David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume makes a statement that is particularly jarring, especially when it is compared to the ideas of other philosophers. He says “the idea of God, as meaning an infinitely intelligent, wise, and good Being, arises from reflecting on the operations of our own mind, and augmenting, without limit, those qualities of goodness and wisdom” (pg. 318). This is the first time, out of the philosophers read in Integral Seminar, that the concept that there is no God, and that God is a human creation, has been presented. Previous to reading Hume, it has been said that humans have ideas of goodness, and wisdom, and all other noble attributes because of the existence of God, and Hume declares the exact opposite, and supports this claim with his explanations of cause and effect. He shows that human beings can never know the power behind cause, and it is only through effects and experiences with those effects, that humans can begin to infer as to what the causes may be. And, to give further degrees of power or attributes to causes of which we know nothing of, in this case the cause of everything, i.e. God, is ridiculous (pg. 414).

There is a sense of discomfort in the idea of humans creating God rather than the opposite. That discomfort is only furthered by the further assumption that there is therefore no intelligent design to the universe, and there is then just some unknown, seemingly random cause that can never be understood. Even if the reader dies not believe in the existence of God, this is surprising in the sense that it veers so far off the course of previous