Hume vs. Kant

Hume develops a view of religious belief by examining both its reasons and causes; that is, the justification for religious belief as well as its origins in human nature and society. The analysis of the reasons or arguments that support belief in God further subdivides into the appeal to revelation and rational argumentation. Reasons by way of argument according to Hume are a posteriori or cosmological arguments, which include the causal and design arguments. It is this aspect of Hume’s attack on religious belief that will be our focus; particularly, the design argument since Hume considers it “the chief or sole argument for a divine existence”.

Within the greater framework of his “mitigated scepticism”, Hume’s critique levels strong and sustained arguments against belief in God. But considering Hume’s apparently contradictory opinions on the status of belie

The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance; of human designs, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since, therefore, the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man, though possessed of much larger faculties, proportioned to the grandeur of the work which he has executed.

 Another powerful argument is Hume’s ‘new cosmogony’ which claims, a la Epicureans, that order and teleology may have occurred with the random formations of matter. This point, related to the first point, questions whether an explanation of order outside of the material world is needed if a possible explanation exists from within.

Like Hume, Kant is also famous for his criticism of the arguments for the existence of God. In line with empiricist epistemology, Kant maintains that “thoughts without content are empty”. Thus, he may agree with Hume in rejecting the possibility of inferring the existence of an infinite God from the finite features of the world that our concept of God supposedly transcends. However, Kant’s criticism takes a distinctly different route. Perhaps to his credit since, as Allen Wood argues, “theistic arguments cannot be dismissed simply by appealing in some vague way to an empiricist epistemology”. Wood claims Aquinas’ acceptance of reasoning from empirically derived principles to a first being is not obviously mistaken, contra Hume. Thus, having discussed Hume’s criticisms, we will examine Kant’s argument and compare which approach proves to be more enduring in light of such views.

Kant’s critique of the ontological argument claims that existence is not a real predicate since it adds nothing to the concept of a thing. That is, if I have a complete concept of God and then assert God is, I only “posit the object in reference to my concept”. For Kant, the error of the ontological argument lies in the view that all existential predicates are synthetic. Although the details of this assertion are beyond our scope, the fundamental distinction is between ‘logical’ and ‘real’ predicates. Anything can be a logical predicate, but “determination is a predicate that is added to the subject’s concept and increases it; hence it must not already be contained in that concept”. Kant claims that the ontological proof illegitimately ‘determines’ the existence of God when it actually only posits an object that corresponds to the subject-concept.

The other version appeals to the inexplicability of order in nature unless an intelligent designer imposed regularities on a presumed chaotic state of matter. There is question as to whether the move from order to orderer is based on analogy or some other tacitly stated premise(s). I argue this version, although a posteriori, does not rely on analogy; rather, it posits that existence of order requires an explanation according to a fundamental postulate of reason, i.e., the principle of sufficient reason. Although this principle is not made explicit in formulations of this version of the design argument, I argue it is this version and not the former that is closer to Hume’s statement of the nomological argument. Hume asks in the Enquiry if order or “such a glorious display of intelligence could proceed from the fortuitous concourse of atoms” , indicating that the existence of order requires explanation since the presumption is that matter naturally entails a chaotic state. This is certainly closer to the latter vers

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