Enlightened Chains, pg. 9
unreasonable to say that much of his bitter attack against faith was due to the strength with which it was forced upon him.
The Church of Scotland returned this antipathy. They blocked Hume’s appointment to the Edinburgh Town Council in 1744, which resulted in Hume penning an exhaustive footnote against the clergy in his essay “Of National Characters” into Essays: Moral and Political. It was shortly after this that he published Enquiry and declared himself against all blind faith and the secular use of it. Most likely drawing on his own experience, he later wrote of the Christian religion being based on fanaticism and superstition.
The same strict Calvinistic doctrine also affected Adam Smith. The deterministic philosophy that denied free will actually can be seen as the “invisible hand” of capitalism. At its core is a Spinoza-like argument that what happens must be what God wants and that the true goal of human will should be to reconcile what happens with the desire for it to happen. After all, how great of a difference is it to say “God wills it” or “the market operates as if an invisible hand guides it”. It is a simple editorial effort to say “the market operates as if the invisible hand of God guides it”. (Perhaps this is why modern Christian conservatives find it so easy to back capitalism as inherently Christian.)
Smith and Hume can be seen as two possible responses of an intellectual to the strict Calvinistic society. One (Smith) subsumes the tenets of belief into theories of science (in economics) and the other (Hume) rebels against the insistence that one must simply lay back and accept life. Since Calvinist doctrine does not allow any middle ground, Hume becomes directly antagonistic to all forms of faith. Natural religion is an unacceptable, perhaps cowardly, response to an inability to thoroughly reject Calvinism.
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The Church of Scotland returned this antipathy. They blocked Hume’s appointment to the Edinburgh Town Council in 1744, which resulted in Hume penning an exhaustive footnote against the clergy in his essay “Of National Characters” into Essays: Moral and Political. It was shortly after this that he published Enquiry and declared himself against all blind faith and the secular use of it. Most likely drawing on his own experience, he later wrote of the Christian religion being based on fanaticism and superstition.
The same strict Calvinistic doctrine also affected Adam Smith. The deterministic philosophy that denied free will actually can be seen as the “invisible hand” of capitalism. At its core is a Spinoza-like argument that what happens must be what God wants and that the true goal of human will should be to reconcile what happens with the desire for it to happen. After all, how great of a difference is it to say “God wills it” or “the market operates as if an invisible hand guides it”. It is a simple editorial effort to say “the market operates as if the invisible hand of God guides it”. (Perhaps this is why modern Christian conservatives find it so easy to back capitalism as inherently Christian.)
Smith and Hume can be seen as two possible responses of an intellectual to the strict Calvinistic society. One (Smith) subsumes the tenets of belief into theories of science (in economics) and the other (Hume) rebels against the insistence that one must simply lay back and accept life. Since Calvinist doctrine does not allow any middle ground, Hume becomes directly antagonistic to all forms of faith. Natural religion is an unacceptable, perhaps cowardly, response to an inability to thoroughly reject Calvinism.
Next Page
© 2004 by Xpatriated Texan
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