The Natural History of Religion

Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Dialogues 1-11 discuss religion’s foundation in human reason. Dialogue 12 in which Philo. the relentless oponent of pro-theistic arguments makes his “confession” that he embraces natural religon; namely the view that the cause or causes of order in nature bear some remote analogy to human intelligence. Hume’s Natural History of Religon although published earlier than the posthumous Dialogues is in effect a second volume to them. It presents a complex naturalistic explanation of religon’s origin in human nature providing a sophisticated (and controversial) account of religion’s origin that is also a critique of religious belief. The core of this critique is an argument that theistic belief cannot be rendered so as to significantly differ from an atheism that grants that natural order has some cause or other.