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Notes less than the probability that either my senses have deceived me or the person recounting the
miraculous occurrence is lying or mistaken, all of which I have past experience of. For Hume, this
refusal to grant credence does not guarantee correctness – he offers the example of an Indian
Prince, who having grown up in a hot country refuses to believe that water has frozen. By Hume’s
lights this refusal is not wrong and the Prince is thinking correctly; it is presumably only when he
has had extensive experience of the freezing of water that he has warrant to believe that the event
could occur. So for Hume, either the miraculous event will become a recurrent event or else it will
never be rational to believe it occurred. The connection to religious belief is left inexplicit throughout,
save for the close of his discussion wherein Hume notes the reliance of Christianity upon testimony
of miraculous occurrences and makes an ironic remark that anyone who “is moved by faith to

assent” to revealed testimony “is aware of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts
all principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary
to custom and experience.”

Design Argument
Anthropic principle and Problem of evil One of the oldest and most popular arguments for the
existence of God is the design argument: that order and “purpose” in the world bespeaks a divine
origin. Hume gave a criticism of the design argument in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Firstly, Hume argued that for the design argument
to be feasible, it must be true that order and purpose are observed only when they result from
design. But order is often observed to result from presumably mindless processes like the generation
of snowflakes and crystals. Design can account for only a tiny part of our experience of order.
Second, that the design argument is based on an incomplete analogy: because of our experience
with objects, we can recognise human-designed ones, comparing for example a pile of stones and
a brick wall. But in order to point to a designed universe, we would need to have an experience of
a range of different universes. As we only experience one, the analogy cannot be applied.
Next, even if the design argument is completely successful, it could not in and of itself establish a
robust theism; one could easily reach the conclusion that the universe’s configuration is the result
of some morally ambiguous, possibly unintelligent agent or agents whose method bears only a
remote similarity to human design.
Furthermore, if a well-ordered natural world requires a special designer, then God’s mind (being
so well-ordered) also requires a special designer. And then this designer would likewise need a
designer, and so on ad infinitum. We could respond by resting content with an inexplicably self-
ordered divine mind; but then why not rest content with an inexplicably self-ordered natural
world?
Finally, Hume advanced a version of the Anthropic Principle. Often, where it appears that an
object has a particular feature in order to secure some goal, is in fact the result of a filtering
process. That is, the object wouldn’t be around did it not possess that feature, and the perceived
purpose is only interesting to us as a human projection of goals onto nature. This mechanical
explanation of teleology anticipated the notion of natural selection.

19.4 Political and Economic Theory

Political Theory
It is difficult to categorize Hume’s political affiliations. His thought contains elements that are, in
modern terms, both conservative and liberal, as well as ones that are both contractarian and
utilitarian, though these terms are all anachronistic. Thomas Jefferson banned Hume’s History
from the University of Virginia, fearing that it “has spread universal toryism over the land”. Yet,
Samuel Johnson thought Hume “a Tory by chance... for he has no principle. If he is anything, he

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