Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion

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Recommended by Anthony Gottlieb, Julian Baggini, Mary Warnock, and 4 others. See all reviews
David Hume is the greatest and also one of the most provocative philosophers to have written in the English language. No philosopher is more important for his careful, critical, and deeply perceptive examination of the grounds for belief in divine powers and for his sceptical accounts of the causes and consequences of religious belief, expressed most powerfully in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion. The Dialogues ask if belief in God can be inferred from the nature of the universe or whether it is even consistent with what we know about the universe.... more
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We've comprehensively compiled reviews of Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion from the world's leading experts.

Anthony Gottlieb His friends urged him not only to give up the idea of having it published in his lifetime, but even of having it published after his death, because they thought that it would condemn all this other works to the dustbin of history. (Source)

Julian Baggini Hume is the main man. (Source)

Mary Warnock Hume thought it didn’t actually make much difference whether you believed that God did design the universe or whether you didn’t, because if you could say nothing about this God then it wasn’t a very interesting belief to hold. (Source)

Simon Blackburn Part of the beauty of the Dialogues — and one thing that makes it a very funny book apart from anything else — is that Hume gives us two spokesmen for religious belief. (Source)

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