Help from Hume (Part 1 of 2)

For the next 2 posts I’d like to take a look at Philosopher David Hume. While he was no friend of Christianity, I believe that his approach to a theory of knowledge (i.e, his epistemology) is extremely helpful in aiding Christians against the predominant philosophical objections to the faith.

Hume stood in the philosophical tradition of British Empiricism, a tradition which teaches that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience. That is, if something is not, at least in principle, able to be tasted, touched, seen, heard, or smelled, then it does not count as a potential object of knowledge.

Brief explanation of [some of] Hume’s thought
Hume had an interesting method of sifting through different types of beliefs. Picking up what a tool of analysis from Leibniz, Hume’s fork for sifting is the “analytic/synthetic” distinction. Analytic statements are relations of ideas, and to deny them necessarily leads to a contradiction (laws of logic, definitions such as “all bachelors are unmarried men). These are usually what we think of as a priori truths. Hume’s (hereafter H) attack on analytic statements was that they are tautological, i.e. they add nothing new to knowledge. H believed that his rationalist philosophical counterparts (ex. continental rationalists such as Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz) were building philosophical systems in mid-air, with nothing empirical to ground their flights of fancy.

Synthetic statements are those which can be empirically explored and verified. An example of such a statement would be “Molly’s dress is green.” How can we truly “know” that this statement is true? By checking it out, it must be subject to an
empirical inquiry.

(Please remember that H, like most Enlightenment philosophers, was working with internalist presuppositions, defined “knowledge” as “justified, true belief”. In order for someone to possess knowledge they must be aware of why they believe as they do and how that particular belief fits in and are supported by all their other beliefs. This is also known as classical foundationalism.)

In light of H’s empiricist epistemology, he uses this fork to sort out all philosophical issues. Only synthetic statements lead to true knowledge. So, H asked of the traditional questions of philosophy, are the answers given merely in the realm of relations of ideas, i.e. analytical ? If so, then they are tautological and offer us no help. But since H only accepted as worthy of study and consideration beliefs based on verifiable experience by at least one of the five sense, he lapsed into his notorious skepticism.

**Things Hume doubted because we cannot know them through the 5 senses:

1) The existence of God (but isn’t God-at least the God of the Bible-a Spirit, and hence should not be sought in the same way that we verify material things?)

2) A continuing self through time (when was the last time you experienced your “self”? Looking into a mirror won’t help, because all you see is a body, not the “self.”

3) Causation. (we never actually “see” a cause. We see one event followed by another, but we cannot experience in any way the necessity of the procession of events. In philosophical terms, we “see” a succession of events-ball A moves after ball B strikes it- not causation. Remember, H is being a consistent empiricist)

4) The uniformity of nature. (There is no empirical -and non question begging!- reason to believe that the future will be like the past. We have had no experience of the future, and hence cannot really be sure. An anti-toxin that cures today may poison tomorrow. Of course apart from the uniformity of nature science cannot proceed.)

Of course the truth is that David Hume never said that the above mentioned things do not exist, or even that he himself didn’t believe in them. His point was to demonstrate that autonomous reason has no logical reason for believing these things. Again, his point was that empiricists cannot given a sufficient explanation of how the belief in the above things are consistent with their approach to knowledge.

According to Hume, beliefs in the uniformity of nature and the necessary relationship between cause and effect are rather grounded in our psychological make-up, a “habit of the mind.” Thus, being that Hume rejected the rationality of belief in God, causality, a sustained “self”, etc, he attributed the belief in such things to the irrational aspect of humanity. Without, for instance, a Christian conception that God creates both the world around us and our minds to understand it (being created in His image), Hume had no assurance that the objects of our knowledge and our perceptions of them cohere.

Next we’ll develop more how Hume aids a Christian apologetic argument against naturalism…