Surely only God, the ultimate author of our lives, can know our coming and our going?
The ultimate author of the crime is unknown, and may always be; but all the possible culprits Mr Putin, the security services, and so on are alarming, albeit in different degrees.
The ultimate author-on-author insult, of course, is to simply deny that another's work actually counts as writing.
Second, if God is indeed the ultimate author of moral evil, then no individual human being is accountable for the criminal actions he performs.
The supposition that God is the "ultimate author" of all that takes place in the world will not, on this view of things, change our natural disposition to praise or blame our fellow human beings.
(True: a Christian might think that the Bible is infallible, since God is its ultimate author; but of course that leaves open the question what God intends to teach in the passage in question).
Rather, the point Hume is concerned to make (since he does not, in fact, doubt the inescapability of our moral accountability to our fellow human beings) is that the religious hypothesis leads to the "absurd consequence" that God is the ultimate author of sin in this world and that he is, accordingly, liable to some appropriate measure of blame.
Concerning Augustine's De Trinitate (On the Trinity), White wrote that Augustine "...develops at length the view that in the creation of living beings there was something like a growth that God is the ultimate author, but works through secondary causes; and finally argues that certain substances are endowed by God with the power of producing certain classes of plants and animals".
Though he had begun his career as one of the ultimate "cult authors," his work was so popular and influential that by the time of his death he was one of the best-known American authors and an established part of the 20th-century literary canon.
There's no question which of the two Gods these authors ultimate privilege — hence the tendency toward spiritual solipsism that Hart rightly identifies.
