SOURCE: “Religion and ‘Natural Belief’ in Hume's Dialogues,” in Hume's Religious Naturalism, University Press of America, 1998, pp. 1-28.

In the following essay, Reich evaluates previous critical approaches to the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in an effort to decipher Hume's philosophical position on the ontological arguments in the book. Specifically, Reich focuses on whether Hume considers belief in a supreme being to be a “natural belief,” and discusses how this affects the claims of the Dialogues.

Nothing in Hume's other works quite prepares the reader of his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion for the apparent shift of position that one of its characters (Philo) makes at its end. For it appears that Philo, who has substantially undermined the argument for God's existence from the “design” of the universe, has made certain concessions to religion at the end of the Dialogues (Part XII) that ill accord with the whole tenor of...