Hume about natural religion and how to connected to other authors
Introduction to Philosophy
David Hume was aiming at understanding reasonableness and meaningfulness of religion in his work “Dialogues concerning natural religion”. In order to be certain about represented beliefs in religion, Hume illustrated his thoughts through series of dialogues between three main characters. Each character symbolize three different ideologies: Demea shows tolerance to religious beliefs and claims that our understanding is limited to know anything about God; on the other hand, Cleanthes argues that people can observe existence of God through reasoning and evidences represented in nature; and the third character agrees with God’s inscrutability, but questions God’s intensions on morality. This paper focuses on analysis of the main ideas represented by David Hume in “Dialogues concerning natural religion” and connects with teachings of other philosophers.
Demea says that existence of God is obvious, no one can deny it, but our understanding has limits and we cannot go beyond it in order to figure out the essence of God. Then, Demea starts to persuade that our universe operates by means of cause and effect, thus there must be first cause that moves everything. Philo agrees with it – causes allow people to understand what the things are, but there is nothing that causes God to be, and again he refers to claim that people cannot know God. In this time, Cleanthes uses analogy and says that nature is a key by looking around and examining it – people can understand that there must be creator and perfect designer of this beauty and order. By looking at the world people can see that the way how things follow; everything has particular direction and purpose. Thus, there has to be designer.
Philo answers to it in way that completely opposes Cleanthes’ affirmations. He states that there is no decisive evidence of God’s existence just simply seeing the fact of ordered world being the result of perfect design. The example of design of universe means
David Hume was aiming at understanding reasonableness and meaningfulness of religion in his work “Dialogues concerning natural religion”. In order to be certain about represented beliefs in religion, Hume illustrated his thoughts through series of dialogues between three main characters. Each character symbolize three different ideologies: Demea shows tolerance to religious beliefs and claims that our understanding is limited to know anything about God; on the other hand, Cleanthes argues that people can observe existence of God through reasoning and evidences represented in nature; and the third character agrees with God’s inscrutability, but questions God’s intensions on morality. This paper focuses on analysis of the main ideas represented by David Hume in “Dialogues concerning natural religion” and connects with teachings of other philosophers.
Demea says that existence of God is obvious, no one can deny it, but our understanding has limits and we cannot go beyond it in order to figure out the essence of God. Then, Demea starts to persuade that our universe operates by means of cause and effect, thus there must be first cause that moves everything. Philo agrees with it – causes allow people to understand what the things are, but there is nothing that causes God to be, and again he refers to claim that people cannot know God. In this time, Cleanthes uses analogy and says that nature is a key by looking around and examining it – people can understand that there must be creator and perfect designer of this beauty and order. By looking at the world people can see that the way how things follow; everything has particular direction and purpose. Thus, there has to be designer.
Philo answers to it in way that completely opposes Cleanthes’ affirmations. He states that there is no decisive evidence of God’s existence just simply seeing the fact of ordered world being the result of perfect design. The example of design of universe means