David Hume and Intelligent Design

David Hume, the famous Scottish philosopher and author that is often quoted in debates on whether or not miracles exist, atheism vs theism etc. had much to say on the issue of whether there was evidence of an Intelligent Designer behind the existence of the universe.

Hume stated, 

"Wherever I see Order, I infer from Experience that there, there hath been Design and Contrivance. And the same Principle which leads me into this Inference, when I contemplate a Building, regular and beautiful in its whole Frame and Structure; the same Principle obliges me to infer an infinitely perfect Architect, from the infinite Art and Contrivance which is display'd in the whole Fabrick of the Universe." (David Hume 1977, 120; A Letter From a Gentleman to His Friend in Edinburgh).

In the Introduction to his book The Natural History of Religion (1757), Hume stated:

"The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent Author; and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion."(Hume1956, 21).

In The Natural History of Religion (1757), Hume wrote:

"Were men led into the apprehension of invisible, intelligent Power by a contemplation of the works of nature, they could never possibly entertain any conception but of one single Being, who bestowed existence and order on this vast machine, and adjusted all its parts, according to one regular plan or connected system. …All things in the universe are evidently of a piece. Every thing is adjusted to everything. One design prevails throughout the whole. And this uniformity leads the mind to acknowledge one Author." (Hume 1956, 26).

"The order of the universe proves an omnipotent Mind." (Hume 1978; Treatise, 633n).

"Is there a system, an order, an economy of things, by which matter can preserve that perpetual agitation which seems essential to it, and yet maintain a constancy in the forms which it produces? There certainly is such an economy; for this is actually the case with the present world. The continual motion of matter, therefore, in less than infinite transpositions, must produce this economy or order; and by its very nature, that order, when once established, supports itself, for many ages, if not to eternity. But wherever matter is so poised, arranged, and adjusted, as to continue in perpetual motion, and yet preserve a constancy in the forms, its situation must, of necessity, have all the same appearance of art and contrivance which we observe at present."

Clearly Hume was a "designist".
He was definitely not an atheist by any means.

Thus, David Hume often cited by atheists and skeptics to prove that miracles do not exist, was not an atheist but an Intelligent Design promoter.  Today, he would be maligned, black-balled, ignored, mocked and dismissed outright by the whole atheist crowd.


Once again, this reveals how incompetent and foolish the so-called "New Atheists" really are.
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Hume, David.  The Natural History of Religion. Ed. H. E. Root. London: A. & C. Black, 1956.

Hume, David.  "A Letter From a Gentleman to His Friend in Edinburgh," in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.(1st ed. - London, 1748), 1977.

Hume, David.  A Treatise of Human Nature. Ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge; rev. edn. P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.

A Stable Universe - In Atheism or Theism?

In my last article I discussed the "God of the gaps" accusation levied against creationists and IDists.  A "refutation" that is common all across the scope of Darwinian influenced minds.

I showed that, in fact, it is the Darwinists that use "gap" arguments, or arguments from ignorance and not the designists at all.

Now at the end of that article I quoted professor Richard Lewontin on his absolute adherence to materialism in all things "scientific".

Here is the quote again, followed by my comments on the last sentence of it:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.”  – Richard Lewontin, 1997. Billions and billions of demons, The New York Review, p. 31, 9 January 1997 (review of Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark).- Dr. Richard Lewontin, Geneticist, Harvard University

Lewotin makes a perfectly foolish unthinking statement at the end when he says that appealing to an omnipotent deity allows that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured.  Really?

Lewontin fails to see that this is perfectly true for atheism, not theism!

Under atheism there are no absolutes, there is no absolute truth, so no one cannot even know anything for sure -including no scientists, such as Lewontin. Now if there are no absolutes THEN it would be true that we allow that the regularities of nature may change any & every moment. The laws may dissolve, mathematics is no longer certain, nothing remains! Nothing is certain under atheism's obligatory relativism. Nothing can be known as objectively true in atheism, including atheism itself! This is standard atheist dogma and if atheism were true, then they would be right in claiming this.

However, under theism, what is the reason that the regularities may be ruptured? The only possible reason would be the will of the deity.  But then why would an intelligent creator simply screw everything he made from one day to the next?  What reason would he have?

Moreover, even if he did, would mankind ever know it? Highly unlikely, well at least not for more than a few seconds. We would almost certainly disappear in some sort of total cosmic implosion if only 1 of the "fine tuning" constants were to be radically altered by the deity. And who would be left to give a damn for humanity?


In theism, we infer through multitudes of inferences and the very state of the cosmos,  that the intelligence of the creator is infinite (just look at what he made) and that his moral nature is the very foundation of all morality.

Worse, Lewontin's statement is in fact ludicrous, since we already have ample testimony that in fact the laws of the nature are universal, stable and constant since the beginning of all human history. Simply because we have something we call "science" and it works!

Now to prove how utterly asinine atheists can get on this specific point, lets read the "expert" atheist version; one that, if true, literally turns Lewontin's inane statement upside down:

"There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago." — Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind,1921, pp. 159- 60

Can you see that the truly unstable, unreliable, utterly mutable universe Lewontin imagines under a deity, is actually the highly probable state of nature if atheism were true and not at all if theism is true!?
Thank God it isn't!

Why else would Einstein consider that one of the most surprising attributes of nature to be that it is understandable?

"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility ... The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle"
-Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson, p. 462

Einstein was not an atheist by any means.
Thank God for that too.