I am currently reading Hume's essay "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding", and a passage where Hume details a skeptical approach to history and custom provoked a question.

He writes:

"A man, who should find in a desert country the remains of pompous buildings, would conclude, that the country had, in ancient times, been cultivated by civilized inhabitants; but did nothing of this nature occur to him, he could never form such an inference. We learn the events of former ages from history; but then we must peruse the volumes, in which this instruction is contained, and thence carry up our inferences from one testimony to another, till we arrive at the eye-witnesses and spectators of these distant events. In a word, if we proceed not upon some fact, present to the memory or senses, our reasonings would be merely hypothetical; and however the particular links might be connected with each other, the whole chain of inferences would have nothing to support it, nor could we ever, by its means, arrive at the knowledge of any real existence. If I ask, why you believe any particular matter of fact, connected with it. But as you cannot proceed after this manner, in infinitum, you must at last terminate in some fact, which is present to your memory or senses; or must allow that your belief is entirely without foundation."


The belief of knowledge is derived from the foundation of "memory or senses" and it is by our "memory and senses" that we hypothesize a causal relationship between human life and the building of buildings (employing Hume's example). Thus, without the presence of human beings building buildings in our "memory or senses", the relationship might never occur to us. With out the aid of our "memory and senses" we would be as likely to conclude that buildings are the product of blowing your nose or any other type of random and seemingly absurd explanation.

With that in mind, answer the following question:

Is it possible that we are not capable of recognizing artifacts of beings past because we are not acquainted with the nature of their creative operations? For example, and I here employ Hume's argument to infer the existence of God, If God is a being past whose actions set in motion the causal relationships that resulted in the creation of our existence, then it is entirely plausible that we do not recognize that "matter of fact" because it is not found within our own "memory and/or senses", nor the "memory and/or senses" of the human beings of history. We have never witnessed God creating existence; therefore it is not found in our own "memory or senses"; therefore, just as we would not infer the existence of human beings from the presence of buildings, were such a causal relationship not present in our "memory and/or senses", we can not see the causal relationship of God and the creation of our existence because it is not present in our own "memory and/or senses".

I would appreciate your thoughts on this. This line of argumentation seems eerily close to an "argument from design". But, because my argument is extrapolated from Hume's skeptical approach to epistemology and not from an argument of analogy employing the operations of creating watches (Pascal), I believe it is stronger than Pascal's (possible because I have always leaned towards skepticism). I infer that our ignorance of God's creative operations (and our consequent innability to identify the artifacts and evidence of that creation) is the stronger of the two arguments for the existence of God.