The 300th anniversary of David Hume’s birth was yesterday. An appreciation by Morgan Meis that concludes with this paragraph:

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is a discussion between an all-around skeptic, Philo; a religious dogmatist and believer in abstract reason named Demea; and a moderate empiricist, Cleanthes. The three characters debate the existence of God and other light topics. Scholars have long debated the question as to which of the interlocutors represents Hume’s true position. The answer is that none of them do, and all of them do. Hume was fully reconciled to being bifurcated, trifurcated even, if we can put it that way. He tried to love the war that was always raging inside. In this, he was an honest philosopher, and an honest man.

I didn’t read Hume with any care until I began teaching, and I quickly realized what all the fuss was about. His attack on rational religion of the 18th century is devastating and continues to resonate across the centuries. I used to include in my lecture on 18th century religion the following quotation:

So that upon the whole, we may conclude that the Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: and whoever is moved by faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience. David Hume, Essay on Miracles

Hume was also partly responsible for one of my great memories of teaching. When teaching Bible to students from conservative religious backgrounds, there inevitably came the moment when students would ask how one could believe in God if the Bible was not God’s inerrant Word. My response was usually to ask them from where their assurance and certainty of faith came. On probing, they usually agreed that such certainty came from experience, from their relationship with Jesus Christ. On one occasion, however, a student responded with, “the argument from design.”

I tried to suppress a guffaw and urged the student to go read Hume’s  Dialogues on Natural Religion.