Wednesday, March 12, 2008

While Descartes goes on about how God is real beacause a triangle has three angles, Locke seems to come to rational conclusions desiphering faith and reason. I especially enjoy and woud like to point out one part that stretches all the way into book 4. Locked points out that it is only right to use understanding and reason to find the truth. "he that takes away reason to make way for revelation, puts out the light of both, and does much of the same, as if he would persuade a man to put out his eyes, the better to recieve the remote light of an invisible star by a telescope." This basically targets people who believe that their immediate religious revelations are correct without using reason or rationality to truly find out. Locke in turn seems to believe that people that do this usually end up with opinions and explanations that make no sense.
As far as innate principles go, I always had assumed that everyone was born with them. But Locke brings up a rational argument in this aspect. He believes that people are not born with innate principles, because if we were, they would be immediately percieved at birth, and a human being must grow up, learn, and undergo experiences for any principle to become apparent to them; knowledge is learned in life, not innate. I like this argument very much because it is rational and makes sense unlike many of Descartes arguments. Descartes on the other hand believed that we have innated principles which are the basis for how we learn everything else. I believe Locke's rational is that when you are a baby, you can't talk, you don't know what anything is, and you don't have words or items to associate your thoughts with, therefore you have pretty much no memory of the time before you learned to speak and comprehend what is around you.