GOD way as to be the foundation of a religion Not, of course, that theists have ever thought that it could be so, in the sense of showing that God exists; they have only claimed that if we know from elsewhere that God exists we know that he is almighty and that it is in his power to work miracles, perhaps in order to authenticate one sect rather than another Do we know of God from other sources—from the traditional arguments, for instance? Hume believed that there was no being whose nonexistence implied a contradiction: accordingly, he had little sympathy with the ontological argument for the existence of God But he makes no direct onslaught on it; his most relevant remarks occur in the section of the Treatise in which he is trying to establish the nature of belief In arguing that belief was not an idea, he claimed that when, after conceiving something, we conceive it is existent, we add nothing to our Wrst idea: Thus when we aYrm, that God is existent, we simply form the idea of such a being, as he is represented to us; nor is the existence, which we attribute to him, conceiv’d by a particular idea, which we join to the idea of his other qualities, and can again separate and distinguish from them When I think of God, when I think of him as existent, and when I believe him to be existent, my idea of him neither encreases nor diminishes (T, 94) It is correct that believing and conceiving need not diVer in content: if I believe that God exists and you not we are disagreeing, in Hume’s terms, about the same idea But having a thought about God and believing that God exists are two quite diVerent things—an atheist who says ‘if there is a God, then he is a brute or braggart’ expresses, in his if-clause, the thought that God exists without assenting to it And Hume is wrong to say that there is no concept of existence distinct from the concept of the existing thing—if that were so, how could we judge that something does not exist? But it is true, and important, that the concept of existence is quite a diVerent kind of concept from the concept of God or the concept of a unicorn To say that unicorns exist is to make a statement of a quite diVerent logical form from the statement that unicorns are diYcult to tame Hume’s insight here was given more precise and accurate form by later philosophers such as Kant and Frege, who used it in a deWnitive demolition of the ontological argument The argument from design is treated more fully and respectfully by Hume His Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion feature three characters, 321