Julian Baggini has been writing a series of pieces on the Guardian's Comment is free site concerning David Hume's writings on religion. They are clearly argued, as you'd expect, and contain a lot of good points well put, not least on the limits of reason.

However, so far, they've left me with the feeling that Hume's work, in the crucial moments - which is to say in the moments that he is often taken conclusively to refute religious belief - just seems to miss the point.

It starts with his decision to attack religion (we should say Christianity really) for its belief in miracles. Now, there are undoubtedly believers who believe in miracles as supernatural interventions from on high, and that belief is questionable for all sorts of reasons. However, if you read someone who's actually reasoned the question of miracles out, there is, I think, a ready answer to Hume - and actually one provided several centuries before he lived.

I'm thinking of Thomas Aquinas, though you could point to Augustine too. For Aquinas, there is nothing exceptional about miracles, should they be thought to have occurred, since the whole of existence is itself, already miraculous. God cannot therefore be said to intervene; when something seemingly miraculous happens, the correct response is not to focus on the apparent exceptionality of what's occurred, but is to be reminded of the extraordinary gift of life and the world that is all around us - what you might call the continuous miracle of existence.

So Hume's definition of a miracle as 'a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the deity, or the interposition of some invisible agent' just misses the deeper point. Moreover, you might use Aquinas to challenge Hume's argument in another way.

Hume argues that a miracle, in his restricted 'interventionist' sense, would only be believable if 'the testimony (to the miracle) be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.' Well, think about the existence of the world and life itself. Both could, at heart, be said to be utterly miraculous: for all that we understand about the world and life, that they are, and what they are in themselves, remains astonishing, improbable and apparently ineffable. So the existence of existence could be taken to be a case of evidence for the 'miraculous' fact of existence, the denial of which would be even more bizarre than accepting the evidence itself.

You can, of course, deny that God is the sustainer of all things, à la Aquinas, and arrive at a different notion of providence. Hume did, seeming to have opted for one rather like the ancient Stoics: human beings are just one part of a whole order. The existence of that whole order remains something of a mystery, though we do well to keep one eye fixed on that bigger picture in which we are but a small thing. So, Hume concludes, that his life is important to him, but not to the 'grand fabric'. 'It is a kind of blasphemy to imagine that any created being can disturb the order of the world, or invade the business of providence,' he wrote in an essay On Suicide. Modesty - intellectual and otherwise - is the appropriate response, and that argues against dogmatic religion and atheism alike.

The other important thing that occurs to me, and that seems often to be missed, concerns the priority of faith. Now, it's impossible to talk about faith as if it was one coherent thing, of course. But you might venture that metaphysical convictions come after the experience of faith as being a tremendous giver of life, life in all its fullness. In short - and if this is not always true, it is in many cases and I'd argue in the more sophisticated and so interesting cases - religious faith does not rest on metaphysical convictions. A believer believes because it is compelling to them in all sorts of ways, some cruder than others, and mostly they are only secondarily to do with strict metaphysics. Similarly, the stories that are told and retold in churches, and other places of worship, are primarily a reflection of faith, not reasoned argument, that faith being in turn mostly to do with hope, and that hope being mostly directed at the enrichment of human life.

This is why the existence of suffering is the greatest challenge to faith: it operates primarily at an emotional not rational level. Or to put it another way, most of the arguments one can read about belief and unbelief are essentially rationalizations of already held positions; individuals are rarely converted by argument, and when someone does convert, one way or another, it's my impression that the arguments are usually said to 'tip them over', rather than of themselves be conclusive.

Theologians, and their critics, get into the reasons 'afterwards', as it were, and also to help 'the faithful' with the important process of discernment: 'faith seeking understanding' in Anselm's famous formula. So there is an important, even vital, dialogue to be had between faith and reason. The arguments are worth having because of the way they shape faith, or the lack of it. But faith itself is prior to reason; it is the existence of faith that gets the debate about belief going in the first place.

Julian's most recent piece was on Hume's dissection of the notion of the immortality of the soul. Hume is apparently against it, for three reasons. First, the very notion of the soul is mysterious (regardless of whether or not such entities exist) and so you can't say much about its supposed immortality on the back of that. Second, he objects to the link in Christianity, at least, between immortality and divine judgement; it's humanly unappealing because it makes God out to be a tyrant. Third, as 'Nothing in this world is perpetual', there's no reason to think the soul would be perpetual either.

Well, the first argument mitigates against concluding anything much about the soul, regarding its immortality or anything else. The soul is, in effect, like consciousness: a 'hard' problem. The second is against a particular conception of divine retribution which whilst mainstream churches might have taught in previous times, they just don't anymore. The third argument just seems weak, given what is now known in science, namely that there are features of nature that exist perpetually. Energy would be an obvious example, it persists and just gets converted into different forms. (The law of the conservation of energy was only conclusively formulated in the 19th century so Hume can't be blamed for not knowing it.) More metaphysically, the laws of nature seem to be constant through space and time too, for all that some physicists are speculating today that might be otherwise. (Even then, you could say that laws themselves are perpetual features of the universe.)

One thing that is striking about reading Hume's philosophy is the way he tends to distance himself from the arguments he conveys. He writes dialogues or uses irony. He is perhaps suggesting that all reason is inevitably provisional. When he is read by those who are already convinced of the positions he purportedly wholeheartedly supports - namely those associated now with atheism - they therefore risk missing the point. Hume is certainly anti enthusiastic superstition, which he saw all around him. But if he's against such evangelical belief he'd also be against convinced atheism. His main goal, I'd say, is to demolish the possibility of rational certainty in matters to do with the nature and origin of things at all. That plays both ways.