 Theists responding to Hobbes’s empiricist scepticism concerning our idea of God had three basic options. One was to reject his empiricist principles concerning the origin of all our ideas and argue that our idea of God is either innate or derived from reason. Another alternative was to accept empiricism about the origin of our ideas but deny that this has any sceptical implications for our knowledge of God. This is the route Locke takes in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, where it is argued that our idea of God is a complex idea arrived at by augmenting simple ideas acquired through reflection on our experience of the operations of our minds. A third alternative, which had been favoured by Catholic and Protestant orthodoxy, was to allow the experiential origin of ideas but then go on to say that ideas of creaturely attributes can be applied to God analogously, on the basis of a supposed degree of similarity or resemblance between God and creatures. This route was taken by, among others, the Irish theologian Peter Browne in Things Divine and Supernatural Conceived by Analogy with Things Natural and Human (1733). This issue concerning our idea of God was fundamental to the whole early 18th century theological debate as it concerned the various schools of “religious philosophers.” During this period freethinking critics (e.g. Toland and Collins) used these difficulties to argue, along the lines of Hobbes, that we have no clear idea of God. Hume’s views about the origins and nature of our ideas should be considered with reference to this controversy.