Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion; CCWV.LIFE

In 1779, three years after his death, David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion appear. Philo, Cleanthes, and Demea argue the design argument to its foundations, and Philo's skepticism leaves natural religion with, at most, a faint and ambiguous assent. Hume, who had held the book back all his life, becomes in it deism's most dangerous critic from within its own method.

Tagged: Deism

The Event

Date: 1779 (exact)
Era: The Revolutionary Age; Standard periodization of deist history
Location: Edinburgh; today Edinburgh, Scotland
Traditions: Deism
Streams: Deism
Key figures: David Hume
Key texts: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Connections

Illustration for Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation

History Event Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation 1730 subjects the religion of nature itself to the method the deists prized

Primary Sources

Hume, David. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. London, 1779.

Secondary Sources

Barnett, S. J. The Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.
Byrne, Peter. Natural Religion and the Nature of Religion: The Legacy of Deism. London: Routledge, 1989.
Walters, Kerry S. The American Deists: Voices of Reason and Dissent in the Early Republic. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992.

Provenance: HIST-1367; confidence 0.95; accessed 2026-10-30.