In his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion Hume points out that “if everything in the universe be conducted by
general laws, and if animals be rendered susceptible of pain, it scarcely seems possible but some ill must arise in the various shocks of matter, and the various concurrence and opposition of
general laws…”
gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=1456362&pageno=51
In other words it is precisely because there are
laws of nature that there is physical evil in the universe. They are essential for life but they also cause suffering and death:
“On the concurrence, then, of these four circumstances, does all or the
greatest part of natural evil depend. Were all living creatures incapable
of pain, or were the world administered by particular volitions, evil
never could have found access into the universe…”
By “particular volitions” Hume means divine fiats or direct commands by God instead of **general laws **which are blind and blundering in their inability to distinguish the different needs of individuals in different circumstances. They are like steamrollers which crush anything that happens to be in their path:
“Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated
and
organised, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety
and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living
existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive
to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How
contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but
the idea of
a blind Nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle,
and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her
maimed and abortive children!”
Hume’s view of nature here is clearly unbalanced when it is contrasted with his acknowledgement of the evidence for Design:
“
A purpose, an intention, a design, strikes everywhere the most careless, the most stupid thinker; and no man can be so hardened in absurd systems, as at all times to reject it… The same thing is observable in other parts of philosophy: And thus all the sciences almost lead us insensibly to acknowledge a first intelligent Author; and their authority is often so much the greater, as they do not directly profess that intention.”
The flaw in Hume’s view of the universe is his assumption that there is a preponderance of evil in nature - which is disproved by the fact that the vast majority of living beings are not diseased or deformed. There is conflict but there is also co-operation in nature. If harmony were not fundamental life would have become extinct rather than have survived for billions of years!
).
