By Charles Mathewes, Ph.D., University of Virginia
It’s important right away to say that the Enlightenment was not one thing, there are several different Enlightenments; historians today talk about three or four. But what’s important, though, is that there are several themes or research agendas, lines of thinking, in the Enlightenment that are all about evil and that all stand in some pretty profound tension with each other. What was David Hume’s understanding of evil?
The Concept of Enlightenment
The most basic tension is between an Enlightenment founded on the idea of turning all of the human knowledge into a form of knowledge that is modeled on that of the natural sciences, an Enlightenment of the sciences, versus an Enlightenment that is more humanistic and potentially skeptical of the prospects for that scientific transformation of all knowledge.
Most centrally, however, beyond that—beyond those tensions, though—the Enlightenment itself is in a certain way an argument, and much of that argument centered around the problem of evil. How should people understand evil? What is it? Is it a natural thing, is it a socially constructed thing; is it related to certain social conditions? Is it something that wells up in people unless they are properly trained? These are profound and abiding questions for the Enlightenment.
This is a transcript from the video series Why Evil Exists. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
David Hume: The Skeptic and the Naturalist
After in some ways in conversation with Voltaire and Rousseau, David Hume, differs from both of them but shares similar concerns with both about optimism; and in a way offers a kind of synthesis of these various views. Philosophically, of course, Hume is known as a skeptic, and a kind of a naturalist, someone who wants to understand human motivation and human thinking as different dimensions of the human as a natural animal.
His work offers the most powerful restatement of the problem of evil as that problem presents itself to religious belief. He well understood the words of Epicurus, and he quotes them in his famous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion very well. He says: “Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is [God] able but not willing? Then is he malevolent? Is he both able and willing? Where then is evil?” Hume has a way with pithy statements, and that is probably one of his most pithy and most wonderful statements.
Effectively he’s saying, if God wants to help us with evil but can’t, then God is not fully as powerful as we think he is; if God can help us with evil but doesn’t want to, then God is not as good as we thought he is; and those are our options unless you can think of a third one. Hume says, “I can’t think of a third one.”
Learn more about Saint Augustine’s “theodicy” of evil.
The Way Hume Thought about Evil
For Hume, a theory may lead people in unpleasant directions if they use it too far, but actually, he thinks the real problem is using theory where people really shouldn’t, because, in this, he’s a little bit like Pierre Bayle. Theory gets people nowhere in understanding the place of evil for rational religion. The fact of evil suggests the cosmos’ indifference toward humanity, and evil offers evidence to support some forms of Manichaeism.
But Hume is no fideist like Bayle was. He wants to be a mild skeptic, someone dubious of pretty much every religious account because the evidence that people can garner from their observations of the world will inevitably be insufficient to support any account over almost any other account. The world is simply too open to offer much in the way of clarity about religious beliefs.
Learn more about the Reformation and the power of evil within.
When Hume Read the World Like Rousseau
But part of the evidence that Hume reads in the world is Rousseauean in nature: Humans do, and they do want to care for one another. They are naturally moral, naturally hopeful. Evil and suffering exist for Hume, of course, but so do goodness and decency. Because of that, Hume’s skepticism extends even to atheism.
He thinks even atheism is significantly under-supported by the evidence of people’s lives. People are left instead with a kind of bemused uncertainty about how to formulate their theoretical beliefs, at least to the level of specificity that many of us have thought that they needed to formulate them to. But for Hume—and here he’s a bit like Montaigne—this is not a bad thing; people ought to be less concerned with their abstract beliefs and more with helping those in need and living, for their lives, a happy and flourishing life.
Common Questions about David Hume, the Enlightenment Thinker and His Views about Evil
David Hume was a prominent Enlightenment thinker and philosopher of his time. Philosophically, Hume is known as a skeptic, and a kind of a naturalist, someone who wants to understand human motivation and human thinking as different dimensions of the human as a natural animal.
David Hume believed that if God wants to help us with evil but can’t, then God is not fully as powerful as we think he is; if God can help us with evil but doesn’t want to, then God is not as good as we thought he is.
The most basic tension is between an Enlightenment founded on the idea of turning all of the human knowledge into a form of knowledge that is modeled on that of the natural sciences, an Enlightenment of the sciences, versus an Enlightenment that is more humanistic and potentially skeptical of the prospects for that scientific transformation of all knowledge.
