What Hume's Empiricism Left of Natural Religion

John Locke opened the empiricist tradition by attacking the idea that the mind arrives already furnished with innate principles, arguing instead that the mind at birth is a blank tablet on which experience, through sensation and reflection, writes everything it will ever contain. George Berkeley pushed the same premise toward a radical conclusion: if all we ever really have access to are our own ideas, then talk of a mind independent material world sustaining those ideas is talk we cannot justify, and what keeps the world in existence when no finite mind perceives it is the mind of God perceiving everything continuously.

David Hume pushed empiricist premises harder still and did not arrive at Berkeley's comforting conclusion. Hume argued that what we call cause and effect is never something we actually observe, only a constant conjunction of one event following another that habit trains us to expect, which leaves the traditional design argument for God, reasoning from the world's order to an intelligent designer, resting on an inference experience cannot deliver. His argument on miracles held still more bluntly that no testimony could ever make it more probable that a law of nature was violated than that the witness was mistaken or lying, since a violation of nature is by definition the least probable explanation available. This atlas states Hume's conclusions as he drew them rather than softening them: empiricism did not set out to be religion's rival, but followed to its own strict standard of evidence, it became one.