smile, a funeral oration of himself. The self-portrait is the thing his Christian opponents found hardest to deal with, and the thing his friends confirmed. Adam Smith, who had watched him die, told the public the same story in stronger words, and was attacked for it for the rest of his life.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) His own century answered him in print, courteously, and he answered the courtesy in kind. + The replies came fast, and mostly from Scotsmen who knew him. George Campbell, one of the ministers of Aberdeen and principal of Marischal College there, wrote A Dissertation on Miracles in 1762, arguing that Hume’s maxim proves too much, since the same reasoning would forbid belief in any sufficiently unusual event, and that testimony has an authority of its own rather than borrowing all of it from experience. Hugh Blair showed Hume the manuscript first. Hume read it "with all the attention possible," sent back a page of criticism, complained mildly about being called an infidel writer on the strength of ten or twelve pages ("Is a man to be called a drunkard, because he has been seen fuddled once in his lifetime?"), and then wrote to Campbell himself on 7 June 1762, thanking him for the civil and obliging manner in which he had conducted the dispute, and telling him, unprompted, the story of the Jesuit at La Flèche. Thomas Reid took a different road. In his Inquiry into the Human Mind of 1764, instead of answering Hume’s conclusions he attacked the starting point, arguing that the mind is not a theatre of impressions and copies at all, and that beliefs in an external world, in other minds, and in the trustworthiness of memory are basic to human thinking rather than conclusions drawn from something more basic. That is common sense philosophy, and it survives today in the Reformed epistemology of Alvin Plantinga and others, who argue that belief in God can be properly basic in the same way. A belief is properly basic when a person is entitled to hold it without deriving it from some other belief first, the way you are entitled to trust your memory of what you ate for breakfast without producing an argument for the reliability of memory. Two more answers mattered, and they came from opposite ends of the English-speaking church. Richard Price was a Welsh dissenting minister, which means he served a congregation outside the established Church of England, and he was also the man who edited and published Thomas Bayes’s work on probability after Bayes had died. He devoted the fourth of his Four Dissertations in 1767 to Hume on miracles, and the striking thing about the reply is that he made it with the mathematics of probability rather than against it. William Paley came from the other end, an Anglican archdeacon writing for the universities: his Evidences of Christianity of 1794, which trained Cambridge undergraduates for a century, opens by taking Hume’s challenge as the thing to be met. Even Immanuel Kant, who was no orthodox believer, credited Hume with waking him. The preface to the Prolegomena, in Paul Carus’s translation, says that the suggestion of David Hume "was the very thing, which many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber."

(†) He changed how Christians argue, and much of that change was an improvement. + Joseph Butler had already published the Analogy of Religion in 1736, with its motto that to us probability is the very guide of life. Butler was answering deists rather than Hume, but the method he defended turned out to be the one that could take Hume’s weight, and the tradition kept it. Christian apologetics after Hume argues less like geometry and more like a coroner’s inquest: here is the evidence, here are the competing explanations, here is which one accounts for more. That shift eventually produced the sharpest replies. Because Hume framed the miracle question as a weighing of probabilities, it could be handed to the mathematics of probability, and when it was, his maxim turned out to be doing less work than it appears to. The general point is that a body of independent witnesses who would each have to be wrong in the same direction can make an event more probable than not, however unlikely it was beforehand, and that Hume never worked out the arithmetic. Picture four strangers who have never met, each shown a line of a hundred parked cars and each picking out yours. Any one of them, on his own, proves very little. The odds against all four settling on the same wrong car, independently, are enormous, and that is the shape of the reply. John Earman, a philosopher of science who is not a Christian, made the case at book length in Hume’s Abject Failure in 2000; Timothy and Lydia McGrew have applied the same tools to the resurrection accounts. Whether those answers succeed is still being argued. What is not in dispute is that they exist because Hume set the question in that form. There is a second thing Christian thought took from him, harder and more useful. Hume is a permanent warning against overclaiming. If an apologist says a proof is demonstrative when it is really an inference to the best explanation, Hume is the man who will notice. Butler had said the same thing more gently, and Scripture never promises the kind of certainty Hume was demolishing; what it says is that what can be known of God is plain from what has been made: "For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse." (Romans 1:20) That is a claim about clear evidence and human responsibility, not about mathematical proof.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a rule set before the evidence, a self he could not find, a morality with no floor under it, and a death without judgment. + Four points, all drawn from what Hume himself wrote rather than from what anyone later made of him. - The maxim came first. Hume worked out the argument of Section X in a Jesuit garden before he had examined any of the evidence it was meant to weigh, and his one extended case study is the tomb of the Abbé Paris, not the apostles. The Jesuit who heard the argument first spotted the difficulty and Hume recorded the exchange himself: the reasoning tells against the Gospel whatever the evidence turns out to be. Christianity does not ask for exemption from scrutiny; it stakes itself on a public event and invites the examination. Paul puts the whole faith on the outcome: "And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins." (1 Corinthians 15:17) That is a claim built to be investigated, and a rule that rules it out in advance has not investigated it. - He could not find himself. Hume applied his own test honestly and reported the result: looking inward he found perceptions, never the self having them, and concluded in the Treatise that a person is a bundle of perceptions in perpetual flux. In the appendix to that book he admitted, with real candour, that he could not make his account of personal identity work. Scripture speaks throughout to a self that endures, is addressed by God, and will answer. A theory that dissolves the person also dissolves the one who is loved and held responsible. - A morality resting on sentiment has nothing above it. If moral distinctions are the settled feelings of humanity, then when those feelings are corrupt there is no higher court. Hume’s own record shows the danger, and it should be stated plainly. In a footnote to his essay "Of National Characters" he wrote that he was "apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites," and went on to explain away contrary evidence. He kept the footnote through edition after edition, revising it as late as the year he died. He was answered in his own lifetime, in 1770, by James Beattie, who pointed out that Britons had been savages two thousand years earlier, that no one could possibly have the evidence Hume claimed, and that the achievements of Africa and the Americas refuted him outright. Beattie had a standard Hume’s system did not supply: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." (Genesis 1:27) Paul told the philosophers of Athens the same thing about the nations (Acts 17:26). A sentiment can be wrong, and something has to be able to say so. - He expected nothing after death, and said so calmly. The composure was real and it was not a pose. But composure is not evidence, and Hume of all people would have granted that a man’s serenity about a claim tells you nothing about whether the claim is true. Scripture is brief here: "And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment," (Hebrews 9:27). Boswell’s piece of coal, which might not burn, is a fine image of a possibility no one can rule out. It is a strange thing to stake a life on. He remains one of the most formidable opponents Christian thought has faced in English, and the honest reason to keep reading him is the one his friends gave. He argued in the open, he took the best answers seriously, he never returned malice, and he made the people who disagreed with him think harder than they wanted to.