"Hume went on to allege other obstacles to Christian belief: the calm neutrality of nature as between man and his rivals on the earth; the prolific variety of evils in life and history; the apparent responsibility of God for Adam’s sin, and for all sins, in a world where by Christian hypothesis nothing can happen without God’s consent. To avoid the charge of atheism, Hume put into the mouth of “a friend who loves skeptical paradoxes,” and whose principles “I can by no means approve,” a defense of Epicurus’ fancy that the gods exist, but pay no attention to mankind. The friend wonders why there cannot be an agreement between religion and philosophy not to molest each other, as he supposes there was in Hellenistic civilization:"
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"After the first alarm was over, which arose from the new paradoxes and principles of the philosophers, these teachers seem ever after, during the ages of antiquity, to have lived in great harmony with the established superstition, and to have made a fair partition of mankind between them: the former claiming all the learned and wise, the latter possessing all the vulgar and illiterate." What a way to offer a truce! (Ch IV, Sec V)
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The Story of Civilization
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