Editing George Berkeley (section)

===Theology===
A convinced adherent of Christianity, Berkeley believed God to be present as an immediate [[Causality|cause]] of all our experiences.

{{blockquote|He did not evade the question of the external source of the diversity of the [[sense data]] at the disposal of the human individual. He strove simply to show that the causes of sensations could not be things, because what we called things, and considered without grounds to be something different from our sensations, were built up wholly from sensations. There must consequently be some other external source of the inexhaustible diversity of sensations. The source of our sensations, Berkeley concluded, could only be God; He gave them to man, who had to see in them signs and symbols that carried God's word.<ref name="The Main Trends in Philosophy">[[Teodor Oizerman|Oizerman T.I.]] [https://archive.org/details/TheMainTrendsInPhilosophy The Main Trends in Philosophy]. A Theoretical Analysis of the History of Philosophy. Moscow, 1988, p. 78.</ref>}}

Here is Berkeley's proof of the existence of God:

{{blockquote|Whatever power I may have over my own thoughts, I find the ideas actually perceived by Sense have not a like dependence on my [[Will (philosophy)|will]]. When in broad daylight I open my eyes, it is not in my power to choose whether I shall see or no, or to determine what particular objects shall present themselves to my view; and so likewise as to the hearing and other senses; the ideas imprinted on them are not creatures of my will. There is therefore some other Will or Spirit that produces them. (Berkeley. ''Principles'' #29)}}

As T. I. Oizerman explained:

{{blockquote|Berkeley's [[Subjective idealism|mystic idealism]] (as [[Immanuel Kant|Kant]] aptly christened it) claimed that nothing separated man and God (except [[materialism|materialist]] misconceptions, of course), since nature or matter did not exist as a reality independent of consciousness. The revelation of God was directly accessible to man, according to this doctrine; it was the sense-perceived world, the world of man's sensations, which came to him from on high for him to decipher and so grasp the divine purpose.<ref name="The Main Trends in Philosophy"/>}}

Berkeley believed that God is not the distant engineer of [[Isaac Newton|Newtonian]] machinery that in the fullness of time led to the growth of a tree in the university quadrangle. Rather, the perception of the tree is an idea that God's mind has produced in the mind, and the tree continues to exist in the quadrangle when "nobody" is there, simply because God is an infinite [[mind]] that perceives all.

The philosophy of [[David Hume]] concerning causality and objectivity is an elaboration of another aspect of Berkeley's philosophy. [[A.A. Luce]], the most eminent Berkeley scholar of the 20th century, constantly stressed the continuity of Berkeley's philosophy. The fact that Berkeley returned to his major works throughout his life, issuing revised editions with only minor changes, also counts against any theory that attributes to him a significant volte-face.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Berkeley, George {{!}} Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy |url=https://iep.utm.edu/george-berkeley-british-empiricist/ |access-date=2022-06-24}}</ref>

Yet as [[Colin Murray Turbayne]] observed, late entries found amidst Berkeley's unpublished private notes in the ''Philosophical Commentaries'' point toward his inclination to withdraw from a dogmatic form of ontological idealism in order to adopt a more skeptical attitude toward the existence of an active, universal substantial mind such as God.<ref name="books.google.com">[https://books.google.com/books?id=DsKvAwAAQBAJ&dq=Colin+Murray+Turbayne&pg=PA2451 ''Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers'' Shook, John. 2005 Biography of Colin Murray Turbayne on Google Books]</ref> Here, Berkeley's "official doctrine" that "Mind is a substance." in a literal sense is accompanied by additional puzzling references to a universal "thinking substance, something unknown" (687) and "the substance of Spirit we do not know, it not being knowable" (701). In his exegesis of the term "substance", and his description of the soul as a substance in which ideas "inhere" while it "supports" ideas, Berkeley also asserts that he must "use utmost caution not to give give the least handle of offense to the Church or Church-men (715)".<ref>{{cite journal| last=Turbayne| first=C. M.| title=Berkeley's Two Concepts of Mind| journal=[[Philosophy and Phenomenological Research]]| volume=20| issue=1|  date=Sep 1959| pages=85–92| jstor=2104957| doi=10.2307/2104957}}. Repr. in {{cite book| last1=Engle| first1=Gale| last2=Taylor| first2=Gabriele| title=Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge: Critical Studies| location=Belmont, CA| publisher=Wadsworth| year=1968| pages=24–33}} See pp. 91-92</ref> Keeping in mind Berkeley's development of a philosophy of science and his theory of vision, this suggests that his final references to God as a universal and "substantial mind" are essentially [[metaphor|metaphorical]] in nature and indicate a willingness to diplomatically uphold a "purely substantivalist conception of the mind, confirmed by his private utterances".<ref>{{cite journal| last=Turbayne| first=C. M.| title=Berkeley's Two Concepts of Mind (Part II)| journal=[[Philosophy and Phenomenological Research]]| volume=22| issue=3|  date=March 1062| pages=383-386| jstor=2104426| doi=}}.</ref>