This January, the OUP Philosophy team has chosen David Hume as their Philosopher of the Month. Born in Edinburgh, Hume is considered a founding figure of empiricism and the most significant philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment. With its strong critique of contemporary metaphysics, Hume’s 'Treatise of Human Nature' (1739–40) cleared the way for a genuinely empirical account of human understanding.
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This is the final in a four-part series on Christian epistemology titled “Radical faith meets radical doubt: a Christian epistemology for skeptics” by John G. Stackhouse, Jr.
By John G. Stackhouse, Jr.
Do Christians need the kind of radical faith that Thomas Reid, in the Scottish Enlightenment, and Alvin Plantinga, in our own time, offer as the best response to the pervasive skepticism of modernity?
Christians traditionally aver that the Bible gives us infallible truth. But wise Christians also acknowledge that God never promises infallible interpretation to any Christian or group of Christians. The Bible is the Word of God, but any interpretation we render is, unavoidably, an interpretation we render. As such, it is limited by our limitations and flawed by our flaws.
What about the Holy Spirit, then? Doesn’t the very presence of God guarantee truth to the believer? Again, the indwelling of every believer by the Holy Spirit is a precious truth, and the assurance God gives us of his love and care and, yes, guidance thereby is a treasure indeed. But the gift of the Holy Spirit has never entailed that every Christian will score 100% on every math test—or on/in any other test in life, either. Wherever we go—even with the Spirit of God—there we inevitably are.
The Apostle Paul comes to our aid at this point and reminds us that we walk by faith, not by sight (II Cor. 5:7), perhaps more profoundly than we knew. We walk, trusting our senses, trusting our memories, trusting our worldviews, and—in the face of all this doubt about all these good, but fallible, gifts of God—trusting God.
The fundamental truth here is that God called humanity to “fill the earth and subdue it, to have dominion” (Gen. 1:28) and to thereby work with him to make the world all it can be. It follows from the fact of this basic commandment that human beings can trust God to give us at least enough knowledge of the world to care for it properly, even as we try faithfully to keep learning more about it so we can care for it better.
Similarly, God called the Christian Church to “make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19), and to thereby work with God to help humanity become all we can be. It likewise follows that we Christians can trust God to give us at least enough knowledge of ourselves and our fellow human beings to disciple each other properly, even as we try faithfully to learn more about ourselves and God so we can disciple each other better.
More particularly, God calls particular groups of people and particular individuals to particular ways of making shalom and making disciples. Modern societies feature such diverse elements as the various parts and forms of the state, the family, businesses, schools, health care facilities, churches, missionary agencies, mass entertainment and news media, and so on. These various instances of shalom-making and disciple-making have particular ways of knowing, and particular bodies of knowledge, that are best suited to the fulfillment of their mission. Again, then, God can be trusted to provide these institutions and individuals distinctively what they need, including what they need epistemically, to fulfill their callings.
So we can and should rejoice in the gracious providence of God, who always supplies our needs in order for us to fulfill God’s call upon our lives. God gives us, as we pray, “our daily bread”—in metaphorical terms of knowledge as well as in literal terms of nourishment.
At the same time, the Bible’s depiction of human limitations squares nicely with the history of skeptical philosophy, and prompts us to be humble enough to realize how little we know, how little we know about the accuracy and completeness of what we think we know, and how much we have to trust God to guide, correct, and increase what we know according to God’s good purposes.
Do we know enough to get to work and make shalom? Yes, we do.
Do we know enough to bear witness to the gospel and make disciples? Yes, we do.
Do we need to claim certainty in order to fulfill the mission of God in these days? No, we don’t.
Certainty isn’t on offer. But confidence—con fide (with faith)—is.
That should be enough for the Christian to get through today with joy and effectiveness. And that’s all that matters (Matt. 6:34).
John G. Stackhouse Jr. is the Sangwoo Youtong Chee Professor of Theology and Culture at Regent College, Vancouver, Canada. He is the author of Need to Know: Vocation as the Heart of Christian Epistemology.
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By Simon Blackburn
David Hume was born three hundred years ago, on 26th April 1711. He lived most of his life in Edinburgh, with only a few improbable interludes: one as tutor to a lunatic, one assisting in a comic-operatic military adventure, and one somewhat more successfully as Embassy Secretary, being a lion in the literary salons of Paris. Apart from these his life was devoted to philosophy, history, literature, and conversation. He is the greatest, and the best-loved, of British philosophers, as well as the emblem and presiding genius of the great flowering of arts and letters that took place in the Edinburgh of the eighteenth century—the Scottish Enlightenment. As with all philosophers, his reputation has gone through peaks and troughs, but today it probably stands higher than it ever has.
This may be surprising. Movements in twentieth-century philosophy were not, on the whole, kind to Hume. Analytical philosophy, initiated by Moore and Russell, took logic to be its scalpel and the careful dissection of language to be its principal task, yet Hume was neither a logician nor primarily interested in language. His empiricism, indeed, had echoes in the later work of the logical positivists. But he was widely regarded as having driven empiricism into a sceptical grave. Russell, for example, could assert in his History of Western Philosophy, that Hume ‘developed to its logical conclusion the empirical philosophy of Locke and Berkeley, and by making it self-consistent, made it incredible’, and this was a widely-held view. On the Continent it has usually been assumed that Hume was simply a curtain-raiser to Kant, who allegedly instructed us how to avoid his sorry descent into scepticism, on the grounds that any world in which we could find ourselves must have a nice regular structure, discernible by the light of reason alone.
There is unquestionably a skeptical side to Hume’s philosophy. But there is another side as well, that is responsible for its current standing. Hume is indeed sceptical about the power of reason to determine what we believe. But he is not sceptical, for example, about whether the sun will rise tomorrow. He just has the calm understanding that our confidence in uniformities in nature, such as this one, is not the result of logic or of any exercise of pure rationality. It is just the way our minds happen to work—as indeed, do those of other animals.
Similarly when it comes to understanding the springs of action, Hume again dethrones reason, arguing that nothing that reason could discover would motivate us without engaging an inclination or ‘passion’. He entirely overturns the Platonic model of the soul in which reason is the charioteer, controlling and steering the unruly horses of desire. ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’. We can correct mistakes about the world in which we act, and choose more efficient means to gain our ends. We may even be able to persuade ourselves and each other to alter our courses, for better or worse. But we can only do this by mobilizing other considerations we care about. These concerns, or in other words the directions of our desires, are themselves a bare gift of nature, again. Hume excelled in adding detail to this: his account of the evolution of what he called the ‘artificial’ virtues—respect for such things as reciprocity, institutions of justice, social conventions, law or government—is the grandfather of all later decision-theoretic and game-theoretic approaches to the evolution of cooperation. But it took over two centuries before this would be recognized. Only recently has Hume’s naturalism become the gold standard for everyone at the cutting edge of contemporary investigation, whether in philosophy, psychology, evolutionary psychology, anthrop
