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- Title
Hume's Critique of Natural Religion: A Thomistic Response.
- Authors
Spoerl, Joseph S.
- Abstract
David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is one of the most influential attacks on traditional religion by an enlightenment thinker. Hume focuses on "natural religion" or "natural theology," that is, conclusions about the existence and nature of God based not on revelation but on reason, attacking in particular two traditional arguments for God's existence, one a version of the teleological argument from design, the other a version of the cosmological argument from the contingency of the universe. Each of these attacks is heavily dependent on Hume's naïve empiricist epistemology, and they fail because his epistemology is so inadequate. Five centuries before Hume, Saint Thomas Aquinas had developed a natural theology based on a much more compelling, less naïve version of empiricism. Hume appears to have been completely unacquainted with Aquinas's thought, even though Aquinas is arguably the greatest natural theologian in the western tradition, and his philosophy provides the tools for assessing and cogently answering Hume's critique of "natural religion.".
- Subjects
HUME, David, 1711-1776; NATURAL theology; BEAUTY of God; THEORY of knowledge; CHRISTIAN Science
- Publication
Saint Anselm Journal, 2017, Vol 13, Issue 1, p82
- ISSN
2689-6230
- Publication type
Article