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John Locke's Argument For The Existence Of God

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1a. To Locke, substance is something that possesses the primary quality of an object that truly exists in bodies themselves in reality. Though if told to describe “substance”, it is something Locke cannot describe and is something “we know not what.”
Locke stated that there must be substances underlying everything we sense and experience, because he believed that substance contained the power to give regularity and consistency to our ideas, and constitute the object of our sensitive knowledge. He backs this up by saying that for something to have an idea/quality (effect) there must be substance (cause), much like Thomas Aquinas and his theory of motion. And then further backs his claim up through the same deductive reasoning as the argument …show more content…

Berkeley arrives to the existence of God through a six-step process. He claims that 1. He has a mind and if he 2. Tries to describe reality in terms of things he’s experienced, then he would arrive at the conclusion that others in the world exist who have a mind like him. And because of this he can state that 3. Other people also have ideas. So, with all these minds, and apart from the finite mind, there must be 4. A mind greater than his and the others, which would be God’s mind. The ideas in our mind are 5. God’s ideas and are communicated to us, so what we perceive is not substance, but God. God also coordinates all the experiences of the finite minds and makes sure that there is regularity and dependability in experiences so that we can think in “laws of nature”. So, the ultimate and true reality would is actually 6. Spiritual (God). And so the continued existence of things even when we don’t perceive them is made sure by the constant perception of them by …show more content…

Hume explains the origin of ideas through his account of the content of minds. According to Hume, when we carefully look at the contents of the mind, it can be reduced or divided into what is given to us by senses and experience, known to Hume as perceptions. And our perceptions according to Hume are made up of two qualities, impressions and ideas. Impressions are the original perception and are what we first-handedly experience or are feeling right now, such as feeling pain, and are vivid and clear in perception of the impression. Ideas on the other hand originate from impressions, meaning they are copies, memories, and reflection of impressions, such as remembering pain, and are not as vivid and clear. Thus, Hume’s explanation of the origin of ideas is that it is born from the impressions we perceive in the

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