I'm currently trying to resurrect David Hume from the dead. We've established that David Hume knew of Bayes Theorem and had two chances to edit his chapter "Of Miracles" in response, but didn't. This seems to be "a deliberate philosophical position," per William Vanderburgh.
As an author I've published a great many blog posts, papers, and books about a whole lot of issues; a small encyclopedia of them, if you will. The more that one publishes the more of a context informed readers have for understanding an author on a separate issue. So let's consider the relevant books of David Hume, apart from his History of England which was a massively influential six-volume historical work that thrust him into fame. Let's see if there's a reason he didn't respond to Bayes Theorem. (In what follows A.I. insisted that I let her help a bit.)
A Treatise of Human Nature was published in London in multiple volumes between 1739 and 1740. Together it was Hume’s most comprehensive philosophical work. It breaks down the origins of human knowledge, ideas, cause and effect, personal identity, the passions, and morality.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). A more accessible, revised version of the first book of the Treatise. It specifically addresses skepticism, our understanding of cause and effect, free will, and the critique of miracles. Thomas Bayes’s work on probability appeared posthumously in 1763. His friend Richard Price discovered the manuscript and published it posthumously in 1767 along with his explanation of Bayesian methods for assessing miracles. We know Hume read Price's paper and liked it. But Hume neither addressed Bayesian arguments nor revised his account of miracles for the 1768 and 1777 editions of his Enquiry.
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751): Hume’s dedicated work on ethics. By relying on empirical observations of human nature rather than abstract religious or rationalist dogmas, Hume presents morality as a practical, natural tool designed by humans to foster social harmony and mutual well-being.
The Natural History of Religion (1757). Hume treats religious history as a natural, secular phenomenon, fundamentally undermining the belief that religion is inherently rooted in reason or divine revelation.
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). His last book published posthumanously. It explores the psychological and sociological origins of religious belief, arguing that religion stems not from rational contemplation or innate knowledge of God, but from the emotional drives of human nature, primarily fear, anxiety, and the desire for security.
Let's pause and cogitate. What do we find Hume saying in these other texts? It's my contention that Hume's work takes on the only possible way to defend miracles. He argues against the existence of God and places religion outside rational discussion. Without God there is little chance miracles take place. Bayes Theorem would detect that easily. Hume wrote a good chapter on miracles. He didn't need to clutter it up and lengthen it to explain and argue for Bayes, which would take up much more space. He didn't see the need for working with mathematical probablities (per Vanderburgh). Plenty of people don't. The heart of Bayes is objective evidence. Hume focused on that. It's the only way to change one's priors. So he did his part. He could've thought to himself, "Factor that into your calculations! Factor in the woeful lack of evidence required for miracle claims based only on testimony!" Then call it a day, leaving it up to others. He said he liked Price's paper. Why do people think it had to be otherwise? Why must Hume respond at all? I'm sure he read the subsequent debates over Bayes. Why must he comment?
Here's what we find in Hume's other works.
David Hume rejected the ontological argument
Anselm (11th-12th CE) argued that even those who doubt the existence of God would have to have some understanding of what they were doubting—namely, they would understand God to be a being than which nothing greater can be thought. Given that it is greater to exist outside of the mind rather than just in the mind, a fool who denied God’s existence would be caught in a contradiction, he argued, because he or she would be saying that it is possible to think of something greater than a being than which nothing greater can be thought. Hence, God exists necessarily.
In Part 9 of Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Hume criticized this argument using his distinction between the relations of ideas and matters of fact. The former has to do with abstract ideas that are known deductively. The latter has to do with that which actually exists, and so they can only be known inductively through experience. Hume argued that the question of the existence of God is about a matter of fact, which can only be known inductively through experience. Therefore the ontological argument incorrectly uses the relations of ideas to show the existence of a matter of fact, and the argument fails. Basically then, no mathematical proof can ever show that something really exists. As Todd M. Furman tells us, a question about matters of fact is “a claim that requires empirical evidence for any sort of justification it might ever have.”1 So we cannot reason from deductive logic that such a being exists. Or, in the words of J. C. A. Gaskin, “No assertion is demonstrable unless its negation is contradictory. No negation of a matter of fact is contradictory. All assertions about existence of things are matters of fact. Therefore no negation of an assertion that some thing exists is contradictory.”2
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1. Todd M. Furman, “In Praise of Hume,” in In Defense of Natural Theology: A Post Humean Assessment,” ed. James F. Sennett and Douglas Groothuis (Downers Grove, IL: Inter- Varsity Press, 2005), p. 45.
2. Quoted ibid., p. 44. Later in the same book above, Paul Copan deals with what is known as “Hume’s fork” by arguing that Hume’s distinction between “relations of ideas” and matters of fact” is “self-referentially incoherent” (p. 208). Furman argues instead that Hume’s criticism of Anselm’s argument is “right on target,” for Hume is attributing to ontological arguments an “evidence error, offering evidence that is categorically inappropriate for the desired conclusion.” He says, “The evidence concerns relations of ideas, and the conclusion—God exists— concerns a claim that is a matter of fact, an empirical claim, a claim that requires empirical evidence for any sort of justification it might ever have” (p. 45). The self-referentially incoherent accusation can only be made, at best, if Copan can legitimately demand that Hume prove with certainty that when it comes to ontological arguments there isn’t any correlation at all between relations of ideas and matters of fact, a request that is probably unattainable. The improbability of this correlation is good enough. Besides, such an accusation as Copan’s can also be made against his God. See Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier, eds., The Impossibility of God (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003). Notes on page 477.
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David Hume rejected the cosmological argument
Cosmological Arguments hinge on some feature of our world, or cosmos, that needs a creator God to explain. The Cosmos exists. Therefore God. Poof!
David Hume rejected the cosmological argument primarily in his posthumously published book Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion(1779). [1, 2] Within this book the critique is articulated through the debates of fictional characters. Demea (defends the cosmological argument) and Philo (who voices Hume's skeptical objections).[1, 2, 3]
• The Fallacy of Composition: Hume argued that it is a logical error to assume that because every individual part of the universe has a cause, the universe as a whole must have a singular cause. [1, 2]
• Rejection of the Principle of Sufficient Reason: He attacked the assumption that there must be a total, ultimate explanation for everything that exists. [1]
• The Possibility of an Infinite Regress: Hume maintained that we cannot rule out the possibility that the universe has no beginning and has always existed as an infinite series of causes. [1, 2] He argued that we cannot observe the "cause" of the universe because we have only ever experienced events within the universe.
• The Impossibility of "Necessary Being": He argues that the concept of a "necessary being" is incoherent. Because we can conceive of God's non-existence without a contradiction, God's existence cannot be logically proven to be necessary. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
David Hume Rejected the Design Argument
David Hume most thoroughly rejects and systematically dismantles the design argument (or teleological argument) in his posthumously published book, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). He also touches on some of these criticisms in Section XI of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). [1, 2]
• Weak Analogy: The argument claims that because natural objects resemble human-made machines, they must also have a maker. Philo argues that the universe is just as similar to a vegetable or an animal as it is to a watch, meaning an organic or random origin is just as plausible as an intelligent one. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
• The Problem of a Finite Cause: Even if we accept the analogy, an effect is only proportional to its cause. Because the universe is imperfect and limited, we cannot logically infer that its creator is infinite, perfect, or omnipotent. [1, 2, 3]
• Multiple Designers / Apprenticeship: Human machines are often built by groups, or through trial-and-error, or by inept apprentices. By this logic, there is nothing preventing the universe from being created by a team of lesser deities or an imperfect creator. [1]
• The Problem of Evil: The sheer amount of pain, suffering, and disorder in the world contradicts the idea of an all-knowing, all-powerful, and perfectly good.
David Hume Rejected the Moral Argument
David Hume did not directly address the standard, later Kantian "moral argument for God." Instead, he rejects the moral arguments of his day in his posthumous Dialogues and the essay "Of the Immortality of the Soul" (found in Four Dissertations). [1, 2, 3, 4]
His specific rejections occur in two main contexts:
1. Against the Moral Argument for an Afterlife: Hume addresses the claim that God is perfectly just, and since justice isn't perfectly met on Earth, there must be a God who provides a future state of rewards and punishments. Hume counters that we cannot observe perfect cosmic justice; thus, using human ideas of justice to infer God's nature is unwarranted. [1]
2. Against Morality as the Source of God's Nature: In the Dialogues, his character Philo argues that we cannot extrapolate human moral attributes (like supreme goodness and justice) to God. Hume argues that nature's mixed state—filled with evil and suffering—implies that if God is the cause of the universe, God may actually be morally indifferent, limited, or beyond human moral concepts altogether. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
Furthermore, throughout his philosophical works like A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume establishes that morality is grounded in human emotion and utility rather than divine commands. [1, 2] https://iep.utm.edu/hume-rel/
• The Fallacy of Composition: Just because every event within the universe has a cause does not mean the universe as a whole requires an external cause. [1]
• The Problem of Causality: We cannot empirically prove that everything requires a cause or that causation works universally outside of our own limited experience. [1, 2]
• The Universe Itself: Even if we accept a first cause, Hume argued there is no reason it must be a deity; the matter of the universe itself could be eternal and self-existing.
Let me interject at this point what Hume might say.
At best, even if we grant that God arguments succeed, all they end up showing is that some kind of philosopher’s god exists and that this kind of god is consistent with the God that Christians believe by faith. But just showing that the god of the philosophers is consistent with the God of their faith does not show that the God of their faith exists. For these same cosmological arguments are equally consistent with a deistic god who created this world as nothing more than a scientific experiment and who thinks of us as rats in a maze, wondering what we will conclude about it all and how we will live our lives. Such a god may be nothing more than a divine tinkerer who is learning as he goes by creating one successive universe after another.
It’s also possible that this god is guiding the universe ultimately toward an evil end, disguising himself as benevolent to trick us. If such a trickster god does exist then all the evidence Christians use to conclude their good God exists would have been planted there to deceive us by that very same god. Based on this alternative god-hypothesis alone the best any believer can claim is agnosticism (in the sense of being skeptical of all metaphysical affirmations). And this is just one of many possible god-hypotheses. I can see no reasonable objection to these other god-hypotheses once we allow them into our equations. They are just as possible as what any Christian believes.
Loftus concludes. ;-)
Even if God arguments are sound, I just don’t see how it follows that this universe was caused to come into existence by the trinitarian Christian God of the Bible. Philosopher James Sennett describes my type of objection as “Hume’s Stopper.” He argued for his Christian God by utilizing a cumulative case based upon the conclusions of the various theistic arguments. He suggested that these separate theistic arguments, assuming they are all correct, lead to several candidate gods and that the theistic God is the best candidate when these gods are compared, contrasted, and scrutinized. But there is something Sennett fails to realize about the theistic concept of God. It evolved over time from the tribal embodied gods of polytheism to a spiritual being who has all the perfections of Anselmian theology. As the world of tribal humans got bigger through travel, and as they thought more about it, their God got bigger, too. So it’s no surprise that these Western theistic arguments cumulatively lead to that very conception of God, the best one they could imagine. So it’s no surprise what they conclude.
Theistic arguments are conceived for the express purpose of concluding that such a God exists in the first place. Oriental conceptions of deities are excluded by Sennett out of hand because Orientals don’t believe in personal gods. So, there is nothing about these arguments that necessarily lead us to think a personal God. Even if we grant that a designing cosmic creator exists, this at best leads to the “god of the philosophers,” the deistic God, and that God is far removed from the Christian God of the Bible. More forcefully, even if cosmological and design arguments are sound I just don’t see how it follows that this universe was caused to come into existence by the trinitarian Christian God of the Bible. Contrary to James F. Sennett, moving from the God of the theistic arguments to the Christian God is like trying to fly a plane to the moon. It cannot be done. This God, Yahweh, started out as a tribal Iron-Age polytheistic war god. Can Sennett’s evolved concept of God really exist if Yahweh didn’t?
As an author I've published a great many blog posts, papers, and books about a whole lot of issues; a small encyclopedia of them, if you will. The more that one publishes the more of a context informed readers have for understanding an author on a separate issue. So let's consider the relevant books of David Hume, apart from his History of England which was a massively influential six-volume historical work that thrust him into fame. Let's see if there's a reason he didn't respond to Bayes Theorem. (In what follows A.I. insisted that I let her help a bit.)
A Treatise of Human Nature was published in London in multiple volumes between 1739 and 1740. Together it was Hume’s most comprehensive philosophical work. It breaks down the origins of human knowledge, ideas, cause and effect, personal identity, the passions, and morality.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). A more accessible, revised version of the first book of the Treatise. It specifically addresses skepticism, our understanding of cause and effect, free will, and the critique of miracles. Thomas Bayes’s work on probability appeared posthumously in 1763. His friend Richard Price discovered the manuscript and published it posthumously in 1767 along with his explanation of Bayesian methods for assessing miracles. We know Hume read Price's paper and liked it. But Hume neither addressed Bayesian arguments nor revised his account of miracles for the 1768 and 1777 editions of his Enquiry.
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751): Hume’s dedicated work on ethics. By relying on empirical observations of human nature rather than abstract religious or rationalist dogmas, Hume presents morality as a practical, natural tool designed by humans to foster social harmony and mutual well-being.
The Natural History of Religion (1757). Hume treats religious history as a natural, secular phenomenon, fundamentally undermining the belief that religion is inherently rooted in reason or divine revelation.
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). His last book published posthumanously. It explores the psychological and sociological origins of religious belief, arguing that religion stems not from rational contemplation or innate knowledge of God, but from the emotional drives of human nature, primarily fear, anxiety, and the desire for security.
Let's pause and cogitate. What do we find Hume saying in these other texts? It's my contention that Hume's work takes on the only possible way to defend miracles. He argues against the existence of God and places religion outside rational discussion. Without God there is little chance miracles take place. Bayes Theorem would detect that easily. Hume wrote a good chapter on miracles. He didn't need to clutter it up and lengthen it to explain and argue for Bayes, which would take up much more space. He didn't see the need for working with mathematical probablities (per Vanderburgh). Plenty of people don't. The heart of Bayes is objective evidence. Hume focused on that. It's the only way to change one's priors. So he did his part. He could've thought to himself, "Factor that into your calculations! Factor in the woeful lack of evidence required for miracle claims based only on testimony!" Then call it a day, leaving it up to others. He said he liked Price's paper. Why do people think it had to be otherwise? Why must Hume respond at all? I'm sure he read the subsequent debates over Bayes. Why must he comment?
Here's what we find in Hume's other works.
David Hume rejected the ontological argument
Anselm (11th-12th CE) argued that even those who doubt the existence of God would have to have some understanding of what they were doubting—namely, they would understand God to be a being than which nothing greater can be thought. Given that it is greater to exist outside of the mind rather than just in the mind, a fool who denied God’s existence would be caught in a contradiction, he argued, because he or she would be saying that it is possible to think of something greater than a being than which nothing greater can be thought. Hence, God exists necessarily.
In Part 9 of Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Hume criticized this argument using his distinction between the relations of ideas and matters of fact. The former has to do with abstract ideas that are known deductively. The latter has to do with that which actually exists, and so they can only be known inductively through experience. Hume argued that the question of the existence of God is about a matter of fact, which can only be known inductively through experience. Therefore the ontological argument incorrectly uses the relations of ideas to show the existence of a matter of fact, and the argument fails. Basically then, no mathematical proof can ever show that something really exists. As Todd M. Furman tells us, a question about matters of fact is “a claim that requires empirical evidence for any sort of justification it might ever have.”1 So we cannot reason from deductive logic that such a being exists. Or, in the words of J. C. A. Gaskin, “No assertion is demonstrable unless its negation is contradictory. No negation of a matter of fact is contradictory. All assertions about existence of things are matters of fact. Therefore no negation of an assertion that some thing exists is contradictory.”2
-------------
1. Todd M. Furman, “In Praise of Hume,” in In Defense of Natural Theology: A Post Humean Assessment,” ed. James F. Sennett and Douglas Groothuis (Downers Grove, IL: Inter- Varsity Press, 2005), p. 45.
2. Quoted ibid., p. 44. Later in the same book above, Paul Copan deals with what is known as “Hume’s fork” by arguing that Hume’s distinction between “relations of ideas” and matters of fact” is “self-referentially incoherent” (p. 208). Furman argues instead that Hume’s criticism of Anselm’s argument is “right on target,” for Hume is attributing to ontological arguments an “evidence error, offering evidence that is categorically inappropriate for the desired conclusion.” He says, “The evidence concerns relations of ideas, and the conclusion—God exists— concerns a claim that is a matter of fact, an empirical claim, a claim that requires empirical evidence for any sort of justification it might ever have” (p. 45). The self-referentially incoherent accusation can only be made, at best, if Copan can legitimately demand that Hume prove with certainty that when it comes to ontological arguments there isn’t any correlation at all between relations of ideas and matters of fact, a request that is probably unattainable. The improbability of this correlation is good enough. Besides, such an accusation as Copan’s can also be made against his God. See Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier, eds., The Impossibility of God (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003). Notes on page 477.
----------
David Hume rejected the cosmological argument
Cosmological Arguments hinge on some feature of our world, or cosmos, that needs a creator God to explain. The Cosmos exists. Therefore God. Poof!
David Hume rejected the cosmological argument primarily in his posthumously published book Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion(1779). [1, 2] Within this book the critique is articulated through the debates of fictional characters. Demea (defends the cosmological argument) and Philo (who voices Hume's skeptical objections).[1, 2, 3]
• The Fallacy of Composition: Hume argued that it is a logical error to assume that because every individual part of the universe has a cause, the universe as a whole must have a singular cause. [1, 2]
• Rejection of the Principle of Sufficient Reason: He attacked the assumption that there must be a total, ultimate explanation for everything that exists. [1]
• The Possibility of an Infinite Regress: Hume maintained that we cannot rule out the possibility that the universe has no beginning and has always existed as an infinite series of causes. [1, 2] He argued that we cannot observe the "cause" of the universe because we have only ever experienced events within the universe.
• The Impossibility of "Necessary Being": He argues that the concept of a "necessary being" is incoherent. Because we can conceive of God's non-existence without a contradiction, God's existence cannot be logically proven to be necessary. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
David Hume Rejected the Design Argument
David Hume most thoroughly rejects and systematically dismantles the design argument (or teleological argument) in his posthumously published book, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). He also touches on some of these criticisms in Section XI of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). [1, 2]
• Weak Analogy: The argument claims that because natural objects resemble human-made machines, they must also have a maker. Philo argues that the universe is just as similar to a vegetable or an animal as it is to a watch, meaning an organic or random origin is just as plausible as an intelligent one. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
• The Problem of a Finite Cause: Even if we accept the analogy, an effect is only proportional to its cause. Because the universe is imperfect and limited, we cannot logically infer that its creator is infinite, perfect, or omnipotent. [1, 2, 3]
• Multiple Designers / Apprenticeship: Human machines are often built by groups, or through trial-and-error, or by inept apprentices. By this logic, there is nothing preventing the universe from being created by a team of lesser deities or an imperfect creator. [1]
• The Problem of Evil: The sheer amount of pain, suffering, and disorder in the world contradicts the idea of an all-knowing, all-powerful, and perfectly good.
David Hume Rejected the Moral Argument
David Hume did not directly address the standard, later Kantian "moral argument for God." Instead, he rejects the moral arguments of his day in his posthumous Dialogues and the essay "Of the Immortality of the Soul" (found in Four Dissertations). [1, 2, 3, 4]
His specific rejections occur in two main contexts:
1. Against the Moral Argument for an Afterlife: Hume addresses the claim that God is perfectly just, and since justice isn't perfectly met on Earth, there must be a God who provides a future state of rewards and punishments. Hume counters that we cannot observe perfect cosmic justice; thus, using human ideas of justice to infer God's nature is unwarranted. [1]
2. Against Morality as the Source of God's Nature: In the Dialogues, his character Philo argues that we cannot extrapolate human moral attributes (like supreme goodness and justice) to God. Hume argues that nature's mixed state—filled with evil and suffering—implies that if God is the cause of the universe, God may actually be morally indifferent, limited, or beyond human moral concepts altogether. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
Furthermore, throughout his philosophical works like A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume establishes that morality is grounded in human emotion and utility rather than divine commands. [1, 2] https://iep.utm.edu/hume-rel/
• The Fallacy of Composition: Just because every event within the universe has a cause does not mean the universe as a whole requires an external cause. [1]
• The Problem of Causality: We cannot empirically prove that everything requires a cause or that causation works universally outside of our own limited experience. [1, 2]
• The Universe Itself: Even if we accept a first cause, Hume argued there is no reason it must be a deity; the matter of the universe itself could be eternal and self-existing.
Let me interject at this point what Hume might say.
At best, even if we grant that God arguments succeed, all they end up showing is that some kind of philosopher’s god exists and that this kind of god is consistent with the God that Christians believe by faith. But just showing that the god of the philosophers is consistent with the God of their faith does not show that the God of their faith exists. For these same cosmological arguments are equally consistent with a deistic god who created this world as nothing more than a scientific experiment and who thinks of us as rats in a maze, wondering what we will conclude about it all and how we will live our lives. Such a god may be nothing more than a divine tinkerer who is learning as he goes by creating one successive universe after another.
It’s also possible that this god is guiding the universe ultimately toward an evil end, disguising himself as benevolent to trick us. If such a trickster god does exist then all the evidence Christians use to conclude their good God exists would have been planted there to deceive us by that very same god. Based on this alternative god-hypothesis alone the best any believer can claim is agnosticism (in the sense of being skeptical of all metaphysical affirmations). And this is just one of many possible god-hypotheses. I can see no reasonable objection to these other god-hypotheses once we allow them into our equations. They are just as possible as what any Christian believes.
Loftus concludes. ;-)
Even if God arguments are sound, I just don’t see how it follows that this universe was caused to come into existence by the trinitarian Christian God of the Bible. Philosopher James Sennett describes my type of objection as “Hume’s Stopper.” He argued for his Christian God by utilizing a cumulative case based upon the conclusions of the various theistic arguments. He suggested that these separate theistic arguments, assuming they are all correct, lead to several candidate gods and that the theistic God is the best candidate when these gods are compared, contrasted, and scrutinized. But there is something Sennett fails to realize about the theistic concept of God. It evolved over time from the tribal embodied gods of polytheism to a spiritual being who has all the perfections of Anselmian theology. As the world of tribal humans got bigger through travel, and as they thought more about it, their God got bigger, too. So it’s no surprise that these Western theistic arguments cumulatively lead to that very conception of God, the best one they could imagine. So it’s no surprise what they conclude.
Theistic arguments are conceived for the express purpose of concluding that such a God exists in the first place. Oriental conceptions of deities are excluded by Sennett out of hand because Orientals don’t believe in personal gods. So, there is nothing about these arguments that necessarily lead us to think a personal God. Even if we grant that a designing cosmic creator exists, this at best leads to the “god of the philosophers,” the deistic God, and that God is far removed from the Christian God of the Bible. More forcefully, even if cosmological and design arguments are sound I just don’t see how it follows that this universe was caused to come into existence by the trinitarian Christian God of the Bible. Contrary to James F. Sennett, moving from the God of the theistic arguments to the Christian God is like trying to fly a plane to the moon. It cannot be done. This God, Yahweh, started out as a tribal Iron-Age polytheistic war god. Can Sennett’s evolved concept of God really exist if Yahweh didn’t?
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