Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

The Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion are David Hume‘s most damaging book on the existence of God. He worked on them over decades, kept revising them through the seventeen-seventies, and arranged for their publication only after his death. They appeared in 1779.

The book is a dialogue in three voices. Demea is the orthodox theist who argues for God on a priori grounds. Cleanthes argues from design, marshaling what was at the time the most respected version of the Teleological Argument. Philo, the skeptic, dismantles both. Philo is widely, though not unanimously, taken to speak for Hume.

The book remains in print not because the design argument it attacks is still widely held in its eighteenth-century form, but because Philo’s broader strategy, that natural theology rests on analogies that fail under pressure, generalizes. The arguments J. L. Mackie makes against the design argument in The Miracle of Theism two centuries later are recognizably descendants of Philo’s.