Is the Bible the word of God ? Hume never retreats from the view stated in the first Enquiry that God (i.e., the cause of the world) is “a Being, so remote and incomprehensible, who bears much less analogy to any other being in the universe than the sun to a waxen taper, and who discovers himself only by some faint traces or outlines, beyond which we have no authority to ascribe to him any attribute or perfection” (EU, 11.27/146). This position is indistinguishable from the scepticism that Hume’s contemporaries associated with Hobbes’s perceived atheism. As Jesus revealed the contradiction in the Pharisees’ theology, He exposed a much bigger problem of how those who followed the Pharisees were experiencing the Pharisees’ devotion to God. Not only will it be hard to prove that there is more happiness than misery in the world, much more than this is needed to vindicate God’s moral attributes. For this reason, maybe it’s best we ignore this liberal contradiction, because, whisper it, there is an answer: colonialism.

No doubt his hope will be realised, as there is no secret that European Kiwis who make up the majority of the population have been rejecting institution religion for decades now. Unless all evil is essential or necessary the religious position will collapse. Hume’s point is not that the reality of evil proves that God cannot be both omnipotent and perfectly good but that we are in no position to claim that we know that God will “rectify” the evil of this world (e.g., its unjust distribution of good and evil) in a future state, since the evidence of this world does not support such a conjecture. It is clear that the theist is in no position to support this claim. More importantly, we are in no position to attribute perfection to God unless we observe perfection in his creation. The usual reply to this (echoing God’s answer to Job) is that we humans are in no position to tell whether there is any unnecessary evil in this world -for all we know, all the evil in this world is indeed necessary evil.

There is, however, a vast difference between these effects. This problem is, of course, most acute when it comes to the “reality of evil” that we observe in the world. The fundamental difficulty with Cleanthes’s example is, however, that it suggests a non-traditional, anthropomorphic conception of God’s nature that cannot be overcome other than by arbitrary stipulation. Immediately after this, however, Philo proceeds to reverse his reversal (i.e., he performs a double-reversal). Our experience is of a series of conjunctions (1,2,3) where there is a close resemblance within each species of objects (i.e., among Xs and among Ys). It follows that there is little or no basis for assuming that Z resembles something like Xs (i.e., human mind or intelligence). On the one hand, theists such as Cleanthes want to insist that the analogy between this world and human productions is not so slight and maintains, on this basis, that God in some significant degree resembles human intelligence (D, 3.7-8/154-5). The difficulty with this view, as we have seen, is that it leads to “a degradation of the supreme being” by way of an anthropomorphism which from the standpoint of traditional theism involves idolatry and is no better than atheism (D,2.15/146,3.12-3/156, 4.4-5/160, 5.11/168). On the other hand, if we follow mystics, such as Demea, we end up no better off than sceptics and atheists who claim that we know nothing of God’s nature and attributes and that everything about him is “unknown and unintelligible” (D, 4.1/158). Hume’s sceptical technique in the Dialogues, therefore, is to play one group of theists off against the other, showing that both their positions end up as nothing better or different from the atheism that they both claim to abhor.

Hume’s line of reasoning criticizing the argument from design presents theists with a basic and seemingly intractable dilemma in respect of their idea of God. The central thrust of Hume’s discussion of evil in the Dialogues is to show that this kind of theodicy fails. On the interpretation provided, it is clear that Hume’s critique of the argument from design is deep and radical. In the case of the design argument our inference has this form. In this case our experience of the constant conjunction of Xs/Ys enables us to draw the inference to Xn, the unobserved cause of Yn. Nor can we attribute unity to the original cause of the universe on the basis of any analogy to human artifacts such as houses; as they are often built by a number of people working together. That is to say, we cannot “ascribe to the cause any qualities, but what are exactly sufficient to produce them” (EU, 11.12-3/136; D, 5.8/168). If we follow this principle, however, we are no longer in a position to assign several fundamental attributes to God.