Letter: No faith in theory that Hume believed in God

IT APPEARS from Michael Fry's article (Perspective, 16 July) on the upcoming David Hume conference in Edinburgh that there will be some present who are anxious to represent him as someone who really did believe in God after all, despite the evidence to the contrary.

Similar representations over Einstein's alleged belief in God can be found all over the internet, most of which rely on misrepresenting his "God does not play dice" remark.

Perhaps Hume will be lined up for a posthumous award of the Templeton Prize, a cash bonus on offer to the small minority of eminent scientists who manage to square their commitment to the scientific method with belief in ancient creeds and holy books as an alternative route to truth.

Some of these masters of Orwell's double-think - the ability to hold two contradictory propositions at the same time - may be found among the creationists, who manage at one and the same time to accept the evidence of the rocks, the bones and the fossils, not to mention carbon dating, but also accept the Ussher chronology that the world was created on Sunday, 23 October, 4004 BC, around the time fully evolved humans domesticated the dog.

Fry quotes David Fergusson of New College Edinburgh, who will speak at the conference, as saying that the "new atheists" (who were the old ones? The respectfully, or fearfully silent ones?) would not have impressed Hume with "their dogmatic certainties and shrill opposition to religion".

Dogma and dogmatic certainty is, and always has been, the province of organised religion, and the opposition of its multiple creeds and cults has not been confined to atheists, but to co-believers, if they did not accept their particular interpretation of the mind of the deity or their holy books.

This opposition has been more than shrill, it has been brutal, bloody and accompanied by the pogrom, the scaffold, the stake, the bullet and the auto-da-f.

Our tortured world today is bedevilled by religious bigotry and dogma - we have it again on the streets of Belfast, in sectarian football support, in Palestine, in Iraq, in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Hume demonstrated formidable intellectual courage in exploring the great questions, but he also displayed a very necessary prudence in the climate of 18th century Edinburgh and Scotland, not yet free of its dogmatic certainties and opposition to anything that challenged that religious dogma. He certainly would not have been nominated for the Templeton Prize, had it existed during his lifetime.

PETER CURRAN

Main Street

Kirkliston, West Lothian