10 It should be noted, however, that even
if Mossner and Livingston have captured Hume's views, it is
difficult to see how this could qualify as a religion by 18th
century standards, and it is hard to believe that Hume would want
to classify it as such. Finally, for James Noxon, Hume is simply
an agnostic (as opposed to an atheist):
no one of the characters in the Dialogues... speaks
consistently for Hume. Every attempt to identify Hume's
spokesman could be forestalled by quoting lines given to
that speaker which were inconsistent with statements
published elsewhere under Hume's own name.11
Insofar as no one of the characters speaks consistently for Hume,
Noxon argues that this expresses Hume's view about the limits of
human understanding and, consequently, indicates that Hume is an
agnostic.
Most of the above contemporary debate about Hume's views
traces back to three sources. First, in Hume's Natural History of
Religion, in no less than nine passages Hume seems to defend the
design argument for God's existence. Second, in several of Hume's
above quoted letters (to Gilbert Elliot and William Strahan) Hume
appears sympathetic to Cleanthes' position. Third, in the
concluding section of the Dialogues Hume seems to endorse the
design argument: Cleanthes, the defender of natural religion,
wins the debate, and Philo, the religious skeptic, eventually
concedes that "the cause or causes of order in the universe
probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence.
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