On Hume's experimental atheism
pp. 123-141
in: Maria C. Galavotti, Alessandro Pagnini (eds), Experience, reality, and scientific explanation, Berlin, Springer, 1999Abstract
Perhaps few people remember that Wes Salmon's first publication — which is to be traced back to the year 1951 — deals with the Design Argument of God's existence.1 At that time Salmon was Instructor in Philosophy at UCLA, where he was lecturing on the Philosophy of Religion and where he had become a fond reader of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. This 1951 essay was afterwards revised and substantially modified by Salmon, in 1978, on the occasion of the bicentenary of Hume's death, and was subsequently published in Philosophical Studies with a commentary by Nancy Cartwright.2 In 1979, in the same periodical, there appeared a reply by Salmon himself to Cartwright, bearing the title "Experimental Atheism".3
