John Locke God's Existence

For John Locke, human beings are capable of knowing that there is a God. Despite the fact that we are provided with no intrinsic knowledge of God’s existence, as Descartes posited, humans are capable of finding evidence for God’s existence using the methods that Locke has posited earlier in The Essay. According to Locke, man has a clear idea of himself. A single human mind, such as myself, has little doubt of his or her own existence. Locke thinks that any person who would go so far as to doubt their own existence is laboring on the impossible; furthermore, they would be proven wrong should they experience some sensory input (the example Locke gives is pain or pleasure). For example, if I was questioning my existence, but I stubbed my toe and felt the agony of such an injury, I would have a hard time denying my own existence. Locke then proceeds from personal existence by stating that nothing that exists could have come from

For Berkeley, the existence of God follows not from the formation and observation of the idea of God, as it does with Locke, but from examining the world itself. According to Berkeley existence is the result of our ideas, we are nothing more than minds in so far as how we related to and interact with the world exists within our minds. Berkeley, through Philonious, points to the many designs and splendors of nature to give evidence to the notion that it must have somehow been created, indeed perceived within the mind of a much greater spirit than ourselves. For Berkeley, since ideas are all that is, then everything outside of ourselves must be an idea within a larger mind. This is a response to Hylus’ fear that, if everything is an idea, then parts of existence must cease to exist if he is not actively perceiving them; therefore, the answer to this is that God must be a mind and it must be perceiving everything all at