okay so we're going to continue looking at hume's skepticism so Hume is an empiricist philosopher who once again he uses these two criteria to um evaluate the rationality of a number of core beliefs that people have the two criteria once again are a relation of idea and a matter of fact a Rel of idea is any particular belief that is true by definition so that will refer to let's say beliefs about mathematics the laws of logic and any kind of statement that is simply True by definition like for instance that a triangle uh sorry that a triangle are the angles of of a triangle equal to 180° um okay so uh Hume sort of says that that is basically True by the way we Define things okay uh the other uh Criterion is what he refers to as matters of fact so matters of fact refer to things that you can verify by experience so in the previous video I looked at how hum uses that sort of like d two-fold criteria to uh analyze uh beliefs about morality and we saw there that he so like changes completely uh the ra the foundations of what it means of morality basically uh then we also saw his skepticism concerning the traditional view or the traditional belief on the self uh he was very skeptical about that maintained that you couldn't really rationally justify that particular idea so in this video I'm going to be looking at two more areas where Hume um demonstrates his skepticism okay so as you can see there one of those is the belief in Miracles so uh Miracles are of course very important for many of the world's religions during the time of David Hume um usually the religion that tended to be a uh the more dominant religion in his uh where he lived Scot Scotland um would have been Christianity and as you know the Christian belief has claims to a number of Miracles like for example the claim that uh obviously the Jesus did uh powerful healings um like he caused someone who was paralyzed to walk uh then you also have the what's what Christians usually consider to be the miracle that confirms the truthfulness of Christianity which is the miracle of the Resurrection right so Christians you believe that Jesus died on the cross and that on the third day that he rose again bodily that is he came to life and he rose again from the grave and now he's alive and so that sort of confirms everything that Jesus said about himself namely that he was the Messiah uh he was the savior of the world and so forth okay so with that in mind and and once again uh I'm just using Christianity as a point of illustration I could have used um uh Islam as an example or or some other world religion where they also incorporate Miracles all right so what does Hume say about miracles um hum is going to argue that you can't really prove the rationality of Miracles why um number one Miracles are a violation of the natural law the only thing that we experience in the world is um that things in the world seem to take place according to the laws of nature and so a miracle by definition is sort of a suspension of one of those laws of n nature now the criticism of Hume that he has towards Miracles is very interesting because he doesn't really say that a miracle is impossible so that's not what he's saying in other words Hume does not claim that the belief in Miracles is not a rational belief because it's impossible for there to be a miracle so he's not really saying that his point is that I am never justified in my beliefs that a miracle has actually occurred okay why is that well because according to David Hume since a miracle is usually um Associated or understood to be a violation of the law of nature he maintains that our overall experience will lead to distrust any supposed sense experience of a miraculous event what does that mean well what that means is that let's say for the sake of argument that someone claims that a miracle happens right well hum is not saying that the miracle is impossible maybe it did happen I don't know in as far as logical possibilities it could have happened but Miracle uh Hume basically maintains that as far as the rationality of that belief right so am I justified in believing that this miracle actually happened human maintains that um given the uniformity of Human Experience with resp with respect to the existence of these things called Miracles according to Hume it is much more probable that I am mistaken when I say that a particular event is a miracle so it is much more probable given the uniformity of Human Experience concerning this matter it is much more prob that I am mistaken than the opposite conclusion that a miracle actually took place uh so Hume basically uh is going to maintain that we are never really justified in believing that a miracle actually took place even if let's say for the sake of argument it actually did happen uh we just are not able to have knowledge of that event why once again because the uniformity of Human Experience seems to go against it so it is much more probable that that there's some other explanation as to why that thing occurred then the explanation which maintains that it was a miracle okay so anyway so that's his criticism there um and then Hume sort of turns his attention to the belief in cause and effect so this is going to be the fourth and Final example of um core beliefs that uh people had during the time of Hume and his skepticism towards those beliefs okay so a couple of quick things sort of as a way of introducing this this idea of cause and effect because it's an important one so as you know the belief in cause and effect was something that was very important to science especially during the time of David Hume when people realize that nature seems to operate on the basis of of cause and effect so um so this is going to be a foundational belief to uh to the the entire Enterprise of scientific understanding and other areas as well okay so the traditional view concerning the law of cause and effect is that if a is the cause of be then you have what's called a necessary connection between the cause cause and the effect okay so that's important to realize because that was sort of like the traditional way of understanding it and Hume is now going to obviously demonstrate uh a level of skepticism towards that way of thinking so once again right if a is the cause of B then whenever a happens then B will necessarily follow so for instance if a person is infected with What's called the Rhino virus then that person will develop a cold right so given the cause you have the effect okay so that's the basic traditional belief in cause and effect all right so what is hume's problem with this once again Hume sort of says all right is there anything can we verify that through sense experience okay so that's going to be his question can the belief in cause and effect bet tray faed back to some kind of uh impression that comes from sense experience that confirms that particular belief and this is where he's going to maintain that no he's going to argue that when we look at experience we don't really see a necessary connection between a cause and its effect the only thing that you can actually prove through experience is that you see this constant pattern it's a pattern of one thing that's being followed by another but the fact that one thing always follows another or let's put it this way the fact that one event follows another event that is not the same thing as a necessary connection so uh to give you an illustration of his point here uh let's say for the sake of argument that you have uh you know you have a pool table with a bunch of bliard balls and then you take the one ball right the white ball and you hit it you strike it and it makes all of the other balls move on the table okay so you've seen that happen a bunch of times right um so does that does it follow necessarily that the same thing is going to happen the next time um well human's going to say no right there's no necessary connection between those two things just because it has happened a thousand times it doesn't mean that the next time that it's necessary Al going to follow uh but yet somehow we think that it does right so we think that number three and obviously if you're looking at the diagram we think that the next time that I strike the ball um or that the next time that that I strike the white ball that all the other balls will move so why do we conclude three will follow necessarily from one one and two um according to Hume the reason for that is because we assume a basic belief and what is that basic belief we assume What's called the uniformity of nature that is we assume that the future will be like the past if this has happened a hundred times a thousand times in the past whenever something similar presents itself in the future it's also going to happen in the future as well so um to summarize the idea here hum is going to maintain that our belief in cause and effect is really based on the prior belief in What's called the uniformity of nature that is that nature operates in sort of like a regular patterns right that um that it doesn't operate in a chaotic fashion so who maintains that my belief in cause and effect is based on my prior belief in the uniformity of Nature and why do I believe that well I believe that because it's based on habit and custom but habit and Custom is very different from rationality and so hum going to maintain that the foundation of the belief and cause and effect is really something that doesn't have a rational basis so we believe it fundamentally on the basis of tradition or on the basis of habit and custom does that mean that we should give up that particular belief not really according to David Hume uh but his point is that there are certain important fundamental beliefs that we have as human beings like the belief in cause and effect that really at the end of the day you can't prove that they're rational uh you just assume that they are but you can't really prove or establish in a in a in a you know in a convincing manner that that particular belief is a rational belief okay um so this is an example once again of hume's skepticism okay all right so Hume is a very interesting philosopher and purist philosopher very skeptical about a number of things and we saw in these um brief videos how his skepticism challenged at least four major areas of belief belief IM morality uh the traditional belief in the self uh the belief in the um probability or justification of Miracles and also the belief in cause and effect fact the next philosopher is going to try to address Hume and answer and give a response to his skepticism thank you