David Hume’s, Georg Hegel’s and Karl Marx’s views on religion have all greatly impacted modern metaphysical theory. Hume believed all knowledge is ideas or impressions and that our minds are only a collection of our perceptions. He believed there is no knowledge other than that which is directly observable (via our sensory impressions), which is why he believed that God is only one idea in our minds. Therefore, God does not exist in reality. He believed that since we cannot use ration to verify substance of causal activity, then all we can do is infer based on a probability that is the product of our perceptions. Hegel believed reality was a dynamic process that evolved through dialectic not one of static ideals or absolutes. He maintained that every thesis has an inherent antithesis within it, and that the conflict between these results in a synthesis which again evolves a contradiction. Hegel believed that the conflict leads to the development of reason and freedom. Reason is what accounts for the stability of societies and for social change. Karl Marx was greatly influenced by Hegel’s dialectic, but he fashioned it into a dialectic materialism in the sense that he did not see the conflict leading to reason, freedom and social change. Instead, he felt that economics and the economic structure of a society are the basis of history and dictates all social, political and intellectual aspects of life (including religion, which he has called the ‘opiate of the masses’).
David Hume’s main contention is that the most common kind of human reasoning, inductive reasoning where we infer things from a series of vents, is not reasoning at all. Instead, he postulated that it was one of habit and expectation. Since we never really experience the phenomena of cause and effect, we can never know the relationship between them through reason. In this manner, we cannot reason that God exists merely because we think he does....