This is, rather, a challenge to consider that God’s ways are not our ways, and that His thoughts are not our thoughts (cf. Philo reprimands Cleanthes’s anthropomorphizing of God: “Is it possible, Cleanthes, that after all these reflections, and infinitely more, you can still persevere in your Anthropomorphism, and assert the moral attributes of the Deity, his justice, benevolence, mercy, and rectitude, to be of the same nature with these virtues in human creatures?” This is Hume’s central point, and it is not an argument against the existence or worthiness of God. By learning about benevolence, justice and mercy from human experience, we learn about God’s benevolence, justice and mercy also. Just as human beings are just, so God is just. Cleanthes’s reasoning is as follows: just as human beings are benevolent, so God is benevolent. Earlier he stated: “Nothing can shake the solidity of this reasoning… except we assert, that these subjects exceed all human capacity, and that our common measures of truth and falsehood are not applicable to them.” In the dialogue, Philo is arguing against Cleanthes who insists that God’s ways are commensurate to the ways of human beings.
Hume is not arguing that God isn't all good and all powerful, but only that we cannot infer this from the common human way of thinking. However, it is crucial to understand what Hume is arguing. His conclusion is as follows: “There is no view of human life, or of the condition of mankind, from which, without the greatest violence, we can infer the moral attributes, or learn that infinite benevolence, conjoined with infinite power and infinite wisdom.” That is, based upon the common conceptions of goodness and benevolence derived from human experience, an all good and all powerful God cannot be reconciled with the fact of suffering in the world. Using three fictional characters-Demea, Cleanthes and Philo-who are debating the problem the evil, Hume indeed seeks to show that one cannot demonstrate that God is all good and all powerful using human experience and human understanding alone. In chapter ten of his book Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, David Hume discusses the problem of evil. These conclusions, however, were not advocated by the eminent 18th century philosopher, David Hume. For many people this problem provides sufficient grounds for them to reject belief in God altogether, or at the very least to confess that while there may be a God, He is not really worth believing in.
Simply stated: if God is all good and all powerful, how can He allow evil and suffering to exist in the world? God’s allowance of evil and suffering does not seem to make sense in the light of human experience and human conceptions of goodness and justice. The problem of evil is one of the most famous and enduring problems in the philosophy of religion.
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