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Locke's Argument For The Existence Of God

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While Hume was more concerned with human nature and reason, Locke focused on the results, or knowledge, that science was uncovering at the time. Locke believed that science already had a solid foundation by which to build on, while Hume questioned this underlying structure and sought to find out exactly what this knowledge was. Further, Hume did not agree with Locke’s view of an innate ability to reason; Hume took the ‘blank slate at birth’ contention to its extreme arguing that even the ability to reason is acquired through experience. Finally, Locke’s argument for the existence of God is markedly different than that of Hume’s. Locke contends that because he (Locke) exists, and he could not have come into existence out of nothing, then something must have produced him. This something, Locke claims, can be one of three things: eternal, self-caused, or random; Locke settles on an eternal being, or God, after arguing that the last two are irrational. Contrastingly, Hume stays grounded in his empiricism, arguing that the knowledge of what created him can only come from experience rather than inference, and since this experience is lacking, God’s existence is insolvable.
GROUP 4
16. Explain why the possibility of synthetic a priori judgements is so important for Kant.
According to Kant, there are many different types of judgements, …show more content…

What are the “a priori forms of our intuitions”? What is their role in the possibility of knowledge?
According to Kant, space and time are a priori forms of our intuition, or, in other words, they are the purest forms of human understanding, prior to experience. These forms are what makes our experience possible, therefore, according to Kant, it is only through the presupposition of these pure intuitions that knowledge can be possible since all human experience must yield to three-dimensional space and as well as the one-way direction of time.
18. Why does Kant say that we must be able to think, if not to know, things in

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1. My belief is that John Locke knew man would not be able exist without God. Man would not even have the ability to think it were not for God. In the first paragraph Locke basically states that though there is no physical evidence of God that can be proven, we still know there is a creator of all things that exist.

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Martin Luther King Jr. wanted to get his point through in his speech about how cruely colored skins were mistreated and didn’t have rights like everyone else did. John Locke made the three most important rights anyone could have, life liberty and pursuit of happiness. None of these colored men had any of those rights. I believe blacks were treated very poorly. I also believe that all those thousands of blacks around the world should have never been treated the way they were.

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In the book the author talks about Hume's argument that cause and effect cannot be experienced by the senses. In Hume’s arguments he states that we just live moment by moment and that one experience leads on to another. Kant argues that synthetic, rather than analytic thinking is needed, and addresses the problem of thinking synthetically without relying on the empirical method. (Kant, Immanuel and J. M. D. Meiklejohn. Critique of Pure Reason.

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Locke’s Use of Both Empirical and Religious Evidence The Enlightenment period resembled a shift in reasoning; from religious evidence to empirical evidence. This transformation was not at all easy, and required years worth of arguments to validate this shift towards a more secular perspective. One man, John Locke, took the leap in order to help this transformation occur. In The Second Treatise of Government, Locke did what many were weary of: applying scientific and secular reasoning to a seemingly illogical phenomenon that was religion in order to justify political authorities of that time. Evidently, this was a sensitive topic that had to be approached in a way that didn’t invalidate centuries worth of tradition, but did bring light to many inconsistencies within scripture.

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“Locke, on the other hand, thinks that god has two different things to do. First, fix all the physics and laws of physics. But second, decide how to ‘annex’ mental events to physical events, fixing up psycho-physical relations.” Like Leibniz, Locke believed that god would have had to first create the physical world, but he added another step to the creation of the universe. Locke believed that god would then have to create the connection between the mental and physical.

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Descartes argues that God is perfect due to his own rational thinking. While Hume believes that experiences are where ideas can be deduced from, and these experiences serve as evidence to support Hume’s idea that God is not perfect. To understand perfection we would have to be able to define the word somehow. Descartes says “[...]since I knew of some perfections that I did not at all possess...there must be something else more perfect[...] (Descartes 19). The idea of perfection must have come from a being who is perfect, for Descartes says “I could not obtain it from myself” (Descartes 19).

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If natural faculties are instincts, then Locke agrees with something synonymous with innate ideas. But it’s unclear, and frankly debateable, if the natural faculties contribute to a cumulative argument aimed at discrediting Locke. When we address Hume’s earlier passage, it seems like the most most credible ammunition against Locke. Insofar as Hume claiming that Locke’s ideas (possibly unbeknownst to the philosopher) are reliant on

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All our ideas, values and assumptions are the result of our experiences – or ‘sense impressions’ – of the world. While he assumed that the sensory apparatus of the body was the only source of valid knowledge about the reality, Descartes distrusted the senses. ‘Our perceptions of the outside world are actually just that – perceptions– and as such they are deeply marked by the perceiving subject’s pre-existing ideas about the world.’ We can only see the world through a filter of ideas. Kant agreed with both Locke and Hume that true knowledge derived from sense impressions, but also that sensory data were filtered and shaped by the faculties of the mind.

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In John Locke’s ‘An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” he explains the limitations associated with human understanding and knowledge. Locke tries to convince the reader that everything is taught and there is no knowledge you are born with or innate knowledge. Others that disagree with Locke may mention god and claim it is god that provides this innate knowledge. This would mean that a newborn child would have a mindset of its own which Locke disproves.

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Background: John Locke (1632–1704), was an English philosopher who wrote during the 17th century at a time where there was grave discussion and disagreements over the crown and the parliament, as well as conflict between Protestants, Anglicans and Catholics. During his period he wrote a vast number of influential works that shaped the face of politics and political reasoning until today. With one of the most important respectively being his 1690 piece “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” that analyzed the foundation and ground for human understanding and knowledge. In addition to this, his work regarding the theories of mind where he argues that men are born “Tabula Rasa” meaning born with a blank slate of mind, free from ideas, influence

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He seems to appeal to skepticism, meaning he doesn’t believe that we have a rational reason to believe anything that we claim to “know.” One of Hume’s inquiries involved whether or not there is a relation between cause and effect. He eventually makes the claim that there is no connection between these events, and because there is no cause and effect, that humanity is experiencing free-will. The strength of Hume’s argument lies within his evidence. For example, he states that our assumptions about what will happen next, or

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Immanuel Kant was a philosophy in the 1724-1804, which believe that ultimate reality is Noumena. Kant was a unknown German philosopher that taught small university in Konigsberg. He believes that their two type of knowledge. First is priori to obtain before or experience. Second is posteriori that obtain from experience.

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But what entails an idea for Berkeley is really diverse and ranges from emotions, passions, products of memory and products of imagination. Today’s common meaning of ideas includes only the last two constituents of the previous definition. Having introduced his own notion of ideas, and since Berkeley’s famous principle is esse is percipi which means “to be is to be perceived” the author now assumes that since ideas truly do exist, then there should be something that is able to perceive them. This is how our enlightenment philosopher argues for the existence of the mind.

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Also, causality – the glue of the universe – would be off the table. This is because if we look at our immediate sensory experience we find that it is impossible to see the supposéd metaphysical realities. Even though things like Newton's laws of motion and gravitation which seemed to illustrate, if not confirm, causality at work, were widely accepted, Hume suggested that science could/might simply be a useful custom. Kant's response turned the tables on Hume: asserting that while we Kant derive causality from experience, the fact that we have such a mental framework is absolutely essential. The fact is that we all share these categories of experience (unity, plurality, totality, reality, limitation, negation, substance, causality, community/reciprocity, possibility, existence, necessity), so even if causality does not/cannot exist out in the world itself, what matters is that we all still experience the world in much the same way; the mind makes the world, not the other way around.

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