I’ve been slowly reading through Frederick Copleston’s A History of Philosophy, and having recently finished the section on the great Scottish skeptic David Hume, I got to wondering if Hume might come to the same conclusions today. An impossible question to answer, no doubt, like comparing great athletes from different eras, but one worth contemplating. The entire Enlightenment project was birthed in an historical and cultural epoch when a world and universe without God had a certain plausibility to it. Science was a new, exciting phenomenon, and Christian apologetics as a discipline hardly existed. The enterprise to construct a credible explanation of reality based on experience (empiricism) and reason sans God was in its infancy, and a heady enterprise it was. Philosophers, even those who considered themselves Christians, thought they could explain reality without revelation. That hasn’t turned out so well.
Those uncritically immersed in our 21st century secular plausibility structure will think my claim preposterous. Naturalism (nature is all there is) is the default worldview of secular Western culture, and ubiquitous in its influence. God and religion are portrayed at best as purely personal issues, at worst fairy tales like any other. But this confidence displayed everywhere (entertainment, education, media, law, government, etc.) is completely unwarranted and in fact, a paper tiger. The latter phrase comes from a Chinese word that means something that seems threatening but is ineffectual and unable to withstand challenge. Exactly! This perfectly captures my conviction about what I’ve called the Berlin Wall of Secularism. It seems impenetrable and eternal, but truth will eventually bring it crumbling to earth like that great Communist wall.
Hume grew up in Scottish Calvinist home, but his father died when he was two. For whatever reason, the faith of his family never took hold, and he was swept up in the intellectual tide of the time. The strength and longevity of Hume’s thought is that he rigorously took the empiricism of English philosophers like Locke and Berkeley to its logical conclusion: skepticism. He realized that in our daily lives we all live as if our knowledge is real, and confidence in it warranted, but philosophically (i.e., if we think and reason it through) we must accept that this is an illusion. Hume was not an atheist, but he rejected religion (i.e., Christianity) in general because revelation was not credible. But reason, our only other option, shows us an ultimately hopeless reality. He can barely live with the logical conclusions of his thought:
Most fortunately it happens that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose. . . . I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse and am merry with my friends; and when after three of four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold and strained and ridiculous that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther. Here then I find myself absolutely and necessarily determined to live and talk and act like other people in the common affairs of life.
Woody Allen couldn’t have said it any better; life is meaningless, but just pretend that it’s not.
Hume was a product of the intellectual current of Western thought in the 18th century that was distinctly against Christianity; but hindsight is, as “they” say, 20/20. Up into the beginning of the 20th century pretty much all Western thinkers, with the exception of Friedrich Nietzsche who took Hume’s skepticism to its ultimate logical conclusion (nihilism), thought the Enlightenment project a resounding success. Then two world wars, communism, and a hundred million plus deaths showed us that this confidence was profoundly misplaced. Would Hume have looked back at the 20th century if he could and agree? That maybe reason without revelation from God (the Bible) wasn’t capable of figuring out the true nature of reality after all?
Two other areas might cause Hume to reconsider if he were alive today. In the 18th century, science was a weapon against religion, even though almost all scientists at the time were Christians. The mechanistic worldview spawned by Newton’s physics made God a bystander to his creation, unnecessary for the material world. The knowledge unearthed by science since, however, has revealed an insane complexity that can only be explained by an almighty, omniscient God. Atheist/materialists still spout that it’s all a cosmic accident, but the odds of that being the case are more vanishingly close to zero every day.
The other area is apologetics, combined with the explosion of knowledge in biblical textual evidence, archaeology, history, and geography. Almost none of what we know now, as with scientific knowledge, was known in Hume’s time. Richard Dawkins has famously said that Darwin allows people to be “intellectually fulfilled atheists,” which might be true if there were a shred of evidence that the mechanisms of Darwinian evolution were in fact a fact; they’re not. By contrast, the explosion of apologetics knowledge in every area makes it possible for intellectually fulfilled, and confident, Christians to exist. Would Hume be honest enough to see that his thoughts and arguments birthed in an 18th century milieu are no longer credible in the 21st? Finally, we have come to the point in history where Hume’s progeny are the ones on the defensive, and if you have children, don’t let them ever forget it.
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