What ’ S True about Hume ’ S ‘ True Religion ’ ?

Despite his well-known criticisms of popular religion, Hume refers in seemingly complimentary terms to ‘true religion’; in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, his character Philo goes so far as to express ‘veneration for’ it. This paper addresses three questions. First, did Hume himself really approve of something that he called ‘true religion’? Second, what did he mean by calling it ‘true’? Third, what did he take it to be? By appeal to some of his key doctrines about causation and probability, and to some key features of the characters and content of the Dialogues, I argue, contrary to important recent interpretations by Immerwahr and Falkenstein, that Hume’s ‘true religion’ is a doctrine, enunciated by Philo, that he regarded as true in an epistemic sense. Key Terms: Hume, religion, God, probability, causation, analogy, design, intelligence Hume uses the term ‘true religion’ over twenty times in his writings. Most often, especially in his History of England, it refers simply to whatever the particular actors under discussion take to be the correct form of religion – as, for example, when Catholic plotters against the life of Elizabeth undertake, if necessary ‘to sacrifice their lives, in fulfilling a duty, so agreeable, as they imagined, to the will of God and to true religion’ (HE 4.41: 21) or when the Scottish General Assembly urges Mary ‘to renounce the blasphemous idolatry of the mass, with the tyranny of the Roman Antichrist; and to embrace the true religion of Christ Jesus’ The Journal of Scottish Philosophy 10.2 (2012): 199–220 DOI: 10.3366/jsp.2012.0038 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/jsp