Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Three speakers argue whether the world proves a designer; Hume's friends refused to publish it, so his nephew did.

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1779(published posthumously)
Original language: English

Overview

The book had been in hand since about 1751, and Hume revised it three times, the last of them in the year he died. Three speakers argue; a young listener reports it afterwards. Cleanthes holds that the world is a machine of finely adjusted parts, that machines have makers, and that the maker of this one must therefore resemble a human mind. Demea will not have God reasoned about from anything as small as human experience. Philo grants Cleanthes the method and then runs it into the ground: the world resembles a growing vegetable or an animal at least as closely as it resembles a watch, an argument from analogy yields a conclusion no better than the likeness it rests on, and a designer inferred from this world would have to be inferred as inept, or indifferent, or apprenticed. The eleventh part puts the suffering of animals where the argument has to pass through it. Then, at the end, Philo concedes much of what he has demolished, and what that concession is worth has been disputed ever since; the text does not settle which speaker is Hume. Adam Smith was asked to see the manuscript into print after Hume's death, and would not. So a codicil signed on 7 August 1776, eighteen days before he died, put the book into the hands of William Strahan, his London printer of many years, on one condition: if it were still unpublished two and a half years after the death, the property passed to his nephew. Strahan let the time run out, and in 1779 the nephew brought it out with no publisher's name on the title page. Reviews appeared within months, and every one of them bore out what Hugh Blair had written to Strahan: the thing had made surprisingly little noise.

Key concepts

What does anthropomorphism mean in the Dialogues?

Anthropomorphism means treating divine intelligence as though it resembled human intelligence. Hume's characters disagree over whether the world's order licenses that comparison, but Philo stresses its limits: human ideas of thought and intention come from human experience, while the divine mind lies beyond any experience that could establish the resemblance.

How does Cleanthes attack the a priori argument in Part IX?

Demea argues that an eternal chain of causes still requires a necessary being to explain the whole. Cleanthes replies that once every link has been given its cause, nothing is left to explain, and that joining the parts into a whole is an act of the mind rather than a fact needing its own cause. The demand for a further cause is therefore misapplied.

Why does Philo call the universe a singular effect?

Philo calls the universe a singular effect because experience presents only this one cosmos, not a class of comparable worlds and their causes. Arguments from analogy normally move from repeated cases to an unseen cause; the universe offers no such comparison. That makes the inference from a machine's designer to a world's designer far less secure.

What is Demea's negative theology?

Demea's negative theology holds that God's nature exceeds human understanding, so religious language should emphasize divine incomprehensibility rather than describe God in familiar human terms. His position protects God's transcendence, but it also creates tension: if divine attributes cannot be understood, reason may struggle to show what those attributes mean or support.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Can Nature Prove God?

If the world displays order, does that order justify belief in a divine designer, or does the inference exceed what experience can support? The answer determines whether natural religion rests on evidence or on human projection.

Through Philo, Cleanthes, and Demea, Hume tests whether observed order can establish God's existence, attributes, or purposes. Cleanthes treats the universe as analogous to a machine; Philo attacks the analogy, questions causal inference, and points to suffering as evidence against benevolent design. The dialogue also exposes anthropomorphism: human minds may assign intention to nature because they know no other model. Some readers treat Philo as Hume's mouthpiece; others read the exchange as deliberately unresolved.

skepticism
epistemology
theology
analogy
design
teleology
reason
metaphysics
anthropomorphism
cosmology
evidence
religion
suffering
experience
necessity
order
theism
design argument
natural theology
problem of evil
philosophy of religion
divine attributes
causation
empiricism
cosmogony
inductive reasoning
argument from analogy
common sense

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 220
distinct concepts: 346
by passages held, corpus-wide: #121

What this book thinks together

Every arc around the wheel is one concept in this book. A ribbon joins two the text reaches for together, and its width is how many of its passages hold both. Strongest: anthropomorphism with theology.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 16 pairings. 67 shared passages in all. 84 weaker pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
anthropomorphism	theology	9
belief	skepticism	6
epistemology	skepticism	6
skepticism	theology	6
analogy	anthropomorphism	4
analogy	logic	4
analogy	nature	4
analogy	theology	4
epistemology	logic	4
epistemology	theology	4
logic	theology	4
belief	logic	3
nature	skepticism	3
analogy	epistemology	2
anthropomorphism	epistemology	2
belief	theology	2

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1739 A Treatise of Human Nature
The quarry from which nearly everything else on this shelf was cut, and now the most read of Hume's books — which is the opposite of what he wanted.
EN
1741 Essays
Not one book but a collection under a single title, and the place on this shelf where Hume writes for the general reader — on politics, trade, taste and manners — rather than for philosophers.
EN
1748 An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Shorter, sharper and re-argued: the first part of the Treatise remade for a general reader, and carrying two sections on religion that the earlier book had deliberately left out.
EN
1751 An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
The moral theory of the Treatise's third book, rebuilt for the readers who were never going to open the original.
EN
1752 Hume's Political Discourses
Twelve essays on money, trade, taxes, public credit and population, published in 1752 and later folded into his collected essays — economics before there was a word for it.
EN
1757 The Natural History of Religion
Written for a volume that lost two of its essays to a threatened prosecution, this one asks where religion came from rather than whether any of it is true — the historical half of a question the Dialogues take up philosophically.
EN
1779 Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion you are here EN

— or open another of their works