Originally posted by seer
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In general I've noticed that Christians do a really bad job of actually thinking seriously about the possibilities involved if something other than this material world is actually the underlying reality. You all seem to have a tendency to just insert your Christian God straight into it and declare victory... even though there is no reason whatsoever that there being a higher reality than this universe should mean that your Christian God exists in it, and in fact surely there are a near-infinite number of ways there could be an underlying reality that wasn't that of Christian teachings.
In this thread you've been super-ready to reinterpret computer-programmers as God, if one happened to be responsible for this universe, even though there was no suggestion they were anything more than average in intelligence or skill, nevermind having any properties like eternality, uncreatedness, knowledge of the future, or having anything whatsoever to do with historical Christianity in any way.
This material world might not be the underlying reality, yet every single other teaching of Christianity might still be 100% wrong. There is no reason to think that the one implies the other.
Berkeley claims that an inspection of our ideas shows that they are causally inert. Since there is a continual succession of ideas in our minds, there must be some cause of it. Since this cause can be neither an idea nor a material substance, it must be a spiritual substance. This sets the stage for Berkeley’s argument for the existence of God and the distinction between real things and imaginary things.
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