David Hume

Hume is the gravitational center of English-language skepticism about religion. He was not, in the modern sense, a public atheist. He was careful enough about the social cost of unbelief in eighteenth-century Edinburgh that he arranged for the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion to be published only after his death. But the Dialogues is the most damaging single book ever written on natural theology, and Hume’s other essays on miracles, providence, and the design argument did the rest.

His specific moves matter. Against the Teleological Argument, he argued that the analogy between the universe and a designed artifact is weak at best, and that even if it held, it would license at most a finite, fallible, possibly evil designer rather than the God of any actual religion. Against the Cosmological Argument, he attacked the principle of sufficient reason and pressed the question why the explanatory chain must terminate in a single necessary being rather than, say, a brute fact at the level of the universe itself. Against Miracles, he argued that no testimony could ever rationally suffice to establish a miraculous event, because the evidence for the laws of nature against which a miracle would be defined is necessarily stronger than the evidence of any single witness.

Margaret Halloran’s first encounter with Hume in seminar reads, by her own admission, as recreation rather than work. She has J. L. Mackie‘s Treatise on her shelf because of Hume.