An Author Interview from Books At a Glance
Greetings, and welcome to another Author Interview from Books At a Glance. I’m Fred Zaspel, and we are delighted to have Dr. James Anderson with us today to talk about his new book, David Hume – the newest installment of P&R’s “Great Thinkers” series.
James, welcome – it’s great to talk to you again. And congratulations on your new book!
Anderson:
Thanks, Fred, good to speak with you.
Zaspel:
Who was David Hume, and why does he matter?
Anderson:
Well, I imagine most listeners will have heard the name David Hume. He’s not an obscure character in the history of Western thought, but maybe some readers aren’t too familiar with who he was and why he’s significant.
Hume is best known as an 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment philosopher. I think that would be the main way he would be described. Although, in fact, he wrote on a wide range of subjects. He was very well informed and wrote a lot of influential material in history, politics, ethics, economics. He was friendly with Adam Smith and he even wrote a six-volume history of England which was pretty influential in its time.
But as for why he matters – well, I think he matters because a lot of people think he matters. I know that sounds a little circular, but the reality is a lot of people see him as an influence, as a positive influence. In the United Kingdom there is a newspaper known as the Sunday Times, a pretty influential paper. They did a poll, I believe it was two decades ago, now, in 1999, asking readers to vote for the greatest Scot of the millennium, so that would be the second millennium A.D., and Hume won the poll, edging out his friend, Adam Smith. He is broadly seen as a very influential Scotsman.
Zaspel:
That really surprises me.
Anderson:
Yeah, I mean there have been a lot of influential Scotsmen for sure, but maybe it tells us something about the readership of the Sunday Times, as well. (Laughing)
Zaspel:
(Laughing) Okay.
Anderson:
But among philosophers, it’s very interesting that there was a survey done in 2009, a survey of professional philosophers, and one of the questions was asked: which nonliving philosopher do you most identify with? And Hume was number one. I think followed by Aristotle and Kant in second and third place. But again, it tells you how influential he is even today in the world of philosophy. Hume’s thought has left its mark on almost every area of philosophy, of metaphysics; epistemology, the theory of knowledge; modern ethics bears his mark; philosophy of religion, even though, as we’ll probably discuss, he was very much a critic of religion. His criticisms have influenced the field of philosophy of religion; philosophy of science, how people think about the scientific method. He had some interesting things to say on the topic of free will, which is still discussed today. So, in fact, many of the questions that Hume posed and sought to answer have set the agenda for contemporary philosophy. And a lot of subsequent philosophers, the main one we might think of would be Immanuel Kant, were directly responding to some of the questions that Hume opposed and trying to find alternative answers and trying to avoid some of the conclusions that Hume was pressing for.
As far as Christians go, why should Hume matter to Christians? I think the short answer is that Hume’s thought lies at the root of much of the religious skepticism that we encounter today. Skepticism about whether there is evidence for the existence of God. Skepticism about the Bible as a special revelation. Skepticism about whether miracles occur or if they do, whether it’s ever reasonable to believe that they do. Many people’s skepticism about religion and about Christianity in particular has been influenced by Hume, whether they recognize it or not. He’s often a hidden influence; but if you trace the objections, many of them terminate in Hume’s own work.
Zaspel:
Okay, he made a big splash. What was distinctive about his work? And what is “skepticism”?
Anderson:
What is distinctive about Hume’s work? Maybe it’s worth saying, by way of preface, that many aspects of Hume’s thought are not distinctive; in that he’s actually continuing traditions that already existed. He’s an empiricist in the sense that he thinks all knowledge has to derive from sense experience, but he wasn’t the first empiricist. There were empiricists before him going even back to the ancient Greeks. His skepticism, again, wasn’t entirely novel. His views on ethics weren’t entirely novel either, they were following in a previous tradition that tried to ground ethics in human sentiments and human feelings.
So, once we recognize that there were many elements that were not distinctive in his thought, then of course, we want to ask: what distinctive contributions did he make? And I think one distinctive of his work is that he is engaged in a philosophical project that is very comprehensive in its sweep and very ambitious, insofar as it tries to provide an account of every aspect of human experience. The way Hume himself puts it is he is attempting a complete science of human nature. A complete science of human nature – that phrase actually has a lot packed into it. He wants to study human nature, that is, why humans think and act as they do, but he wants to do it from a scientific perspective. He sees himself as a scientist of human nature itself. And one way to understand what he’s trying to do, is he is trying to do for the internal world what Isaac Newton had done for the external world. Isaac Newton is describing laws that govern the motions of the heavenly bodies and, gravitational attraction, and so forth. So, Newton is coming out with a set of laws, natural laws, that explain the externals of our experience, the world around us, and Hume is saying we need to do the same for the internal, for the way that we feel, the way that we think, the way that we reason, how we make choices. All of this he wants to explain naturalistically by appealing to natural laws, law-like principles, that govern human nature. So, that’s what he is trying to do. It’s very ambitious and it’s very comprehensive in its scope.
And, his approach or his methodology is strictly empiricist – that’s the other distinctive of this project. He wants to apply what he calls the experimental method. By which, he means not so much doing experiments, but experiment in the sense of experiential. So, he’s going to study his experiences and human experiences in general to reach conclusions about human nature. And he is going to follow it through wherever it leads. This is another distinctive of Hume – he wants to be absolutely consistent, starting with very, very simple foundations and follow reason and experience wherever they lead, even if they lead to very counterintuitive, even seemingly absurd conclusions. He wants to force his way through to the logical endpoint based on his methodology.
I think you asked about skepticism, is that right? You wanted me to elaborate a bit on that. Hume certainly describes himself as a skeptic, that’s not just a label that’s been placed on him by others as a sort of pejorative. He embraces the title of skeptic, but he wants to distinguish himself from certain forms of skepticism. There’s an ancient form of skepticism, that is pyrrhonism, which is a very, very radical form of skepticism that says, in effect, we don’t know anything and we shouldn’t believe anything, we should withhold judgment on everything. We shouldn’t commit ourselves to anything. Skepticism, in general, is a philosophy of doubt. Skepticism literally comes from the word meaning to doubt, so a skeptic is one who doubts and who advocates doubt. But Hume doesn’t advocate doubt about everything. What he says is we just need to be clear about what we can know and what we can’t know. And, strictly speaking, what we can know has to come from experience. If our beliefs can’t be traced back to experiences and things that we can deduce from our experiences, then we don’t really know them, and so we should doubt everything that can’t be firmly grounded on the basis of sense experience. So that leads him to skeptical conclusions; it’s not that he particularly likes skepticism.
Zaspel:
That has massive implications for Christians.
Anderson:
It does. Yes, that’s right, because if you accept Hume’s starting point, and this is where a Christian response really has to focus, on Hume’s starting point and his methodology, his fundamental epistemology, his theory of knowledge, if you start where Hume starts and follow it through you do end up with all kinds of skepticism. I argue in the book even more skepticism than Hume himself conceded. He’s a skeptic as a consequence of the other things that he has committed to, namely empiricism and a naturalistic account of human knowledge and human experience in general.
Zaspel:
Maybe you could situate Hume for us in the history of philosophy. What came before him, and what shaping influence did he have on later philosophy?
Anderson:
Right. Well, that’s a good question. Obviously, the history of philosophy is a long history and Hume comes toward the more recent end of the history of philosophy. Hume is usually located in what is called the Early Modern period in Western philosophy. The Early Modern period, which spans roughly the 17th and 18th centuries, and a lot has gone before that. You go back to the early days of philosophy, you’re really starting with the ancient Greeks, especially Plato and Aristotle. Everyone’s heard of Plato and Aristotle, but there are other important schools of Greek philosophy like the Stoics and the Epicureans which led right up in fact to the early Christian period. Following the birth of Christianity, you have a number of significant Christian thinkers who are contributing to the history of philosophy. Philosopher theologians like Origen and Augustine, of course. That tails into the Medieval period where you have some very significant Western Christian thinkers like Anselm, Aquinas, William of Ockham, each making their own contributions. And then you have something of a transitional period with the Renaissance, which was really characterized by a kind of a Christian humanism that wanted to go back to some of the early classical sources and challenge certain church traditions that had built up during the Medieval period. But alongside the Renaissance you also have the Reformation, of course, that you and I and I imagine a lot of our listeners will be very familiar with the changes that were taking place in the Reformation. But all of this led to a lot of challenge, not just to the institutional church, we would think of the Roman Catholic Church, but also challenges to religious authority in general, even the authority of Scripture. Not just extrabiblical traditions, but the idea of divine revelation in itself. Out of this transitional period there are some radical thinkers who are starting to challenge even the foundations of the Christian faith itself. And so you have a movement that is commonly known as the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment which exalts human reason and experience and in effect says that all claims including religious claims, including claims to divine revelation, need to be subjected to the judgment of what we deem to be reasonable and justifiable on the basis of first principles. First principles of reason, first principles of experience. This is also the period were modern science is starting to develop. You have pioneers of what we would consider modern science. It’s based on the experimental approach making observations rather than just metaphysical speculations.
There’s a lot going on at this time, but in general there’s an attempt to try and drill down to the foundations of human knowledge. Where can we really find firm foundations for what we believe? And out of this Enlightenment movement there are, generally speaking, two traditions: the rationalist tradition and the empiricist tradition. The rationalist tradition tries to found human knowledge on first principles of reason. So, self-evident truths of reason, Descartes would be a good example. Descartes employs his method of doubt and comes to the foundational conclusion that he exists. That’s the one thing that rationally cannot be doubted, his own existence. And then he sort of builds from there, and there are other rationalist philosophers who, again, try to start with the pure, rational truths that we can apprehend. The other tradition is the empiricist tradition and this is where we start getting to Hume. You have thinkers like John Locke, Bishop George Berkeley, who, instead, want to ground human knowledge on experience. They think the problem with reason is it’s too abstract. If we are actually going to know things about the world, well, how do we have access to the world? We experience it, we see it, we hear it, we touch it, and so forth. They want to ground real knowledge, knowledge of the natural world, in experience, immediate sensory experience. And Hume is part of this tradition, this enlightenment empiricist tradition and arguably Hume is the most consistent and thoroughgoing empiricist. More so than his predecessors, he is actually winnowing some of the conclusions that early empiricists had drawn and saying, look, on and empiricist basis we can’t even know that. We need to be a lot more modest about what we can actually know if we are committed to empiricism.
After Hume, you have a lot of movements. Some that are sympathetic to Hume, some that say, yes, Hume has set the standard here; he can certainly be improved upon, but basically we need to adopt this naturalistic empiricist approach. That leads, for example, in the 20th century, to what was called the logical positivist movement that tried to turn philosophy into science by saying that science was the standard of everything and even philosophy had to be done on a scientific, strictly empirical basis. That’s also where we see scientism, the idea that all knowledge has to be scientific knowledge. So there are Hume-ian traditions; you might argue that logical positivism is Hume on steroids or Hume 2.0, it’s Hume to the max.
But then you have other philosophers that are trying to respond to Hume and saying, look, this skepticism that Hume is advocating here, that’s really problematic. We don’t want to have to live with that. There must be answers to the challenges that Hume has laid out here. And Immanuel Kant is an example of someone who is trying to offer an alternative epistemology that will solve the problems that Hume has raised and will avoid the skepticism that Hume’s empiricism is threatening. Kant himself lays the groundwork for what is called the idealist philosophical tradition which has various forms, again, leading up to the present day. So, maybe that will give your listeners a sense of what leads up to Hume and how he is situated in this early modern enlightenment period and how he himself influenced subsequent thinkers.
Zaspel:
What do you see are the critical weaknesses of Hume’s philosophy?
Anderson:
I think his philosophy has a lot of weaknesses, but where you identify those weaknesses will depend largely on the perspective that you, yourself, or bringing. You can read books on Hume by secular philosophers that criticized him, for example, Bertrand Russell, obviously not a Christian, a very atheistic, anti-religious thinker. In his works, whenever he mentions Hume, he points out what he sees to be some fundamental flaws in Hume’s philosophy. But we as Christians come with a very different worldview. That doesn’t mean that we can’t see some of the same flaws that someone like Russell does; but, we are starting with different presuppositions. And I think that from a biblical Christian perspective, the basic flaws in Hume’s philosophy lie in two presumptions. That’s how I put it in the book, two presumptions that he brings to his philosophical project. One is the presumption of naturalism where he is only going to allow natural explanations. He wants to start with a naturalistic account, so he’s not going to allow any appeal to supernatural forces, specifically God, a divine hand, a divine Providence. Everything has to be explained in terms of natural cause and effect and natural laws. And that isn’t something that he ever proves, it’s just a rule of engagement that he imposes from the very beginning. It’s a methodological axiom that he applies. But from our perspective he is starting off on the wrong foot altogether. I use this analogy in the book: imagine that you are being asked to paint the world, paint some scene in the world, but you’ve decided that your palette of paints is only going to contain white, black, and shades of gray. You’re just going to restrict your palette of paints right from the beginning. Are you going to be able to accurately paint the world? Well, if the world is in fact, black and white and shades of gray, then, yes, you might be able to do that. But if, in fact, the world is multicolored, then you’ve artificially restricted your palette for painting the world. And that’s what Hume does – he restricts his philosophical palette so the picture of the world that he paints is one that’s restricted and it cannot actually account for the way the world really is, because he has ruled out any kind of supernatural reality right from the outset.
So that’s one presumption. And then the other presumption I talk about is the presumption of autonomy. Namely, that the human intellect is in a sense its own final authority. That human reason and experience are the final judge of what is true, of what is reasonable, and what is explicable. And so he doesn’t recognize any higher authority. Specifically, he doesn’t recognize the higher authority of God and the divine revelation that might have something important to say about how we understand ourselves and how we understand the world. So, again, he almost arbitrarily excludes a biblical theism from the outset. And the moment he does that, from a Christian perspective he is headed off on an expedition in entirely the wrong direction and it’s inevitable that he’s going to get lost in the woods. He leaves God out, from the beginning, and there are consequences for that. And Hume actually shows us what the consequences are by leading us toward a debilitating skepticism in all matters of human life.
There are other internal problems we could talk about in Hume’s system. I think his empiricism, in the end, is ultimately self-defeating. He can’t even justify his starting point by the criteria that he himself sets. So, there are philosophical critiques of Hume that I, as a Christian philosopher, would share with other philosophers who see the same kind of internal difficulties in the way Hume sets up his own system.
Zaspel:
Let me ask about a couple of specifics. Why would an empiricist, why would Hume have trouble with the idea of, say, revelation, or of miracles? Hume for instance, would believe a lot of things that he, himself, hasn’t experienced, seen, touched, heard, but he takes it on historical authority of others who have seen it. And so we have the idea of those who have, the apostles, who have seen and heard and touched and they tell us that and they pass on the tradition and give it to us in the Scriptures. Why is that discounted from the beginning? Both in terms of revelation, and in the idea of miracles, why is that discounted out of hand?
Anderson:
Well, I think if we wanted to be charitable to Hume, we would recognize that he would say that he hasn’t excluded them from the outset. He would say he is open-minded and that if there were sufficient evidence, empirical evidence for supernatural revelation and for miracles, that he would accept them. He, himself, would say I am open to this, but we need to subject these claims to the same kinds of standards as anything else. Now, I think there’s actually more going on there, because, as I said, there is a prior commitment to a methodological naturalism that, in the end, is going to have to rule out any kind of supernatural revelation that would involve a divine intervention, you know, God revealing things specially to prophets in the past, and so forth. But Hume’s view of special revelation, such as Scripture, is that any claim to special revelation has to rest on a miracle. He thinks, this is almost axiomatic for Hume, that if a claim that such and such a Scripture is a special revelation, if that claim is made, the only way it could really be vindicated would be by a miracle.
Zaspel:
On one level, Christians are glad to affirm that.
Anderson:
Exactly. Right. Yes, Jesus vindicates his claims with miracles, the prophets of the past. So Hume is not entirely out on a limb here, there is something reasonable about this; but, then he goes on to say that’s a problem. If something has to be vindicated by miracles, then it’s never going to be vindicated because… And he offers this lengthy and very famous, influential argument against miracles. Not that miracles can’t occur – Hume grants that miracles are possible. He says from an empiricist basis you can’t rule out anything altogether, maybe they do happen. But what he argues is that it’s never reasonable to believe a miracle claim. This is the somewhat surprising thing about his claim – even if a miracle occurred, it would never be reasonable to believe that it had occurred or that someone’s claim that a miracle had occurred was actually true. His argument is, in a nutshell, that all of our prior experience is that miracles don’t occur; that nature follows orderly, regular, predictable patterns. So, when someone dies, they stay dead; every single time we observe someone die, they stay dead. And so he argues that our entire past experience counts against any claim that these laws of nature have been violated. He sets things up like scales of evidence and says on one side of the scale you’ve got the claim that a miracle occurred, but on the other side of the scale you’ve got this cumulative weight of evidence that nature operates in unexceptional ways, that always operates according to laws. And his argument is that no matter how good your testimony is to a miracle on one side of the scale, the weight of your own experience or of human experience in general of unexceptional natural events is always going to weigh it down on the other side. So, if someone claims a man who died has come back to life again, Hume’s response is it’s irrational to believe that because of the weight of evidence against it.
Zaspel:
Isn’t that just a roundabout way of denying miracles from the outset?
Anderson:
I think it is, and I think most commentators on Hume’s argument say that it does stack the deck in advance. Hume acts like it doesn’t; he acts like he is just applying general principles of evidence to the particular case of miracles, but when you look closely at it, what it means is that no amount of evidence could possibly weigh in favor of a miracle. This is, in a sense, how absurd it gets: even if you witnessed a miracle with your own eyes, right in front of you, you shouldn’t believe your own eyes, according to Hume’s argument.
Zaspel:
It’s just gratuitous.
Anderson:
You can’t win. When it’s set up like that, you can’t win.
Zaspel:
You argue that although Hume’s project was a failure it was nonetheless an “instructive” failure – how so?
Anderson:
Actually, I call it a “highly instructive” failure. I’ve actually got in front of me the paragraph in which I make that claim. It might be helpful for me to read it and then explain what I mean by that.
Zaspel:
Okay.
Anderson:
What I say is that even though Hume’s philosophical project must be judged a failure, and we’ve talked a bit about why it is a failure on its own terms, it is a highly instructive failure for it exposes the irrationalism of a naturalistic worldview founded on the autonomy of the human mind. When one encounters a dead-end, the only reasonable course of action is to turn around and head in the opposite direction. So that’s what I say in the book, and the point is this: if naturalism inevitably leads to skepticism, and I think that’s what Hume’s philosophy shows us, that once you commit at the outset to naturalism, that inevitably leads to a pretty radical skepticism. What we conclude from that is that the only way to avoid that skepticism is to repudiate naturalism in the first place. And so we have to embrace some form of supernaturalism. And I would go on to argue specifically a biblical theism where our starting point is a recognition that there is a personal, transcendent, absolute God who created the world, created it orderly, providentially, orders and guides it so that it operates in knowable, predictable fashions. I think we have to say something about humans being made in the image of God with a derivative rationality. That our reason isn’t original, but it is in fact derivative of a higher, divine reason recognizing that the cognitive faculties, or the intellectual faculties that we have are designed by God to be reliable, to give us genuine knowledge of the world. Unless you start with that kind of a worldview, you will end up with the kind of skepticism that Hume has because on Hume’s view, human knowledge has to pull itself up by its own bootstraps. Which is in principle impossible, rather than depending on a higher source of truth and knowledge and reason. So, in sum, Hume, I think, indirectly gives us an argument for the existence of God; specifically an epistemological argument for the existence of God, that human knowledge depends on the existence of God. Which, actually, is something not very far from Cornelius Van Til’s transcendental argument.
Zaspel:
Actually I was going to ask you that next. Although he was no friend to Christianity, he has had some shaping influence on contemporary Christian apologetics, right?
Anderson:
Yes, I think that is right. I certainly agree that Hume was no friend to Christianity. Strange as it may sound, there are still some academics who are trying to claim that Hume was a Christian, just a certain kind of enlightenment Christian. I think anyone who recognizes what Christian orthodoxy is will not be able to accept that claim. I think quite patently he is critical of orthodox Christian claims and the idea that these claims are well grounded rationally and evidentially. But I think Hume has certainly shaped the landscape of contemporary Christian apologetics. You and I know that there are different schools of Christian apologetics today, different methodologies that are adopted, but even these differences, I think, owe something to the challenges that Hume set for Christian belief. I argue in the book that Hume is really the fountainhead for what we might call the evidentialist challenge to Christianity. Hume has this famous dictum, “a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.” In other words, you should only believe something to the extent that you have good evidence for it. And the implication of Hume’s work is that Christian beliefs don’t have that evidence; Christian beliefs lack sufficient evidence to make them rational or justifiable. And this idea that Christian beliefs lack sufficient evidence is recounted today, it’s very common among skeptics. This is the fundamental problem with Christianity – it makes these claims that are unsupported by the evidence. And so you have this evidential challenge or evidentialist challenge to Christianity which goes something like this: you’ve got one premise that says a belief is rationally justified only if it is supported by sufficient evidence. That’s Hume’s, “a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.” So a belief is only rationally justified if it is supported by sufficient evidence. Then, the second premise, which is often just assumed, is that Christian beliefs are not supported by sufficient evidence. And then you draw the conclusion from these two premises that Christian beliefs are not rationally justified, and that’s meant to be a bad thing.
Now you have different responses among Christian apologists to this sort of challenge. You have the traditional evidentialist approach that wants to challenge the second premise. The second premise is that Christian beliefs lack sufficient evidence. And the evidentialist says, “poppycock! Look, there’s tons of evidence. There’s the evidence of the fine-tuning of the universe, of complexity in biological structures. You’ve got historical evidence for miracles, and so forth. So, you want evidence? I’ve got evidence. Back up the truck, here’s the evidence.” That’s the general evidentialist approach, to challenge the second premise. But also there’s this 20th-century movement known as reformed epistemology that’s most associated with Alvin Plantinga, but there are others who have been part of this movement, that has actually challenged the first premise which says that a belief is only rational if it’s based on sufficient evidence. And Plantinga and others have pointed out actually there are many beliefs that we have that we consider to be rational, but they’re not evidentially justified. We can’t point to empirical evidence or really any kind of evidential grounding for these beliefs, but we have to take them as rationally justified, and maybe Christian beliefs are like that. Maybe they are what Plantinga calls properly basic beliefs. So there’s a different kind of challenge.
Zaspel:
What are some of those properly basic beliefs, according to Plantinga?
Anderson:
Some would be, for example, very simple a priori truths about logic and mathematics. The truth that no proposition can be both true and false at the same time. Do we have evidence for that? No, actually, that’s a criteria of evidence. When we consider evidence, we assume the law of non-contradiction. One plus one equals two. Do we know that on the basis of evidence? Do we go out and gather lots of evidence to show that one plus one equals two? No, it’s something that you just recognize if you understand what one is and what two is, you can just see that it’s true. And even assumptions like my sensory faculties are reliable, my sensory faculties give me an accurate picture of the world. We couldn’t justify that evidentially because we assume that when we consider evidence. When we consider empirical evidence, we actually have to assume that our sensory organs are reliable and give us an accurate picture of the world. So these are the examples of properly basic beliefs, and Plantinga has some interesting arguments for why belief in God should be like that and other distinctively Christian beliefs.
So that’s another answer to the evidentialist challenge. And then I also talk a bit in the book about what we might call the presuppositionalist approach. Which I think is a third and distinctive approach which actually challenges both premises. It not only challenges the premise that all of our beliefs require rational justification by evidence because the presuppositionalist will say, actually some of our beliefs are presuppositions, they aren’t justified by evidence but rather our use of evidence requires these rational presuppositions. So it’s sort of digging deeper into the foundations of our epistemology. But also the presuppositionalist will look at premise two, the claim that Christian beliefs lack sufficient evidence and will say, on the contrary, there’s an abundance of evidence for Christian beliefs and, in fact, and this is what Van Til said, that every single fact of experience actually is evidence for a Christian worldview because we could not make sense of any fact in the world apart from a broader framework in which there is a creator God who created the world and created us with faculties able to understand the world and to employ rules of evidence and evaluation along evidential lines.
So, there are different responses, but I think the diversity that we see in the Christian apologetic world can be explained in one sense, not completely, but can be partly explained by different approaches to the evidentialist challenge that Hume and his heirs have set before the Christian faith.
Zaspel:
That was really helpful. I’ve kept you awhile, but let’s do one more. I should mention that even if the topic may sound daunting to some, your book is really quite brief – a little over a hundred pages. Before I let you go, maybe you can give us a quick overview so our readers can know what to expect.
Anderson:
I’ll be glad to do that. As you say, it’s not a long book, although it felt like it was a long book as I was writing it. There is a sort of a paradox and maybe you’ve experienced this, that it takes more work to write a short book than a long book because you have to work on being very economical with words.
Basically, the book can be divided into three parts. There’s some introductory material, there’s a superb Foreword by Andrew Hoffecker that provides some historical context for the book which is really helpful. I was so glad to receive that and have that as part of the book. And then I give a little introduction to why Hume matters just to lay the table and say this is why I think this book is worth writing and worth considering. Chapter 1 is about Hume’s life and work, setting the historical context for Hume’s own life, his influences and the major works that he produced in his career. That’s all introduction.
The rest of the book, the bulk of the book, is in two further parts. One would be exposition of Hume’s thought. Chapter 2 describes Hume’s general philosophical project, the complete science of human nature. Chapter 3 focuses on his approach to ethics to develop a naturalistic approach to ethics rather than a religious approach to ethics. Chapter 4 deals with his religious skepticism, his arguments against natural theology, his arguments against miracles, the reasons he gives for being skeptical about religious claims and Christian claims in particular. And then chapter 5 rounds things off by talking about his continuing relevance, the subsequent cultural and philosophical movements that owe a debt to Hume’s thought. That’s the exposition part of the book.
Beginning in chapter 6, I moved to an evaluation of all this, more of a critical assessment from, I think, a distinctively reformed perspective. Chapter 6 is a reformed assessment of Hume’s thought in general, a critique of his philosophical project and the conclusions he draws. Chapter 7 focuses on his religious skepticism and I provide, I think, a distinctively reformed response to Hume’s critique of Christian claims. And then in chapter 8, I turn the tables somewhat and argue that Hume’s philosophy actually promotes the cause of Christian apologetics in some of the ways that we discussed earlier, that actually Hume’s arguments can be turned around into positive arguments against naturalism and for a biblical Christian worldview. Then there’s a short epilogue about the influence of Hume in our culture today and some end material, a glossary, and some recommended reading if people want to go deeper.
Zaspel:
It was just a wonderfully clear and helpful read. I’m glad to recommend it.
We’re talking to Dr. James Anderson about his new book, David Hume. It’s the latest installment in P&R’s “Great Thinkers” series, an important and useful book for the study and understanding of this massively influential philosopher.
James, thanks so much for talking to us today.
Anderson:
Thanks, Fred; God bless.
