[MUSIC] We've moved from the continent to Oxford. For centuries, the capital of British philosophy. This is Oriel College, established in the early 14th century and widely considered to be one of the most beautiful colleges in Oxford. In our last clip, we saw that Phidiasm as a solution to the skeptical crisis which emerged during the 16th century is inherently ambiguous. Did Bayle really mean to say that the security offered by a leap of faith serves to pacify his questions relating to the moral evidence of Christianity? The reasons why we embrace the particular religion we call our own, and the impossibility to account for the reality of evil, from a philosophical perspective, the Phidias took claims that rational arguments are of no avail the defense of religion. The security offered by faith so besiege rationality raises difficult questions for In a sense, the Phidias appears to turn the philosophical question how to account rationally for the truth of faith into a psychological and a moral issue. Trust me. The Phidias appears to be telling us, I do believe. I am not lying. I may question the reasons on which some people base their faith. But I can honestly tell you I do believe. It's clear, meanwhile that in Europe during the early modern age, it was extremely hazardous to admit genuine doubt about the truth of revealed religion. To be an overt atheist was simply impossible. In the same year Bayle published his dictionaire In Edinburgh, the 20-year old student Thomas Aikenhead was hanged, not for having published any blasphemous book, but because he was reported as telling people theology was nonsense. That as far as he was concerned, scripture held no authority. And Bayle himself was fired from his position as a professor in Rotterdam mainly on account for his view that atheists need not be immoral. During the 18th century, one of Bayle's British admirers was to use a strategy very similar to Bayles. In many ways David Hume was a very different philosopher. Whereas Bayle throughout his life remained something of a Cartesian, that is a follower of Rene Descartes. Hume was an empiricist, arguing that our knowledge of the external world, and of ourselves derived from sensual experience. That is from ideas we create on the basis of the way in which our senses are affected by the outside world. The main reason why Hume is considered to have been the greatest skeptical philosopher ever was the brilliant way in which he demonstrated that our claims about the world, in the end, cannot be justified philosophically. According to Hume, all our meaningful propositions are either concerned with what he calls relations of ideas, or with matters of fact. They differ in the way we assess their voracity. All we have to do, in order to ascertain the truth of propositions regarding relations of ideas, is to look for the meaning of the ideas involved. Should I want to know whether the proposition, this bachelor is unmarried, is true. I don't need to know which particular man is referred to. I know the proposition is true, because I know what being a bachelor means. But should I want to know whether this bachelor is six feet tall, is true I need to know about which man we are talking. And how tall he actually is. So far so good, but next Hume went on to demonstrate that as far as propositions regarding matters affect our concern, they're all based on the principle of causality. As such this was hardly enough to move us. Aristotle had already argued that we can only claim to know something once we know it's cause. When do we know for instance what inflation is? Once we're able to identify it's causes. However, and here Hume was revolutionary, shouldn't we simply admit that causation itself cannot be perceived in any way? We don't see the movement of one billiard ball causing the movement of the ball it hits. All we see is first, that a ball is at rest, and next that it moves after it has been heat, post sed non propter. But our situations is even worse, as the principle of causality is it self based or an assumption that can not be demonstrated. For it assumes that like causes will always produce like effects. But how are we to know whether the causes of nature will not change? The fact is that we don't and we won't. All we do when we assume the regularity of nature is following a habit, a custom. According to Hume philosophy, inevitably led to complete skepticism. But this also he felt, should not worry us. For this insight is of little relevance to our daily lives, which should be guided by a moderate skepticism. Meanwhile, the large majority of Humes' contemporaries regarded him not only a skeptic, but an atheist as well. Rumors concerning his atheism prevented him from following an academic career, and were to follow him until his death in 1776. Three years after his death, Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion were published and soon it raised similar questions. Very similar questions and one provoked by Bayle's stance in the Dialogue's which he never dared to publish while he was alive. He more or less destroyed the well established argument from design for the existence of God. Ever since antiquity, philosophers have argued that since the world, the show traces of intelligent design. Its very existence seems to pre-suppose the existence of an intelligent architect. Hume, however, for instance pointed to the lack of proportion between say a house designed by an architect and the entire universe of which we inhabit a very tiny part indeed and a supposed architect of the universe. And yet Hume concluded his dialogues claiming that to be a philosophical skeptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential step towards being a sound, believing Christian. In Hume's case however, it was even more difficult to deny the anti-religious nature of his skepticism. A few of the facts that he also destroyed the traditional account of miracles and made mincemeat of the Doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul. It's hard to believe the greatest skeptical philosopher in the history of philosophy did not die an Atheist. We should like you to write at least one essay. So please write a 500 word essay on the question how convincing Hume's conclusion to the Dialogues actually is.
