An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

It was of John Locke's philosophy that Bertrand Russell famously wrote: No one has yet succeeded in inventing a philosophy at once credible and self- consistent. Locke aimed at credibility, and achieved it at the expense of consistency.

Nowhere is Locke's empiricism more inconsistent than in his ideas about God. According to Locke, the only knowledge we can have with any certainty is the knowledge of our own existence; and the knowledge of the existence of God.

This second assertion is at odds with the whole push and thrust of his empiricism, however. The Essay itself provides the arguments and methods to refute this assertion. The Essay exists in a state of tension between asserting certain knowledge of the existence of God, and providing arguments to disprove that assertion. Book 4 of the Essay may with justice be regarded as a classic example of the mess thinkers get into when they try to reconcile reason with the unreasonable.

Let's first look at what Locke asserts about our knowledge of God, and then look at how The Essay Concerning Human Understanding provides the arguments with which to refute the existence of God...

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Words "signify only Men's peculiar Ideas, and that by a perfectly arbitrary imposition". I love how Locke produced this by accident, intending to write about cognition and perception and then spiraling helplessly into language. I love that it prefigures the twentieth-century "linguistic turn", in that sense--the understanding of language as an arbitrary but inevitable filter--a sort of "empirical turn" in that sense, if you wanna be cute, yeah? No high rationalism; no objective induction? I love that it sponsors a thousand eighteenth-century flowers, and, like, historical linguistics and the amassing of data that we otherwise would have ignored in favour of weighty pronouncements on the essence of language and how it resides in speech or writing and how it achieves its fullest nature. I love that this hits like a shot to the dome. ( )

Well! Thank goodness the 'essays' I had to write in college weren't this long and dense! ( )

...[T]he modern philosophers mostly consider thought as a function of our material organisaion; and Locke paticularly among them charges with blasphemy those who deny that Omnipotence could give the faculty of thinking to certain combinations of matter.
--Letter to August B Woodward, March 24, 1824

[Locke, Bacon and Newton are] "the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception."
- Letter to John Trumbull, Feb. 15, 1789

The founder of modern epistemology. Not to be confused with the bald guy on "Lost".