Essay About God Existence

[Essay II i 10-16] Locke frequently expressed significant reservations about the demonstrability—if not the very truth—of Cartesian dualism.

[Essay II i 10-16] Locke frequently expressed significant reservations about the demonstrability—if not the very truth—of Cartesian dualism.Given our widespread ignorance of the inner constitution and operation of substances generally, Locke notoriously suggested that, for all we know, the power of thinking could be providentially superadded to an organic human body as easily as separate thinking and material substances could be combined.Although knowledge of God is vital for human life and practical conduct, on Locke’s view, it cannot be grounded legitimately on the supposedly universal possession of an innate idea.

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An answer to this fundamental question is a prerequisite for answering the other big questions of life: Where did we come from? If, for example, I am already dedicated to the philosophical idea that nothing can exist outside of the natural realm (i.e. My answer would be "No, He doesn't," regardless of whether God truly exists or not.

" we first have to deal with our philosophical predispositions.

Since I know intuitively that I exist as a thinking thing, and since nothing can be made to exist except by something else which both exists and has powers at least equal to those of each of its creations, it follows that from all eternity there must have existed an all-powerful cogitative being.

[Essay IV x 3-6] This amounts to a variation on the Aristotelean / Thomistic cosmological argument for God’s existence: there is an instance of thinking; every thinking thing proceeds from some other thinking thing; but there cannot be an infinite regress; so there must have been a first thinking thing, or God.

Although it may not strictly be inert, matter is most definitely unthinking.

[Essay IV x 9-10] Materialism can never account for the emergence of thought in a universe containing only senseless matter.

[Essay IV ix 3] Notice, however, that Locke declined the further implications of the Cartesian inference to sum res cogitans.

Thinking, he argued, is merely an activity of the soul, not its essence; so the continued existence of an individual thinking thing does not necessarily entail its continuous consciousness.

Whether the original being were a single atom, or an eternal system of many parts, or whether every material thing thinks, Locke thought the possibility of a material thinking being at the start difficult to defend.

On his view, we don’t even have respectable grounds for supposing that a separate material reality is co-eternal with the necessarily cogitative first being.