Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Summary

Travis Gibbs
Dr. Clayton Crockett
Modern Religious Thought
September 25 2011
Hume
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by Davis Hume is a pretty heavy text full of many arguments each one with multiple sub arguments and countless premises. While reading I often found my self asking “what the hell does this mean” or “where does this even connect with the previous statement”. To be honest if it was not for spark notes I would be even more lost for words than I am now. However as I wade through the literary labyrinth which is Hume I discovered multiple themes that have lead me to one final thesis. Since it is impossible to determine true design through a priori argument alone, the only way to be comfortable with your faith (if you chose
Just because you are a skeptic doesn’t mean you have to be atheist, Philo argues for skepticism through the whole dialogue by questioning everything Cleanthes and Demea have to say and by making speculative analogical arguments in defiance against those that Cleanthes or Demea make. So in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion I believe Philo makes the best argument against natural religion. To explain the persuasiveness of his arguments against natural religion you must first understand what natural religion is; it is the process of obtaining religious belief through gathering evidence and reasoning from that evidence. Any believer would immediately say you can look around and see that God exists but anyone who really cares about deriving a truth from real evidence would
He says that any analogy could be made about God, this is where generation and vegetation come into play. Philo even brings up the idea of the universe being a body and God being the soul. For this to be true the universe would have to have sensory organs like and animal does. I for would like this theory, I could totally imagine different parts of the cosmos acting as sensory organs, but at a very large and undistinguishable scale. However with this analogy we have to assume the world is eternal along with God because if God, the soul is eternal and the universe is the body, then God could not have existed before the universe or body. Because carbon dating had not been discovered in Hume’s time Cleanthes is quick to disregard this argument of analogy by saying the world is young, on the premise that the human race is just now discovering never before seen continents and are transplanting animals and plants in new places. He thinks that if the world has been eternal along side God then all of this would have been done before. If Cleanthes truly believes what he has said then he is a Deist. Once again on page 84 Philo goes back to our narrow scoop of experience and says that there is no way to disprove or prove what I like to call matter recycling, the idea that