Section XI of Hume’s “Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,” is entitled “Of a Providence and of a Future State.” A literary device puts the argument in the mouth of a friend who has been invited by one referred to in the first person to imagine himself making a speech for Epicurus before an audience of enlightened Athenians. Accepting the challenge the friend opens his apology as follows: “The religious philosophers [O, ye Athenians], not satisfied with the tradition of your forefathers and doctrine of your priests (in which I willingly acquiesce) indulge a rash curiosity in trying how far they can establish religion on the principles of reason; and they thereby excite, instead of satisfying, the doubts which naturally arise from a diligent and scrutinous enquiry. They paint in the most magnificent colors the order, beauty and wise arrangement of the universe; and then ask, if such a glorious display of intelligence could proceed from the fortuitous concourse of atoms, or if chance could produce what the greatest genius can never sufficiently admire. I shall not examine the justness of this argument. I shall allow it to be as solid as my antagonists and accusers can desire. It is sufficient if I can prove, from this very reasoning, that the question is entirely speculative and that when I deny a providence and a future state, I undermine not the foundations of society, but advance principles which they themselves, upon their own topics, if they argue consistently, must allow to be solid and satisfactory. “You then, who are my accusers, have acknowledged that their chief or sole argument for a divine existence is derived from the order of nature.... From the order of the work you infer that there must have been project and forethought in the workman.” Now, “if the cause be known only by the effect, we never ought to ascribe to it any qualities beyond what are precisely requisite to produce the effect.... No one, merely from the sight of one of Zeuxis’s pictures, could know that he was also a statuary or architect.... “Allowing, therefore, the gods to be authors of the existence or order of the universe, it follows that they posses that precise degree of power, intelligence and benevolence which appears in their workmanship.... The supposition of farther attributes is mere hypothesis; much more the supposition that in distant regions of space or periods of time there has been or will be a more magnificent display of these attributes and a scheme of administration more suitable to such imaginary virtues.... Let your gods, therefore, O philosophers, be suited to the present appearances of nature, and presume not to alter these appearances by arbitrary suppositions in order to suit them to attributes which you so fondly ascribe to your deities.” And the pleader proceeds to show that it is as useless to practice as unsupported by reason, to supplement the order of things we know by another for which there is no evidence.