Sublime

human belief systems are good at absorbing contradictions into their thinking.

“To be is to be perceived,” said the Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753). We exist and give existence by virtue of perception. Berkeley meant that God’s omniscient perception maintains all things. For a moralist—and Berkeley was a bishop—this could mean you’re never out of the sight of God, so you’d better be good! For a metaphysician,

He maintained that material objects only exist through being perceived. To the objection that, in that case, a tree, for instance, would cease to exist if no one was looking at it, he replied that God always perceives everything; if there were no God, what we take to be material objects would have a jerky life, suddenly leaping into being when we

professor of philosophy, called Raymond Smullyan, says about this. He says: The dilemma is this. If it is really true that the unconverted will suffer eternal punishment, then my deceased parents, my family, my best friends, all those I love dearly are scheduled for eternal torture. Now, if God wants this, if he is the cause of this, then I would,

Philosophy, as I shall understand the word, is something intermediate between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable; but like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or that of revelation.

Though an atheist, Ayer rejected the idea that one could even talk about atheism with meaning, because it was just as nonsensical to say “There is no God” as it was to say “God exists,” as neither statement could ever be verified.

Hume claimed that the traditional arguments for God’s existence (for example, the world is an effect that needs a personal cause) were quite weak. He also said that since we cannot experience God with the five senses, the claim that God exists cannot be taken as an item of knowledge.

Denys Turner writes, “In showing God to exist reason shows that we no longer know what ‘exists’ means.”