Abstract
This article shows how David Hume’s notable essay “Of Miracles” responds to the exigency of scientific Christianity by articulating a rationale for divorcing the concerns of English empiricism and Protestantism while also attempting to liberate secular inquiry from religious interference. What it calls skeptical Baconianism denotes how Hume altered Francis Bacon’s cultural grammar to reveal the epistemological incommensurability between science and religion and appeal to the strong anti-Catholic and proscientific sentiments of British culture by way of equivocation. In so doing, it shows how Hume attacks the epistemological foundations of scientific Christianity while also exploiting the theological prejudices of English Protestants in the eighteenth century.
