David Hume on Cause and Effect

[1holycatholic]

I caught an interesting comment by Scott Hahn on the EWTN program Reasons to Believe regarding David Hume. This isn’t verbatim, but sums up the comment:
David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion attempts to disprove cause and effect. Ironically, Hume employs cause and effect to disprove cause and effect.
:doh2: That’s going to leave a mark.

 

[Detales]

Cause and effect can easily be dimissed by understanding God as ALL. Since God is ALL, cause and effect are the same, united in BEing and AMing. God said so. This eliminates argumentation about the necessity of a first cause. There never “was.” There is only IS, mistaken for cause and effect by asociation of Identity with limits.

 

[o_mlly]

I caught an interesting comment by Scott Hahn on the EWTN program Reasons to Believe regarding David Hume. This isn’t verbatim, but sums up the comment:
David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion attempts to disprove cause and effect. Ironically, Hume employs cause and effect to disprove cause and effect.
:doh2: That’s going to leave a mark.

Hahn uses the standard argument against the extreme skeptic which Hume was in the 18th century or the postmodern thinker is in the 21st: If you argue that we cannot know the truth about anything, then how do you know that that is true?

Peace,
O’Malley

 

[tjm190]

David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion attempts to disprove cause and effect. Ironically, Hume employs cause and effect to disprove cause and effect.

if you use a concept to disprove that very concept, you’ve shown that concept to be self contradictory. It’s a valid method

 

[Prodigal_Son]

if you use a concept to disprove that very concept, you’ve shown that concept to be self contradictory. It’s a valid method

That’s not what Hume did. He didn’t hypothesize cause and effect, and then prove that it leads to an absurdity. Although, unless Hahn (or someone more proximal) explains it to me, I’m not sure how he “used cause and effect” to make his point, at all.

 

[1holycatholic]

Hahn uses the standard argument against the extreme skeptic which Hume was in the 18th century or the postmodern thinker is in the 21st: If you argue that we cannot know the truth about anything, then how do you know that that is true?

Peace,
O’Malley

A couple of dictionary definitions (from the built in dictionary on my computer) and a quote from Peter Kreeft might be helpful understanding the error in Hume’s argument.

argument:
a reason or set of reasons given with the aim of persuading others that an action or idea is right or wrong

persuade
• trans. ] cause (someone) to believe something, esp. after a sustained effort; convince : they must often be persuaded of the potential severity of their drinking problems | trans. ] he did everything he could to

cause:
“A cause is the sine qua non for an effect: if no cause, no effect.”

• Peter Kreeft

 

[1holycatholic]

Cause and effect can easily be dimissed by understanding God as ALL. Since God is ALL, cause and effect are the same, united in BEing and AMing. God said so. This eliminates argumentation about the necessity of a first cause. There never “was.” There is only IS, mistaken for cause and effect by asociation of Identity with limits.

That doesn’t make any sense at all.

 

[DavidHume]

When Hume wrote the word “cause” he meant something rather different than what Aquinas and Aristotle meant when they wrote the word “cause.”

Furthermore, Hume’s argument was not intended to deny the existence of cause and effect, only to deny that the principle of cause and effect can be proven logically or demonstrated empirically.

“Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” is also surely the wrong citation – either you misheard or Hahn is mistaken. “An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding” is where Hume addresses cause and effect.

Suppose a person, though endowed with the strongest faculties of reason and reflection, to be brought on a sudden into this world; he would, indeed, immediately observe a continual succession of objects, and one event following another; but he would not be able to discover anything farther. He would not, at first, by any reasoning, be able to reach the idea of cause and effect; since the particular powers, by which all natural operations are performed, never appear to the senses; nor is it reasonable to conclude, merely because one event, in one instance, precedes another, that therefore the one is the cause, the other the effect. Their conjunction may be arbitrary and casual. There may be no reason to infer the existence of one from the appearance of the other. And in a word, such a person, without more experience, could never employ his conjecture or reasoning concerning any matter of fact, or be assured of anything beyond what was immediately present to his memory and senses.

Suppose, again, that he has acquired more experience, and has lived so long in the world as to have observed familiar objects or events to be constantly conjoined together; what is the consequence of this experience? He immediately infers the existence of one object from the appearance of the other. Yet he has not, by all his experience, acquired any idea or knowledge of the secret power by which the one object produces the other; nor is it, by any process of reasoning, he is engaged to draw this inference. But still he finds himself determined to draw it: And though he should be convinced that his understanding has no part in the operation, he would nevertheless continue in the same course of thinking. There is some other principle which determines him to form such a conclusion.

This principle is Custom or Habit…

 

[o_mlly]

When Hume wrote the word “cause” he meant something rather different than what Aquinas and Aristotle meant when they wrote the word “cause.”

Furthermore, Hume’s argument was not intended to deny the existence of cause and effect, only to deny that the principle of cause and effect can be proven logically or demonstrated empirically.

“Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” is also surely the wrong citation – either you misheard or Hahn is mistaken. “An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding” is where Hume addresses cause and effect. … This principle is Custom or Habit…

I think the principle would be better termed “common sense” which is why philosphers see little to be gained in having discourse with extreme skeptics. Hume denies common sense in the discovery of cause and effect but uses common sense to refute claims that go beyond sense data; to wit, “Our evidence, then, for the truth of the Christian religion is less than the evidence for the truth of our senses …” Dave, you can’t have it both ways!

Peace,
O’Malley

 

[1holycatholic]

“Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” is also surely the wrong citation – either you misheard or Hahn is mistaken. “An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding” is where Hume addresses cause and effect.

Hume most certainly addresses cause and effect in “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.”

 

[DavidHume]

I think the principle would be better termed “common sense” which is why philosphers see little to be gained in having discourse with extreme skeptics. Hume denies common sense in the discovery of cause and effect but uses common sense to refute claims that go beyond sense data; to wit, “Our evidence, then, for the truth of the Christian religion is less than the evidence for the truth of our senses …” Dave, you can’t have it both ways!

Peace,
O’Malley

On the contrary-- Hume argued that common sense was all we had to justify belief in cause and effect. This standard was far below the standards of metaphysical ratiocination common among the forgotten philosophers of the time.

Hume was a skeptical philosopher but a quite practical man.

 

[DavidHume]

Hume most certainly addresses cause and effect in “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.”

Those are dialogues about an unrelated topic, none of the fictional participants representing Hume’s actual views on the matter. This is obvious when one grasps that all participants in the Dialogues are theists, whereas Hume himself was a well-known atheist.

To understand Hume’s views on the matter of cause and effect, one should consult Hume’s exploration of the topic – which is the Enquiry.

Do you have any substantive critique of the content of the Enquiry, or are you just repeating things you hear on TV?

 

[1holycatholic]

Do you have any substantive critique of the content of the Enquiry, or are you just repeating things you hear on TV?

I did not offer a critique on An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding.

 

[DavidHume]

I did not offer a critique on An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding.

True, you offered a summary of something you heard secondhand about irrelevant material, something secondhand that turned out to be false. Oh well.

 

[1holycatholic]

True, you offered a summary of something you heard secondhand about irrelevant material, something secondhand that turned out to be false. Oh well.

No, I did not. I’ve read Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and Hahn’s comments are exactly on the mark.

Hume has to attack efficient causality, because it’s his only possible means to undermine the argument from first cause. If Hume’s failed attack on causality actually had any merit it would completely undermine the scientific method. Even Kant recognized Hume’s error as it awoke him from his “dogmatic slumbers.”

 

[Prodigal_Son]

If Hume’s failed attack on causality actually had any merit it would completely undermine the scientific method.

I don’t contest the other things you’re saying, but…

In Enquiry, one of the major goals is to call into question the scientific method – or rather, to show that nothing the scientific method ever discovers can be pure knowledge. Hume says that no amount of observation can ever prove a scientific law.

 

[James_S_Saint]

Hume did not “use cause and effect to dismiss cause and effect”. He attempted to use logic to dismiss “first cause”.

Cause == That which brings effect.
Effect == That which is brought by cause.

This is not an “argument”, but a declaration of definitions.

Hume along with almost all philosophers and logicians of his time were burdened with a corruption of rationale brought about by the politics of the time.

The number of errors displayed by philosophers of Hume’s time possibly out number those of today. All of it could easily be straightened out by merely maintaining definitions of the words being used.

In Hume’s statement, he declares that God == ALL (== Reality). From this is presumed that “ALL” cannot have components; within ALL, there can be no partials (ie; past and present). This is paramount to saying that Reality is ALL and thus fathers and sons are not real, because they are not ALL.

But there is a problem with defining God as ALL. ALL changes its state. ALL is not the same from day to day, else there would be no time. If there were indeed no time, then indeed there would be no “first cause”. But time is one of the many concepts that philosophers of that day had trouble comprehending (time == the measure of relative change).

I believe Scriptures state that the Biblical God does NOT change. This leads to the conclusion that God cannot be defined as “ALL”. So one must ask to which “God” Hume was referring.

The intended meaning of “first cause” is also skewed from its origin. In Science terms (substantially different than ancient Scriptural terms for the same words), Reality can have no beginning and has existed for an infinite length of time as it must continue to do so. Time, like the other “dimensions” is infinite in both directions.

I find the number of errors involved in such sociopolitical thinking to be over-burdensome to bother to correct. Holding up Hume as a great philosopher is about like holding up Data as a Prophet for the Federation of Planets.

Although “the show must go on”, the audience must not forget that it is merely a show for the public eye (the bad guy is supposed to make obvious mistakes). If you cannot think for yourself (needing no historical references), I would advise not trying to argue the fallacies of others.

 

[DavidHume]

Hume has to attack efficient causality, because it’s his only possible means to undermine the argument from first cause.

I think you mistake Hume’s intent. His philosophical life was not consumed by the quest to disprove Thomistic arguments.

If Hume’s failed attack on causality actually had any merit it would completely undermine the scientific method. Even Kant recognized Hume’s error as it awoke him from his “dogmatic slumbers.”

So what’s your substantive criticism of Hume again? What is his error? You’re still just making insinuations and half-researched references. (The introduction to Prolegomena? Really? That’s all you have?)

To say that something cannot be proven, and cannot be used as a premise in proofs purported to be irrefutable, is not the same as to say it is false. You would think that this forum above all would be sensitive to that.

 

[1holycatholic]

I don’t contest the other things you’re saying, but…

In Enquiry, one of the major goals is to call into question the scientific method – or rather, to show that nothing the scientific method ever discovers can be pure knowledge. Hume says that no amount of observation can ever prove a scientific law.

I wasn’t specifically commenting on Enquiry.

The scientific method presupposes a rational and orderly universe which presupposes the existence of God known by human reason through natural theology. The scientific method (which has its limits) has it’s foundations in Christianity (see Bishop Robert Grosseteste) and did not emerge from the east, or even Islam because they do not hold the same belief of a rational and orderly

It’s no surprise that Hume would seek to undermine its foundation. I am surprised that Hume would also deny the possibility of miracles since a miracle is a violation of natural/scientific laws. How can Hume claim that the violation of a law is not possible without the absolute knowledge he claims is necessary in order to establish the law in the first place?

 

[Prodigal_Son]

It’s no surprise that Hume would seek to undermine its foundation. I am surprised that Hume would also deny the possibility of miracles since a miracle is a violation of natural/scientific laws. How can Hume claim that the violation of a law is not possible without the absolute knowledge he claims is necessary in order to establish the law in the first place?

Good point. As far as I can recall, his position is rather contradictory. It amounts to one of two things, I’m not sure which:

1. A miracle is a violation of a law of nature, but a law of nature would not be a law if there were a single instance of a miracle. Thus, there are no miracles.
2. Nature=all there is. If nature is all there is, then an action cannot be supernatural; it is simply an action within nature.

Both of these are word games, not arguments. There is no possible *argument *against miracles, although one can certainly claim that many (perhaps even all) individual testimonies of a miracle are unreliable.