Cause and Effect in David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

In Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion we are introduced to three characters that serve the purpose to debate God and his nature, more specifically, what can mankind infer about God and his nature. The three characters; Demea, Philo, and Cleanthes all engage in a debate concerning this question and they all serve the purpose of supporting their views on the subject. It is the “argument from design” put forth by Cleanthes that is the focal point of the discussion, and it is Demea and Philo who attempt to discredit it.

It is within this dialogue that two versions of the design argument are presented and done so through analogy. From the two arguments then comes the concept of the “Problem of Evil”. I seek to try and understand Hume’s concepts and justify an opinion based on his ideas surrounding the existence of God.

Hume rejected lockes theory of experiencing cause. He argued that you do not feel the connection between your mind and arm, and thus don't sense the cause of the muscles contracting to raise your arm. Cause, in Hume's mind, is a synthetic experience used to explain the unobservable things in reality. To help explain he used the billiard ball experiement. Ball A is hit and put into motion towards ball B.When ball A collides with ball B the cause of ball B's movement is not experienced, there is no observable connection between the two. This would mean that there is no way to be certain that everytime Ball A collides with ball B that ball B will move, ball A could just as likely bounce off and begin rolling in a random direction. He believd that there is no way of knowing for certain the outcome of an event without being able to perceive the cause.

Although it seems reasonable to predict the effect of dropping a glass bottle, Hume argues in his theory that we cannot draw the effects of it from prior experiences. That is to

As humans, where does our knowledge come from? In Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes outlines his proof for the existence of God. However, David Hume offers a rebuttal in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding that questions not only Descartes’ proof but also his notion of how humans acquire knowledge. In what follows, I will examine Descartes’ proof of God’s existence, then argue that Hume would disagree with it by maintaining that humans can conceive of God through mental processes. Furthermore, I will show how in responding to Descartes' claim that God is the source of our knowledge, Hume asserts that we are instead limited to knowledge from experience.

In this paper I discuss both Hume’s and Anscombe’s view on causation. I begin with Hume and his regularity theory; then I move onto Anscombe where I provide a rebuttal of Hume’s regularity theory, and later I explain how Hume would respond to Anscombe’s objection to Hume’s regularity theory.

Because it is so prominent, everyone notices that a central concern of Hume's Dialogues is empirical natural theology—how one can discern from Nature, using empirical facts and "experimental" forms of inference available to anyone, the existence and nature of an Author of Nature. But few connect this concern to the simple fact that the Dialogues is itself authored. It is a text with an author, David Hume. At the very least, then, on Cleanthes's approach, (3) there should be some resemblances between the world and this text, insofar as they both imply an intelligent "author;" at the most, this analogy of authorship might prove even more fruitful for theological understanding than the mechanical and biological analogies mentioned by the characters in Hume's text. By this, I do not mean that we can prove God's

     Hume began his first examination if the mind by classifying its contents as Perceptions. “Here therefore [he divided] all the perceptions of the mind into two classes or species.” (27) First, Impressions represented an image of something that portrayed an immediate relationship. Secondly, there were thoughts and ideas, which

In explaining Hume’s critique of the belief in miracles, we must first understand the definition of a miracle. The Webster Dictionary defines a miracle as: a supernatural event regarded as to define action, one of the acts worked by Christ which revealed his divinity an extremely remarkable achievement or event, an unexpected piece of luck. Therefore, a miracle is based on one’s perception of past experiences, what everyone sees. It is based on an individuals own reality, and the faith in which he/she believes in, it is based on interior events such as what we are taught, and exterior events, such as what we hear or see first hand. When studying Hume’s view of a miracle, he interprets or defines a miracle as such; a miracle is a

David Hume was a British empiricist, meaning he believed all knowledge comes through the senses. He argued against the existence of innate ideas, stating that humans have knowledge only of things which they directly experience. These claims have a major impact on his argument against the existence of miracles, and in this essay I will explain and critically evaluate this argument.

Since ancient times, people have been exposed to numerous stories of miracles, and quite frankly, the majority of them involve religions; even the ones who are not religious are familiar with Jesus turning water into wine and parting the red sea. However, a miracle itself is an extremely abstruse and complex concept; therefore requires much of a deeper and intimate understanding of what its true natures are. According to Oxford Dictionary, a miracle refers to “an extraordinary and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore attributed to a divine agency”, so even the most common definition recognizes that a miracle requires some kind of a religious force. However, who can truly argue that a miracle is a cause of a divine agency, and how can one prove that such divine agency is the God of a certain religion?

In Section IV of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume, Hume provides argument that will outline that any conclusions about the future based on past experience are limited to being just probable suppositions, because all arguments that claim to know the future impacts of an object’s “secret powers” (Hume 21) are based in assumption. By “secret powers” (Hume 21), Hume means those abilities of an object, such as a loaf of bread, to “support… a human body.” (Hume 21) The bases for Hume’s claims are in the question he posits asking, “What is the foundation of all conclusions from experience?” (Hume 20) In other words, Hume seeks to find the substance or grounding of conclusions that are formed

Hume’s claim that the only semblance of causation we’re able to discover is that one idea or thing follows from another, fails to recognize that we discover necessary causation through simple experiences almost daily. While it may be the case that we truly cannot see the connection between why we can move our limbs, but cannot alter the state of some organs or control their actions through experience alone, we can discover the causal relationship between other things. Hume argues that “while the impulse of one billiard ball is attended with motion in the second[,] this is the whole that appears to the outward senses” (Hume 558). His claim is that “the mind feels no sentiment or inward impression from this succession of objects” and that as a result, there is nothing derived from the experience that suggests “the idea of power or necessary connection” (Hume 558). However, that which we perceive with our outward senses does allow us to derive a necessary connection between ideas or things. We are able to observe that the necessary connection allowing the billiard ball to move is that another object interferes and causes its motion. We know this through experience because we consistently perceive another object interfering and causing the effect of the ball’s motion. In this sense, we can perceive many necessary connections, as the same is true with cutting

David Hume is one of he greatest philosopher the world has known. Hume presented and defended several arguments, and one of them is the argument from design. The way that Hume presented this argument is quite different from other arguments because he presented it as a dialogue. This dialogue has three characters: Philo (skepticism), Demea (revealed religion), and Cleanthes (natural religion). Each one have their definition about the existence of God. Demea explains that humans can never prove the true nature of God. Philo will agree with this argument, even though he is very skeptic, and Cleanthes is the one who will not agree with Demea’s argument because he believes that it is possible to prove the existence of God. However, the essence of this paper will not be

Hume being a skeptic philosopher doubted basic life aspects that people took for granted. Hume believed that we can never see cause. Hume argues that we only tie one event with another through experience, and we do not truly see the cause of an event. Hume denied the necessity of a cause and argued that it is not necessary for everything that exists in life to have cause and reason to exist in the first place. Hume backed up his argument by the idea of the unexplained objects, and phenomena’s in the universe and their reason of existence. Hume argued that there are many unexplained things in the universe that humans fail to explain how they came to being and their reason of existence, and since humans failed to explain those things then it is not necessary for everything that exists to have a cause. Hume believed that things we take for certain arises only from the comparison of events and the analysis of the relation between events, as one could never know that a ball thrown at a wall would bounce back without previous experience of such an event. In other words, to say that event 1 causes event 2 is to say that based on our experience event 1 always precedes and event 2 usually occurs after event 1. Hume’s argument about causation is very controversial as it disproves arguments about the existence of God, like the cosmological argument which is based on the idea that everything that exists