The Secret Connexion: Causation, Realism, and David Hume by Galen Strawson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Very good book. Meticulously counters the traditional view of Hume as dogmatically denying the existence of causation. Strawson shows (by close reading of Hume's texts) that Hume's arguments about 'necessary connexion' being only in the mind are epistemological rather than ontological. Hume avoids the mistakes of the 20th century positivists who call themselves Humeans. 'Hume, then, is not a "Humean"' (p. 228).

Hume on Freedom of the Will

Hume recognized that any account of free will has to be made compatible with our knowledge of the causal operations of the world around us. Given that his Treatise is an attempt to detail a "science of man" we should expect that Hume's explanation of human freedom to fit within his naturalistic and empiricist philosophy of nature. This is, in fact, exactly what we get. Hume puts his theory of the will within his general casual account and in doing so offers an interesting solution (or rather, dissolution) to the problem of the compatibility of free will and determinism.

How seriously should we take Hume's skepticism?

The Treatise of Human Nature has given David Hume a reputation for being the arch-skeptic. After beginning his work with the goal of detailing a "science of man" he proceeds through the argument to undercut our confidence in the reliability of the senses, the objectivity of our notions of space and time, the reality of causal laws, and the rationality of our beliefs. By the end of Book I, he seems to have devastated human knowledge and beliefs, leaving us with the mere shell of skepticism. But then, paradoxically, he proceeds to write two more books in the Treatise as well as many other works in which these considerations appear to be largely ignored. So the question becomes: how seriously should we take Hume's skepticism?

Happy birthday, David Hume

The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer: as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it. Thus the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us at every turn, in spite of our endeavours to elude or avoid it.

From An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Evaluating the First Enquiry critique of traditional religion

I've summarized the two sections that comprise the two halves of the critique of traditional religion contained in Hume's First Enquiry here and here. Now I want to take a look at how the two arguments complement each other and evaluate how good a critique they make.

Although he is not explicit in this, I take it that Sections X and XI of the First Enquiry are intended by Hume to jointly show that neither the miraculous events of revealed religion nor the conclusions of natural theology can serve the purpose of acting as a rational foundation for religious belief. Hume leaves it to the reader to evaluate whether religious belief is rational without these supports, but the implication is pretty clear that he thinks it is not.

As I see it, there are three main approaches to establishing the foundations of religious belief in the history of philosophical theology. First, there is the a priori approach, exemplified by the sorts of arguments that occupied mediaeval theologians. The various formulations of the ontological argument, the first cause argument, etc. are ways of attempting to establish the existence of God and determine his properties through an analysis of the contents of our concepts and by applying deductive logic once those concepts are clarified. Second, there is revealed religion, which calls on miracle accounts, authority, tradition, scripture, and revelation to provide the epistemic justification for religious belief. Third, there are a posteriori approaches to religion exemplified in natural theology. This approach looks at the way the world is and argues that the existence of God is a necessary component of any adequate explanation of the world.

Hume's critique is targeted at the second and third approaches. His critique of revealed religion is primarily occupied with the lack of foundation of miracle accounts, but the argument is easily extended to all forms of justification of revealed religion. There is no logically sound reason why we should believe anything on the basis of authority, scripture, tradition, or revelation. There is simply no logical connection between the speaker of a proposition and its truth value.

Our confidence in each of these bases must then rely in their perceived reliability. But experience is the only way to determine what is reliable, and so the content of a claim made in scripture or from the pulpit has to be judged according to the likelihood criteria by which all other claims about matters of fact are judged. And in the case of vast swaths of scripture, tradition, etc. the overwhelming evidence is that the way religion describes how the world is (with miracles, angels, talking donkeys, resurrections, etc.) is far different than  our normal sensory or scientific experience of the world. This being the case, we ought to apportion our beliefs to the evidence and reject revealed religion.

Hume's critique here is devastating to the method of justification of revealed religion. An advocate of revealed religion will have to offer a plausible reason to think that authority, etc. are generally trustworthy that does not call on reliability, because as Hume has shown, the probability (and thus general reliability) of scientific accounts of the world that contradict religion is far greater than the probability that the miraculous events that pepper scripture and tradition actually occurred. This reason won't be able to point out a necessary connection between the source of information and its truth value because no such connection exists. And it won't be able to claim that we can trust revelation, authority, or scripture as true or miracle accounts as likely because of the truthfulness or power of the deity, because the existence of this deity or the truth of religion is supposedly justified by these things. Invoking God to buttress the veracity of the scripture (or authority, etc.) which is used as a reason for positing God's existence is as straightforward a circularity as you could ask for.

The reach of his critique of the Design Argument is much more limited, however. A posteriori proofs for the existence of God are essentially inferences to the best explanation, and at the point at which Hume was writing in the mid 18th C., there was not much in the way of scientific theory that could conclusively argue against a divine creator being a candidate for the best explanation for the existence of the universe and the order that we see in it. Newton's universe was a static place with fixed laws and no discernible origin; it is not until the development of modern cosmological theory that anything approaching an understanding of the beginnings of the universe was developed. Similarly, Darwin's extraordinary achievement of detailing a natural mechanism to explain adaptation and order in the biological world was still a century away. So, Hume was unable to fully refute the Design Argument's claim to have established the likelihood of a deity.

What Hume's argument did accomplish, though, is still significant. By correctly identifying the Design Argument as an argument from effect to cause he was able to show just how little advocates of that argument can hope to get from it. All it warrants is the inference to some being or entity of we know not what sort with we know not what properties that is sufficient somehow to bring about the existence of the universe in some fashion. Not exactly the anthropomorphic God of traditional religion. Nothing more can be concluded because for the other attributes traditionally attributed to God (omniscience, omnipotence, goodness) there is scant evidence in the world we see. The Design Argument gives us none of these properties. And, having blocked the methods of revealed religion, Hume has also blocked one avenue of supplementing the minimal conclusions of the Design Argument to get something approximating Christian dogma.

Hume's critique does not address the a priori method of establishing the existence of God, however. My supposition is that his Empiricist worldview would have led him to simply dismiss any a priori arguments attempting to establish the existence of God, or for that matter, any matter of fact. He probably was right to do so, but defending that position is a task for another day.

Hume’s critique of the Design Argument in the First Enquiry

Section XI of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding sets out Hume's critique of the Design Argument in the form of a dialogue between Hume and a friend. The ostensible reason for the dialogue is to determine whether someone who denies that there will be reward or punishment in a future life for deeds and misdeeds in this one will undermine morality, but within the course of the discussion, it becomes clear that the (or at least a) primary target of Hume's discussion is the traditional design argument for the existence of God. Hume's goal is not to refute the argument outright; it is rather to limit the scope of what someone ought to claim on the basis of having established the existence of God through this argument.

Hume's friend starts out by reviewing the argument from design. It is ‘an argument drawn from effects to causes.’ Advocates of the design argument claim that it establishes no more than is warranted by the facts.

The friend then lays out rules for inference from effects to cause: (1) the cause must be proportional to the effect; no qualities may be assigned to the cause beyond what are necessary and sufficient to bring about the observed effect. Anything more is conjecture. (2) No further effects may be inferred from the cause beyond what is already known. The existence and order of the universe shows the power, intelligence and benevolence of God only to the degree that those qualities are displayed in his creation. Any further attribution of qualities is hypothesis. We cannot ‘mount up to Jupiter’ from effects to causes and then ‘descend downwards’ to new effects. Any attribution of other qualities or effects has no foundation either in reason or experience. In other words, an inductive argument of this sort for the existence of God can establish no more facts about the purported deity than are necessary to account for those features of the world that the positing of God is needed to explain.

So, even granting that the existence of the universe requires a cause of some kind, is it reasonable to look at the world and contend that it demonstrates any of the qualities that should lead us to believe that the creator (whatever it was) was an intelligent, benevolent designer as we're instructed by traditional religion to believe? There is no prima facie reason to believe that the world is just—injustice is clearly all around us, in fact.

The defender of the ultimate justice of the universe might point to future reward and punishment as evidence of the justice of the world, and thus to the existence and justice of its creator. The idea here would be that although justice does not obtain in the present world, God will balance the books in the future. However, the rules of inference from effect to cause only give us the right to attribute the justice of the visible world to its creator. The friend poses this question: is there distributive justice in this world? If not, then the absence of justice in the world does not give us warrant to expect it in the future; in fact, it should lead us to the opposite conclusion.

Experience serves as the only standard by which to judge a claim about the world; any inference beyond what experience provides is unwarranted. Having found these limits unacceptable, some have allowed speculation and imagination to carry them to concepts beyond what experience provides. One of these, that there is an intelligent, benevolent cause of the universe, is ‘uncertain’ and ‘useless,’ in the words of Hume's friend. It is uncertain because it lies beyond experience, and it is useless because the inference to an intelligent cause will not allow us to infer anything further than its mere existence.

Hume puts forward a possible objection that an advocate of the Design Argument might raise, though. Is it truly the case that we cannot infer anything further about the creator than simply that he created the world? We are certainly permitted to infer the existence of a builder if we happen upon a house partially built, and once we infer a builder, are there not many things that we can also affirm about the builder? There are many things that we know about builders, after all. It is interesting here that Hume's objection anticipates the sort of claim that is often made by advocates of the Design Argument and other arguments for the existence of God. If, once we've established a creator, we can come to knowledge of the other properties of that creator (by reason, revelation, etc.) then we can build upon the foundation of the inductive Design Argument. Perhaps we can indeed 'mount up to Jupiter' and come back down again.

The friend replies that the difference is that in the case of the house we are familiar with men as builders from other experiences, and have seen that houses are built by men. If we had no such experience of builders, then we would not be able to make the inference from the existence of a house to existence of a builder. In that case the situations would be analogous, but we could not argue from effect to cause and then make inferences about the other properties of that cause.

Once again, for Hume experience is the sole foundation for knowledge, and any attempts to put flesh on the skeleton of the notion of a creator arrived at through the Design Argument is merely speculation. We have no independent experience of the deity, who is known only by his products, so we cannot infer any further attributes beyond those necessary for the creation of the world. We have no license to suppose the deity possess qualities like goodness or justice in any measure beyond what is observable in the world.

Anything further is speculative, and the source of our tendency to attribute additional qualities to God is a projection of our own qualities, and our belief that God will reward and punish in a future life is derived from this anthropomorphic projection. In reality, we cannot say anything more about that deity’s nature than is included in his works. No new fact can be inferred from the ‘religious hypothesis’ beyond what is given in experience.

An implication that Hume's argument carries, but which he does not bring to the surface explicitly (probably for political reasons) is this: if Hume is right about the limits of the Design Argument that served as the centerpiece for natural theology's attempts to establish the truth of traditional religion, then if we accept Hume's attack on revealed religion in his discussion of miracles in the prior section of the first Enquiry, the foundations of traditional religious belief are destroyed.

Hume, D. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1772), ed. Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Hume on Miracles

Hume’s argument against the rationality of believing in miracles (found in Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (EHU) section X) is simple, elegant, and to my judgment, decisive.

According to Hume, all knowledge of matters of fact comes from experience. A matter of fact on his view is basically anything that isn’t a mathematical or analytical truth. However, Hume acknowledges that though experience is the only guide in reasonings regarding matters of fact, it is not infallible; experience in some cases is less than uniform. ‘A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence’ in cases where experience is not uniform (EHU, 170). A man should weigh the opposing evidence as if evaluating conflicting ‘experiments’ and judge more probable the results that occur more frequently.

Hume considers testimony as it relates to these epistemic norms. Experience provides the basis of our belief in human testimony (a consequence of experience providing us with the basis of all of our beliefs). We feel testimony to be reliable because we have experience with people as truth-tellers, and know by experience what psychological and social factors cause people to tell the truth, such as the general human inclination to tell the truth and the desire to avoid the shame of being exposed as a liar. Since testimony is founded on experience, its reliability should subject to the same measures of proof and probability as all other experimental evidence gathered from experience.

Testimonial reports of marvelous [which for Hume are unlikely but not impossible] and miraculous events are one source of positive evidence for their occurrence; in fact, since authority and tradition amount to forms of testimonial evidence, testimony is really the sole evidential ground for miracles for any person who has not witnessed a miracle herself. However, against the testimony in favor of a miracle we have our uniform experience of the world operating according to fixed laws; this experience serves as counterevidence to the possibility that the miraculous event reported might have occurred. Here we have two sources of evidence, both grounded in experience, in conflict. Our belief should side with the body of evidence that is more probable based on our experience.

Hume is making the empirical bet that in every case the evidence that the universe operates according to laws which prohibit the miraculous event will overwhelm the positive evidence for the miracle, which should be considered against the possibility that the story of the event is contrived, misunderstood, or misreported. Hume offers a maxim by which to evaluate miracle claims: the falsehood of the miracle report must be more miraculous than the miracle reported in order to warrant belief.

When we hear a report of a miracle, say, a man rising from the dead, we should weigh the probability of this occurrence against the probability that the testimony is false, and apportion our belief accordingly, which is to say, reject the miracle report as false.

Hume’s argument has not destroyed the possibility of miracles, of course. He has only shown that it’s irrational to believe in one if one takes the view that we ought to base our beliefs on the preponderance of evidence.

Claiming that the miracle is an act of God doesn’t increase its probability or weigh in its favor, according to Hume, since all we can know of God is known via nature, which speaks uniformly against the miraculous. The testimony of miracles is insufficient to found a religion, given that what grounds testimony in general also refutes it in the case of miracles. So the miraculous nature of any religion cannot be given as a defense of its veracity. Given that Christianity cannot be believed without at least one miracle, it is only faith that might compel assent to it, and this faith must be affirmed in opposition to reason, understanding, and experience.

References:
Hume, D. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1772), ed. Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.