Int J Philos Relig (2015) 78:183–193 DOI 10.1007/s11153-015-9527-0 ARTICLE
George Berkeley’s proof for the existence of God Hugh Hunter1
Received: 26 June 2014 / Accepted: 11 June 2015 / Published online: 17 June 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
Abstract Most philosophers have given up George Berkeley’s proof for the existence of God as a lost cause, for in it, Berkeley seems to conclude more than he actually shows. I defend the proof by showing that its conclusion is not (as is often supposed) the thesis that an infinite and perfect God exists, but rather the much weaker thesis that a very powerful God exists and that this God’s agency is pervasive in nature. This interpretation, I argue, is consistent with the texts. It is also an important component of Berkeley’s philosophical project, which consists of launching many small arguments (rather than one large argument) against his philosophical and theological opponents. Keywords God
Early modern philosophy George Berkeley Philosophy of religion
Introduction George Berkeley has an original proof for the existence of God, but most readers think it is a philosophical failure because it does not establish its stated conclusion (cf. Pitcher 1977; Fogelin 2001; Jesseph 2005; Bettcher 2008; Dicker 2011). This paper is a defence of the proof. I argue that Berkeley’s proof does not fall short, because the conclusion it sets out to establish is the one that it succeeds in establishing, and this conclusion plays the role that Berkeley wants it to play in the overall context of his approach to philosophy and religion.
& Hugh Hunter
[email protected]; http://www.jhughhunter.com 1
Dominican University College, Ottawa, Canada
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Given Berkeley’s metaphysical commitments, he is entitled to argue as he does that many features of the world reveal the pervasive agency of a greater-than-human mind. He then concludes, triumphantly, against the ‘‘impious schemes of atheism and irreligion’’ (1710, Sect. 92): these will be ‘‘baffle[d] and oppose[d]’’, he writes (1713, p. 213). But why? If Berkeley had shown that God, as he is generally understood by Christians, exists, that would baffle and oppose the impious. The supposed failure of the argument comes from the fact that Berkeley’s argument falls well short of establishing that such a God exists.1 As one critic has put it, the inadequacy of the argument is ‘‘so obvious it is hard to see why Berkeley did not address himself to it.’’ (Muehlmann 1992; see also Bennett 1971 and Dicker 2011). My suggestion is that the conclusion of the existence of a greater-than-human mind whose influence pervades our experience is enough for Berkeley’s purposes. It is all he needed to prove, and all he set out to prove. It is, as he intends it to be, inconsistent with atheism, deism and his own understanding of Hobbism and Spinozism. These would be small victories indeed if there were nothing more to Berkeley’s project than scoring points against certain articulations of impiety, whose authors might restate them in more defensible versions. That is why it is important to locate the proof in the broader context of his approach. In that context we can see that it is an opening move in a much longer series of arguments. Berkeley’s apologetic project does not focus on a single flagship proof for the existence of God. Rather, that argument is part of a flotilla of small arguments aimed at many components of the views with which Berkeley disagrees. Such an approach to apologetics strikes me as plausible and attractive, and perhaps that is one reason to attribute it to Berkeley. But another is that it is what I believe that he said. Since my goal is to show how what Berkeley says forms part of a coherent project, I will need to take the time to fill out the details of that project, and to show that Berkeley is aware of the extent and limits of what he has established. To that end, in ‘‘Berkeley’s arguments’’ section I offer a brief interpretation of Berkeley’s proof for the existence of God. Three versions of the proof are sometimes distinguished, but all versions at least have this in common: they invoke the existence of God to explain natural occurrences over which we have no control. Next, in ‘‘Berkeley’s conclusion’’ section I establish the scope of Berkeley’s conclusion. One reason that interpretations such as mine are not common is that Berkeley seems to conclude that a perfect and infinite God exists. (I do not contest that this is what Berkeley believed, but he was in no position to assert it in the context of his proof for the existence of God. This particular proof does not require that he establish his actual beliefs: it is sufficient for him to reach a more limited conclusion.) Berkeley does not in fact conclude that an infinite God exists, and so the conclusion which I attribute to him falls short of that which is generally attributed to him. In ‘‘The extension of the proof‘‘ and ‘‘The proof and the project‘‘ sections I consider where his argument leaves Berkeley. It brings him, as he intends, 1 Two recent readers argue that Berkeley supplements his proof at Treatise Sects. 26 and 29 with reasoning at Sect. 146. But it does not seem to me that Berkeley’s argument requires such strengthening (Flage and Ksenjek 2012).
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into opposition to atheism, deism and at least his own notion of Hobbism and Spinozism. Compared to more traditional proofs for the existence of God, it leaves notable gaps, for example Berkeley’s view is not inconsistent with polytheism. However Berkeley’s conclusion suffices for his apologetic project, which I consider further in ‘‘The proof and the project‘‘ section, where I argue that the subsequent discussions in Alciphron are best understood as tying together the conclusion of Berkeley’s proof, Christian dogma, and the historical moment in which Berkeley lived.
Berkeley’s arguments Berkeley’s proof of the existence of God appears in discussions scattered over five different works. Three versions are generally distinguished. The first version appears early in An Essay Toward a New Theory of Vision (1709), and then reappears in Alciphron (1732) and The Theory of Vision, or Visual Language shewing the immediate Presence and Providence of A Deity, Vindicated and Explained (1733). Another version appears in A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), and then reappears in Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (1713), but in the Dialogues the focus turns to the third version. There is some discussion about whether these are three versions of one argument, or three slightly different arguments. I tend to the former, but even on the latter view their similarities are sufficient to allow them to be taken together here, for in each case Berkeley argues that we find an order in ideas which is not of our making, It is worth sketching Berkeley’s idiosyncratic metaphysics, for it in this context that the proof is situated. The metaphysics is one of parsimony. It stems from a rejection of John Locke’s representationalist account of perception; Berkeley starts there not because he thought the view absurd but because he thought it was the next best thing to his own philosophy. Locke’s account of perception, at least as Berkeley took it,2 makes reference to three sorts of things: material substances, the sensations, or in Berkeley’s catchall term, ‘ideas’ which represent them and are present to our minds, and perceivers, who are minds. Berkeley thinks that the account can be simplified and improved if it is reduced to two sorts of things: ideas and minds. Since both he and Locke thought that access to ideas is direct, Berkeley thus becomes a sort of direct realist. The parsimony which governs his account of perception extends to Berkeley’s metaphysics, and so the term ‘idea’ is refitted for ontological use. Where Locke thought that ideas represent bodies, Berkeley proposed that they constitute bodies. These bodies which are constituted by ideas make up the physical world, but there is no mind-independent material world as Locke supposed. As Berkeley has Philonous put it in the Dialogues, ‘‘I am not for changing things into ideas, but rather ideas into things; since those immediate
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Locke’s doctrine of ideas is notoriously vague, to the extent that Keith Allen and Jonathan Bennett both conclude in interesting fashions that there is no Lockean doctrine to be found (See Allen 2010; Bennett 1971).
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objects of perception, which according to [the Lockean view], are only appearances of things, I take to be the real things themselves’’ (1713, p. 244). Berkeley’s parsimonious ontology then contains just two sorts of things. The first of these are ideas, these are the things we sense in perception, and which when placed in certain relations constitute bodies. Ideas are mind-dependent. Berkeley preserves the Lockean notion that ideas depend on and are contained in minds, at least in part because he thinks Locke is right that their dependency and containment in a mind is what makes it possible to perceive ideas directly, and Berkeley cannot give this up without giving up his own version of direct realism. Ideas are also passive. As Berkeley sees it, the ontological dependence of ideas does not allow for any aspect of an idea that is unperceived, and thus ideas are completely revealed in perception (1710, Sect. 25). Because he thinks this, Berkeley takes as reliable his impression that ideas are without agency, he finds them ‘‘altogether passive and inert’’ (1713, p. 231), their ‘‘bare observation’’ reveals them as ‘‘visibly inactive’’ (1710, Sect. 25). Minds are the other sorts of things in the Berkeleian cosmos. Since ideas are completely passive, only minds remain to account for activity; fortunately for the coherence of idealism, just as we discover by experience that ideas are passive, so we also experience ourselves as agents. Berkeley’s paradigm of activity is the imagination, in which he can produce ideas at will, which ‘‘making and unmaking of ideas doth very properly denominate the mind active.’’ (1710, Sect. 28) Since all bodies are constituted by ideas, all change in the world must be accounted for in terms of the activity of some mind, and Berkeley has often been read as attributing all bodily change to God’s mind in a quasi-occasionalist fashion, though new interpretations have questioned this orthodoxy (see McDonough 2008 and Hunter 2015, for a defence of the traditional view see Lee 2012). It is an essential feature of Berkeleian metaphysics, then, that minds are active, indeed that only minds are active. ‘‘Philosophers amuse themselves in vain,’’ Berkeley wrote, ‘‘when they inquire for any natural efficient cause, distinct from a mind or spirit’’ (1710, Sect. 107). And this view of mental activity is necessary for making sense of Berkeley’s proof for the existence of God. Consider the ‘‘continual succession’’ of our sensed ideas, a succession in respect of which we are inactive (Berkeley 1710, Sects. 26, 29)? According to Berkeley’s metaphysical principle, only a mind could cause it. Of course there might be as many causing minds as there are ideas in succession. Berkeley’s argument is best read as invoking Ockham’s razor here,3 to conclude that there is only one responsible mind (following Flage and Ksenjek 2012; Fogelin 2001), and thus Berkeley concludes that ‘‘the cause of ideas is an incorporeal active substance or spirit’’, not himself of course, but some ‘‘other will or spirit’’ (Berkeley 1710, Sects. 26, 29). This mind concerns itself with our ideas since it produces and orders them. Moreover, the order and complexity of the ideas we sense gives us an intimation of 3
Berkeley’s invocation of Ockham’s razor is in in the context of his already having shown that there is no material world, and so he takes himself to have already ruled out the supposition that there are as many material causes as there are events. Berkeley supposes, plausibly as it seems to me, that if one abandons the material hypothesis then one loses the justification for positing many material causes.
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the power and greatness of a mind that could produce and order them. There is thus a very great and powerful mind which concerns itself with us. This is, I suggest, all there is to the so-called ‘passivity’4 version of the argument. The other versions of the argument follow a similar line of reasoning. Bodies (which are collections of ideas) exist continuously, independently of finite minds. ‘‘I conclude,’’ Philonous says, ‘‘not that [bodies unperceived by me] have no real existence, but that seeing they depend not on my thought, and have an existence distinct from being perceived by me, there must be some other mind wherein they exist [italics in original]’’ (1713, p. 212). Or again, the natural order which Berkeley famously calls the ‘language of nature’ is arbitrary: it is a product of the will, arbitrium, of another. As Berkeley put it in a sermon preached shortly before his death, the ‘‘laws of nature…sufficiently declare and speak out the will of him that framed them.’’ (1751, p. 133; see also 1732, p. 4.6.148ff, 1733, Sect. 40). In all three cases we discover an order which is much greater than any we could produce ourselves. It is what Berkeley calls God’s ‘‘immediate providence’’ in the title of the Dialogues. With no reason to attribute this providential order to many minds like ours, we attribute it to a single, much more powerful mind. This, I suggest, is Berkeley’s proof for the existence of God.
Berkeley’s conclusion The three articulations of Berkeley’s proof of the existence of God as I have presented them do not go beyond the evidence he adduces: the production of the world’s order must be by a mind, and such a mind must be greater and more powerful than a human one: it must be a Godlike mind. And Berkeley often writes, as in the cases I have quoted above, as though there were no more to the argument than this (1710, Sect. 149; 1733, Sect. 2). The trouble—and one reason that commentators have found the argument so unsuccessful—is that on other occasions Berkeley’s conclusions seem to go much further. Berkeley concludes, for example, that there is ‘‘an infinite omnipresent spirit who contains and supports [the world]’’ (1713, pp. 212, 230), that ‘‘there is an omnipresent eternal Mind, which knows and comprehends all things [this and subsequent italicizations are Berkeley’s]’’ (1713, p. 231), that ‘‘sensible things…are necessarily perceived by an infinite mind: therefore there is an infinite mind, or God’’ (1713, p. 212), that the producer of our sensible impressions is ‘‘wise, powerful, and good, beyond comprehension’’ (1713, p. 215, see also 1710, Sect. 72), and that ‘‘if we…attend to the meaning and import of the attributes, one, eternal, infinitely wise, good, and perfect, we shall clearly perceive that they belong to the aforesaid spirit, who works all in all, and by whom all things consist’’ (1710, Sect. 146). It is important to see which of these attributions are problematic, and why. First the why. The reason there is a problem is not that Berkeley did not believe that God 4
The name jars with Berkeley’s own inclination not to call minds ‘passive’, though certainly he would allow that our agency is not involved with these ideas. See 1710, Sects. 27, 89.
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had all these attributes. No fair-minded reader could suppose that Berkeley was anything but a sincere and orthodox Anglican. But in the context of this argument, the problem is that such dogma seems to be carried over into the argument without any justification. This brings us to the question of which of these attributes are problematic. In each case, I am going to argue that there is a sense in which Berkeley might refer to such attributes consistently with his proof. Berkeley says that God is wise, and that he is one. Surely there is a sense in which Berkeley is entitled, even at this stage of the argument, to both claims. The being who orders the whole world must have some cognitive capacity for choosing order over disorder, and given the scale on which this capacity is exercised it does not seem wrong to call this being wise. Similarly, we need not take Berkeley to be expressing anything very theologically complex by saying that this being is one. Berkeley has already reached this conclusion by invoking Ockham’s razor. Even when Berkeley writes of God that he is omnipresent and eternal, this does not necessarily go beyond the evidence. In Berkeley’s immaterial metaphysics, by virtue of producing (and therefore having) all ideas, God would be present in all places and times (1710, Sect. 98). What about the attributes of goodness and perfection? Berkeley does not make it obvious how to arrive at these attributes. But he also does not specify any degree of either goodness or perfection. If what Berkeley is concluding about God is that he is somewhat good, then this does not go beyond the evidence. Surely there are many hellish orderings of things that God might produce that are far worse than the one that actually exists. A similar strategy can explain Berkeley’s attribution of perfection to God. Good empiricist that he is, Berkeley has Philonous opine that ‘‘all the notion I have of God, is obtained by reflecting on my own soul heightening its powers, and removing its imperfections’’ (1713, p. 231f). This means that there is an ‘‘unavoidable…inadequateness of our conceptions of the Divine Nature’’ (1713, p. 254). Indeed, the Dialogues even hint at a distinction between ‘perfect’, the extension of good human qualities to the limit of imagination, and the stronger attribute, ‘‘all-perfect’’, which perhaps—although Berkeley is not very clear here— refers to the actual extent of God’s perfections, which presumably exceed our imaginative capacity (1713, pp. 211, 219, 257). In other words, Berkeley has some room for a distinction here. The term that Berkeley often applies to God and that on the face of it seems to allow no ambiguity is ‘infinite’. As an Anglican, Berkeley was doctrinally committed to the thesis that God is infinite,5 and as a philosopher and mathematician Berkeley was committed to the thesis that everything else is finite (see e.g. 1710, Sect. 133; 1707). Since Berkeley defended the use of univocal terms for talking about God, divine infinity could hardly be such as to be incomparable with creaturely finitude.6 But if Berkeley observes a finite order of finite things, and 5
The first of the Anglican 39 Articles states that ‘‘There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible.’’ Berkeley certainly presented God as infinite in his sermons, see e.g. Berkeley (1751, pp. 132, 135).
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Peter Browne’s suggestion that our knowledge of God is analogical is generally regarded as one of Berkeley’s targets. Browne (1728), for Berkeley’s critique see Berkeley (1732, pp. 4.16–4.22).
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concludes that there is an infinite creator, he is surely going beyond the evidence! Kenneth Winkler dismisses Berkeley’s proof for the existence of God on just these grounds: ‘‘[i]n the end the argument cannot of course succeed, if only because the evidence will not be enough to convince us that the existence of an infinitely wise and perfect God is even part of the best explanation of ideas of sense. The attributes named simply go too far beyond the ideas they are invoked to explain’’ (Winkler 1989). Such accounts seem to me to fall short of the historian’s duty of charity. It would not be worthy of any serious thinker to confuse a very small number with a very large one. This account attributes to Berkeley the colossal error of confusing the finite and the infinite. This is especially unlikely since Berkeley thought and wrote about the infinite for much of his life, and published discussions of both mathematical and philosophical merit. For this reason, it would be surprising if he had slipped between, or as one recent commentator has suggested, elided the concept infinite and that of something that is very large.7 But what is the alternative? It is this: we ought to recognize that Berkeley was not confused, and nevertheless read his use of ‘infinite’ as meaning ‘very great.’ There are two reasons for doing so. First, like most eighteenth century authors, Berkeley often does use ‘infinite’ in this sense. To choose just a few from a wealth of examples, Berkeley calls the hypothesis of material causes ‘‘infinitely more extravagant’’ than that of mental causes (1713, p. 236). He writes that philosophical paradoxes (including paradoxes that stem from the wrongheaded belief in an actual infinite) have given ‘‘infinite amusement’’ to philosophers (1710, Sect. 85). In fact if we were to read the word literally in every instance then Berkeley would deny his own finitism, when he writes, ‘‘the effects of Nature are infinitely more numerous and considerable, than those ascribed to humane agents [my emphasis]’’—and this shortly after he has attacked the ‘‘dark and general pretence of infinites’’ (1710, Sects. 147, 133)! The second reason to think that Berkeley consciously used ‘infinite’ to mean ‘very great’ even though he knew this would be confusing is that it was prudent for him to do so. As Berman has documented, Berkeley had encountered serious obstacles in his career precisely because he had seemed to deny the infinity of God in a presentation on philosophical finitism in Dublin (1707). In the audience was William King, Archbishop of Dublin, who took the young Berkeley to be veering away from orthodoxy and in consequence became (and remained until his death) Berkeley’s implacable enemy and persecutor (Berman 1994). Soon afterwards, Berkeley left himself a reminder, ‘‘N.B. To use utmost Caution not to give the least Handle of offence to the Church or Church-men’’ (1706–1709, Sect. 715). Berkeley’s phrasing avoids giving offence, but given his other usage and his wellknown finitism, it leaves him philosophically uncommitted. Yet even this small 7
What persuaded Berkeley of the infinity of God, Samuel Rickless suggests, is that the beautiful and orderly features of the world are ‘‘innumerable and endless, that is, infinite in extent and aspect.’’ But a mathematically minded philosopher like Berkeley would hardly confuse the endless (or potentially infinite) with the boundless (or actually infinite). The features of the world might be endless, but any observation of them (including God’s own observation of them) would see that they fell short of showing God’s infinity, as Winkler rightly notes (Rickless 2013).
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compromise was abandoned after King’s death in 1729. In Alciphron (1732) Berkeley describes God’s power in the context of this argument as ‘‘this vastly great or infinite power and wisdom’’ (1732, p. 4.6.147), and he leaves the attribute of infinity entirely out of the Theory of Vision Vindicated of Berkeley (1733). So Berkeley himself, in Alciphron, invites us to read ‘infinite’ as ‘very great’, and charity requires that we apply this reading throughout. I have suggested that the conclusion of Berkeley’s proof is merely that a greater than human mind is pervasively active in our experience. The things that Berkeley attributes to this mind in the context of his proof are, I have argued, all consequences of this conclusion, rather than additional claims. If I am right, Berkeley knew exactly how much he had succeeded in establishing. The standard view suggests that Berkeley’s proof falls short of a stronger conclusion. My suggestion is that Berkeley’s conclusion is very limited—but that though it is more limited in its extension than the conclusions of other early modern proofs for the existence of God, it is nevertheless all that he needs for his apologetic project.
The extension of the proof One reason that so many readers assume that Berkeley tries, but fails, to establish the existence of an infinite and perfect God is that they suppose that he needed such a conclusion for his apologetic project. This is not the case. The notion of God that emerges from Berkeley’s argument, a very great, wise and good mind at work in our world may seem to be far weaker than that which emerges from most proofs for the existence of God. Compare, for example, Descartes, who concludes that there exists a God, and that ‘‘[b]y the name ‘God’ I understand a substance that is infinite, eternal, immutable, independent, supremely intelligent, [and] supremely powerful’’.8 In some ways, Berkeley’s notion is weaker than Descartes’. Descartes’ definition rules out the possibility that there are things beyond God’s power or knowledge. Berkeley’s does not do this. Moreover, Descartes’ God cannot have peers. Berkeley’s definition does not rule out the possibility of polytheism, though Berkeley certainly thought that refuting polytheism was one of the goals of apologetics (see Berkeley 1732, p. 7.9.301). On the other hand, Berkeley’s notion is stronger, in that God is defined as being at work in the world (i.e. God’s is an immediate providence), which cuts against deism—one of Berkeley’s main apologetic targets (see 1732, pp. 1.8.43, 1.12.53, 5.27.206). Berkeley also wanted his view to clash with those of Hobbes and Spinoza. Insofar as his view makes God a mind (contra Hobbes) and minds are one of two completely distinct sorts of being (contra Spinoza) Berkeley’s definition of God succeeds in this.9 And Berkeley has proved, surely, the existence of a God, so atheism, strictly speaking, is ruled out as well. 8
The 1641 Latin version reads ‘‘Dei nomine intelligo substantiam quandam infinitam, independentem, summe intelligentem, summe potentem’’, and the 1647 French edition adds ‘‘e´ternelle, immuable’’ to this list (Descartes 1641/1647).
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These characterizations of Hobbes and Spinoza may be contentious, but they are Berkeley’s: ‘‘Hobbes allowed a corporeal God; and Spinosa [sic] held the universe to be God.’’ (Berkeley 1732, p. 4.7.163), see
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Nevertheless it would be a mistake to suppose that Berkeley’s proof either is, or was intended by Berkeley to be a single refutation of the many views which he found philosophically or theologically wrong. Like any dogmatic believer, Berkeley had much to disagree with. He disagreed with other articulations of Anglicanism (for example, with Latitudinarianism, 1.8.43) and of Christianity (for example, with Roman Catholicism, 2.26.108f). He was committed to the falsity of Judaism, Islam, and the religions of ‘‘heathenish and idolatrous nations’’ (1.6.41). Berkeley’s notion of God does not rule out any of these views, though doing so was explicitly a part of his overall project. Berkeley invites his reader to avail himself of other proofs for the existence of God. The reader is ‘‘left in full possession of all other arguments for a God, none of which are weakened by [Berkeley’s argument]’’ (1733, Sect. 8). If the philosophical Christian adds Berkeley’s argument to his arsenal, he loses nothing, and perhaps gains a proof that cuts against deism, and against atheism in a new way. Still, it is unlikely that these will do much to answer, say, the errors of the Latitudinarians.
The proof and the project Berkeley’s proof, then, is not a silver bullet to lay dogmatic disagreements to rest. It would be a mistake to think that Berkeley did not know this (following Hooker 1982). That is why the discussion in Alciphron where Berkeley lays out his divine language argument concludes with one of Berkeley’s free-thinking foils saying, ‘‘we will grant there is a God…but what then? What hath this to do with religion or divine worship?’’ (1732, pp. 4.25.173). The fact that Berkeley puts the observation that the apologetic project was not finished, indeed that it had barely begun into the mouth of a free-thinker suggests that Berkeley was not going to leave the matter there. In the next books of Alciphron it becomes apparent that Berkeley the author was aware of how much remained to be done to identify the mind whose existence he set out to show, with the God of whose worship was presided over from Canterbury. For Berkeley took the view, a plausible one as it seems to me, that this connection would not be established by a grand a priori argument, or even by a few such arguments. Instead, it would be established by a flotilla of small arguments, many of them a posteriori, each of which would secure some small point of contact between faith and reason. Perhaps there were too many such arguments for anyone to hope to make them all, but few of Berkeley’s contemporaries were so well placed as he to make the attempt. It is worth recalling that Berkeley’s reputation in his own time was largely founded on his accomplishments in mathematics, natural philosophy, political philosophy, and Classics. For the purpose of showing how the existence of God was logical, scientifically plausible, morally coherent, and that a reliable tradition of human interactions with God could be traced backwards in history, few men were so well placed as Bishop Berkeley. Footnote 9 continued also Berkeley (1706–1709), Sects. 825, 827. The divine language version of the argument does not rely on quite the same metaphysical assumptions as the passivity and continuity versions, and Berkeley notes that it does not address Hobbism or Spinozism, see 4.7.163—a concession on his part that contemporary readers often overlook. For example, Kline (1993).
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The reader who continues in Alciphron after book four encounters a large number of obscure and often tedious discussions. I submit that these are elements of Berkeley’s project of connecting what he has shown to Christian orthodoxy. One finds Berkeley trying to establish that religion is useful and that it improves the human condition, that his Christian contemporaries are not morally inferior to the noble Greeks and Romans, that Christianity is not rightly held responsible for the deeds of bad Christians, that a good historical case can be made for the historicity of Christianity despite spurious texts such as the mention of Christ in Josephus’ Histories, that Christian miracles are well established, that the relevant traditions of scriptural interpretation are sound, that the idea of revelation is not absurd, that Christian doctrines fit well with pagan thought at its best, that Trinitarian theology is not absurd, that human beings are free in the way that Christianity requires—the list could easily be extended and amplified. Many of these discussions are necessarily dated. For example, Berkeley devotes a full section of Alciphron to explaining how the existence of duelling is compatible with the goodness of God. But then they should be dated. Berkeley’s project was to connect his proof for the existence of God to the world as it was. Someone wishing to reason similarly today would have to consider different problems, and write a different book.
Conclusion Berkeley’s approach to God’s existence is like that of a detective. It is important to establish that a death was not an accident or a suicide: that the scene one sees before one is the product of another’s malicious activity and intentions. But that is not where the detective’s work ends, that is where it begins. The detective must now assemble a picture of the criminal, coming to understand the particular traits and circumstances that made him a murderer. The task that Berkeley sets for himself is comparable. Once the existence of God has been proved, the work begins for the clergyman, the scientist, the historian, and the theologian to understand the manifestations of God in each new age (though few in our age of specialists could, like Berkeley, play every role). The standard view about Berkeley’s proof is deficient in what it attributes to Berkeley, but also in what it denies about his view. Berkeley does not and need not claim that God is infinite in order to motivate his argument. The standard view does not notice that what Berkeley does say about God is enough. His intention was not to show that orthodox Anglicanism or even Christianity is correct—Berkeley has other arguments for that. The proof is intended to lead the charge against Berkeley’s philosophical and religious enemies, by showing that even the mundane contents of experience reveal the acts of a great and powerful Other.
References Allen, K. (2010). Locke on the nature of ideas. Archiv fu¨r die Geschichte der Philosophie, 92(3), 236–255.
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