Strengths and Weaknesses of Empirical Methods of Inquiry Essay

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philosopher Rene Descartes can be regarded as the supreme rationalist. Descartes believed that only through our rational minds could we fully know God and find evidence of God. Empirical knowledge was not sufficient justification to prove the existence of God because our senses could delude us or be faulty (such as through madness or blindness). In contrast, through rational inquiry we could first demonstrate our own existence on a mental plane: even if all is a delusion regarding the body there must be some 'mind' doing the thinking, rationalized Descartes. And, as the human mind can conceive of a greater intelligence known as God, a level of perfection human beings cannot approach, then within the very structure of our mind lies the evidence of God.

David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, however, takes the opposite, empiricist point-of-view. In the dialogue, three figures known as Demea, Cleanthes, and Philo engage in a debate over how and if God can be proven to exist. Cleanthes, in opposition to Demea and the Cartesian point-of-view, believes that the perfect, mechanical workings of the world show that there must be some overriding intelligence at hand in the creation.

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"You will find it to be nothing but one great machine...therefore, the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man, though possessed of much larger faculties, proportioned to the grandeur of the work which he has executed" (Hume 143). Philo, in contrast, is an absolute skeptic. "Nothing exists without a cause; and the original cause of this universe (whatever it be) we call God; and piously ascribe to him every species of perfection" (Hume 142). This, however, is due to our mental gymnastics, not to any innate causal connections that really occur.

Both the rationalist and the empiricist method can be used to justify the existence of God in a similar fashion. Because the mind can conceive of greater perfection than itself there is a God; because the world….....

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