David Hume on Religion

David Hume is widely regarded as a religious skeptic, and probably an atheist. Yet there are passages in his writings which are hard to accommodate with this view. This paper considers some of these passages, and argues that Hume leaves a conceptual space for ‘true religion’ when he draws a distinction between the practice of religion — ‘worship in the temple’ and theological speculation — ‘disputation in the schools’. This paper argues that Hume cannot capitalize on this distinction since his empiricism cannot properly accommodate such a distinction.