Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

From one of my lectures:

Hume’s “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” involve three fictional speakers named Philo, Demea, and Cleanthes. These three discuss natural theology, or what can be known about God and the world from reason apart from revealed religion.

Part 1 begins with Demea discussing his view of education. He says: “The method I follow in education of my children is based on the saying of an ancient: Students of philosophy ought first to learn logic, then ethics, next physics, last of all the nature of the gods. Because this science of natural theology is the most profound and abstruse of any, he held, students of it need mature judgments, and it can’t safely be entrusted to a mind that isn’t already enriched with all other sciences. . . my chief concern with my children is to bring piety into their minds while they are young. By continual teaching (and also by example, I hope), I imprint deeply on their young minds a habitual reverence for all the principles of religion. While they pass through every other branch of knowledge, I comment on the uncertainty of each branch, on the eternal controversies of men, on the obscurity of all philosophy, and on the strange, ridiculous conclusions that some of the greatest geniuses have derived from the principles of mere human reason.”

It is interesting that in the name of advancing religion and piety, Demea sees the need to deny that reason can know much of anything in the area of natural theology. He appeals to the reality of disagreements to say that philosophy has not given us any certainty. Is this a kind of fideism? Is fideism necessary for religion and piety? Is it true that reason and philosophy have not provided any certainty and does the reality of disagreements and pluralism prove this? What other explanations might there be for pluralism? Is it true that natural theology deals with the most complex subject or is it the most basic subject presupposed by all others?

Demea gives an order for learning: logic, ethics, physics, then the nature of the gods. What can be the explanation of this order? Is it empiricism which assumes that the senses gives knowledge of what is most immediate and so we start there? Does this follow the order of epistemology, then metaphysics, then ethics? What might an order look like that begins with the most basic beliefs and proceeds to the less basic?