Brief Historical Setting of Hume’s Investigation of Religion

Abstract

The claim that it is possible to gain exact and certain knowledge about some of the matters which the religious believer deems of supreme importance, solely through the employment of his or her rational capacities and without the need of any special revelation, has been customarily associated with the more or less equivalent terms of ‘natural religion’, ‘rational theology’, or ‘philosophical theology’. It has seldom been pretended that human reason is able to know everything which the religious person believes to be important or necessary to know. Yet, whenever such a discipline has flourished (at least within Judeo-Christian tradition), it has usually presented itself as a set of truths about the existence and attributes of the Deity, moral government of the world, freedom of the will, and the immortality of the soul. This is particularly the case with the natural religion of the second half of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century in England, which was in particular the object of Hume’s critical scrutiny.