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John Locke's Argument For The Existence Of God

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In John Locke’s, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke develops an argument for the existence of God. In the the following paper, I shall first reconstruct Lockes’ argument for his claim of God’s existence. I shall then identify what I take to be the weakest premise of the argument and explain why I find it in need of justification. The following is a reconstruction of Lockes’ argument: 1) Man has a clear perception of his own being 2) If man knows his own being, then man knows that bare nothing cannot produce a being 3) Therefore, man knows that bare nothing cannot produce a being (from 1 and 2) 4) If bare nothing cannot produce a being, then there has been an eternal being 5) Therefore, there is an eternal (infinite) being …show more content…

With an explosion with infinite energy being the explanation of how our world started there had to be a being to first start the explosion. The explosion would be considered has the first beginning to produce another being. Everything that has a beginning was produce by another being. An eternal being never had a beginning because it has always been in existences. Therefore, an eternal being was never produced by another being. The Big Bang Theory is not wrong but it does not cancel out the fact that an eternal being exists. For the explosion of the Big Bang Theory to happen there had to be something to produce it, which is an eternal being. In conclusion, my reconstruction of John Locke’s argument in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I rejected premise number 4. Which is “if bare nothing cannot produce a being, then an eternal being exists”. This premise needs further justification for it to be correct. The term “bare nothing” does not cancel out that explanation that nature could have the power to produce another being. Locke responded explaining that nature is the first beginning and every beginning was produced by something else. An eternal being was the reason why the explosion of nature started our world and further produced all of

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In his later years, he devoted his time to theology and wrote his major work in the field called The Reasonableness of Christianity. It was to be published anonymously in the year of 1695. This work of John Locke’s was controversial because he argued that many beliefs traditionally believed to be mandatory for Christians were unnecessary.

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