There are several reasons for undertaking a comparison of Lonergan and Hume. It is my intention to move the discussion on to the realm of philosophy of religion and as the author of the most powerful critique of religion ever written in English, Hume lays strong claims for inclusion. It will, I trust, be interesting to see how Lonergan’s argument for the existence of God copes with Hume’s famous objections and to see further how a Lonerganian response might be fashioned to meet the various facets of Hume’s critique.

But before going on to philosophy of religion it will be necessary and profitable to compare and contrast the epistemologies of the two philosophers since these underpin and are presupposed by their respective positions on religious belief. Besides, there is a growing awareness today that the dispute about religious belief is at heart a dispute about rival conceptions of human rationality. It is surely significant that philosophy of religion, as a subject, dates back to the rise of empiricism. Before then there had been, to be sure, disputes, frequently acrimonious, over interpretations of religious doctrines and so forth, but it was not until then that men were affected by a profound unease surrounding religion as a phenomenon. For the first time since the classical age the legitimacy of religious belief of any kind was called in question. From the vantage-point of the twentieth century it is becoming increasingly clear that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the importation into philosophy of what was believed to be the method of science, there arose a new and revolutionary conception of human rationality that rendered religious belief problematic.