Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Book

All the New Atheists I've come across cite the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, most recently A.C. Grayling in his horrible The God Argument. But I wonder how carefully they read it; more and more often I feel they are metamorphosing into their creationist enemies, diligently mining out-of-context quotes to support their claim that there is no God and they can prove it. Hume would never have said anything so silly, though I doubt he'd be surprised at the way he is now used: he gives the impression of having seen every side of this debate a hundred times. He is not an atheist but a sceptic, an important distinction. His task here is to look critically at the arguments which purportedly demonstrate that the universe displays evidence of having been created by God. He is remarkably convincing when he demonstrates their essential weaknesses.

The main problems are easy to state: we can only ever reason by analogy with things we know, we only know a small part of the universe, and, worst, we only have one example of a universe to reason about. It is impossible under such circumstances to draw firm conclusions about our universe's origins. It is arguable that the universe in some ways resembles a machine; machines are designed and produced through the agency of human minds, hence it is possible, by analogy, that the universe was produced by some Being whose mind resembles ours. Hume has little difficulty in showing that the argument is weak, and that, even if the universe was produced by a purposeful Being, we have no reason to deduce that this Being necessarily resembles us in any important respects.

The New Atheists like to quote passages from the above. Hume also considers related arguments. Machines are not the only complex, ordered things we are familiar with; there are also living creatures, which are produced by reproductive processes. (It is startling to see how close he is to explicitly hypothesizing a version of evolution). As he says, the universe is arguably as much like a living creature as it is like a machine, so once again it is feasible to reason by analogy: living things arise by reproduction, the universe is like a living thing, hence the universe perhaps arose through a process like reproduction. Yet another possibility is that the universe arose through a process of blind chance. Given enough time, its particles will cycle though all possible combinations, and in the end one configuration may arise which causes the production of the complex world of living creatures that we see.

I think Hume would have been amused to see people like Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss claim, in all seriousness, that they know some version of his second or third scenario to be the true account of our universe's origin. He advances these ideas in a spirit of playfulness, to show that there are equally good alternatives to a Divine Watchmaker, but he makes it clear that he trusts them neither more nor less. He can't see any way to resolve the questions given the evidence at our disposal. We now have a great deal more evidence, but the difficulties in principle remain. With only a single universe, it is not obvious how one can use the scientific method, which relies on accumulating evidence from multiple related cases. This point has been made repeatedly in recent years by Lee Smolin, who accuses speculative cosmologists of concocting radical metaphysical fantasies and marketing them as science.

I'd love to see Hume in a panel discussion with Lawrence Krauss and Francis S. Collins. Since that, alas, seems unlikely to happen, read his book. It's short, amusingly written and remarkably sensible.