Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

In his philosophical work Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), David Hume discusses the existence and nature of God. Hume began Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in 1750 and did not complete the work until 1776. A Scottish philosopher and economist who played a critical role in the Scottish Enlightenment, he is regarded by some historians as one of the greatest philosophers to write in the English language. Also credited with being a founder of cognitive science, he greatly influenced his contemporary European counterparts.

Significantly, Hume was an empiricist, believing that knowledge comes from experience. Truth comes from experiencing something first-hand. The trouble with religion, Hume argues, is the lack of evidence supporting God. However, Hume accepts that arguing whether God exists is less important than determining what sort of God exists.

In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume questions whether it is rational to hold religious beliefs. For argument’s sake, Hume is willing to accept that God exists and that believing in God is rational. Enough people have experienced divinity to argue that God may, in fact, exist. What is less clear is whether God is benevolent, ambivalent, or cruel. Exploring God’s nature, with very little evidence available to us, is the central thesis of Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.



Hume uses imaginary dialogues to question God’s character and our place in a divine plan. There are three major characters in the book. Each of these characters feels differently about God and about the nature of religion. For decades, critics have questioned whether these characters are based on Hume’s contemporaries or classical philosophers, or if they are simply figments of his imagination. There is no clear answer to this question.

The three major characters are the philosophers Cleanthes, Demea, and Philo. Cleanthes believes that nature gives us answers about God’s character. We learn about God by studying nature and moral order. Demea believes that no amount of rational thought will bring us closer to understanding God. Philo, like Demea, fears that God is beyond our comprehension. Cleanthes argues against Demea and Philo throughout the text.

Hume references two further characters—Pamphilus and Hermippus. Pamphilus serves as a narrator of sorts, because he compiles the conversations between the three philosophers, distilling them into a letter. From the outset, he is sending this letter to his friend, Hermippus. Pamphilus joins the three philosophers one evening and listens while writing everything down.



Pamphilus judges that, while Cleanthes makes the most compelling case, Cleanthes is not necessarily correct. Readers do not learn what Hermippus thinks. He and Pamphilus will discuss it all another day. Cleanthes, Philo, and Demea each represent a side of Hume’s own views on the subject. By failing to pick an outright “winner,” Pamphilus represents Hume’s conflicting views on divinity and morality.

In Part I, Hume outlines what Cleanthes thinks about morality, religion, and rational thought. Cleanthes says that the natural world is too complex to be a work of chance. Only a careful designer could create or construct a world so beautiful and multifaceted. The world is a machine, and only an intelligent creator can build a machine.

Although Philo and Demea are skeptical of Cleanthes’s arguments, they indulge him. Cleanthes explains that, since humans are intelligent beings, only a being more intelligent and more knowledgeable than us could create us. Cleanthes thinks that it is perfectly possible to explain God by making these logical assumptions. It is unnecessary to overcomplicate matters.



In Part II, Philo considers Cleanthes’s arguments carefully and deconstructs them. The design argument Cleanthes uses is not, according to Philo, a proper analogy. Even if the design argument is a proper analogy, it is a weak one. The world is only a small part of the larger universe and we know so little about this that we cannot explain it by design.

What we do know is that, if there is a creator, the creator is part of the universe. The creator is not separated by a machine/creator relationship; the creator exists independently of the machine. On the other hand, whichever deity created the universe exists because of it. Alternatively, even if we accept that the creator and universe exist independently, so much of the natural world can be explained by chance that it cannot be the result of a design.

Philo also talks of inductive arguments, or arguments based on past evidence. He says that we have nothing to compare the universe to. We cannot build a conclusion based on past evidence because we cannot replicate the universe. Essentially, Philo picks apart Cleanthes’s entire argument, concluding that we cannot rationalize the universe.



Demea suggests that all these arguments are futile at best. What really matters is the moral nature of God. Since the world is evil and cruel, and life is very short, God’s motives for creating us are unclear. At best, God is ambivalent, leaving everything up to chance, which means He is no designer. At worse, God has no morality, treating His creations like playthings. If God is cruel, then it does not matter why He created us, or whether He exists—there is no happy ending for anyone.

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion concludes with the idea that we only understand God, morality, and reason by questioning everything we think we know. It is only by allowing God to reveal Himself to us that we solve the mysteries of the universe. Searching for concrete answers in the meantime is nothing short of futile.