Every philosopher in the ancient times was concerned with the study of human nature in relation to the environment. Three thinkers used different perspectives of argument in relating the work of God and sufficient reasoning why, how people came into existence and the varying actions they had towards objects. They are discussed as follows;
Leibniz was the first German philosopher who existed early 17th -18th century, in his principle of sufficient reasoning he stated that, every action that was done by human had a purpose and a cause and that the existence depends on God’s free choice. He argued that anything on earth had an explanation of life either in an external cause or necessity of its nature. Further, he used this principle to state several claims such as rationalism concerning space and time, God’s existence and the identity of indiscernible. At first, the major idea that he pointed out was the ultimate origin of things, in which he related to series of unexpected things that was a necessary explanation why something existed for example the existence of the universe.
The other truth was necessity and he mentioned that fundamental reality depends on the principle of contradiction; he believed that any necessary breathing being is God, indicating that His existence is on earth. In the second argument which was about things that people cannot see or distinguish, he said that they would have been treated differently for example human beings. In his statement, he stated that, because there are no different beings from one another, they need not to be treated separately despite their numerical distinction. Finally, Leibniz claimed that since space and time are systems of relations that were found between two or more bodies, they are not absolute things on their own since God performed all His creation work in space.
Descartes was the second philosopher and he had his trademark argument in which he tried showing evidence that God existed from the fact that individuals had the concept of Him. Descartes claims that all ideas have a cause and that they are of three different types namely, fictitious, innate and adventitious and that all the reasons at least must have factual evidence in them as their outcome effects. He claims that God’s idea was natural. Descartes gives two major arguments to support his point of God’s existence. One is the trademark argument that says something came into existence because there was an idea to do so and that its reality is directly related to the formal idea of making it.
A second statement was that of Ontological, which entails an analysis of activity that needs to be done and the properties required to make something look impressive. He finalized by saying that it is an empirical question to understand whether something truly exists or not stating that God exists with an indefinite body and a finite mind making his argument to collapse as the idea of God had no cause (Pynn, 2012).
The last thinker was a Scottish called Hume who used scientific method of study to observe the nature of human beings and their beliefs. He advocated that all knowledge that people use is through the experiences they encounter in life. In his research, he came up with two sorts of beliefs. It included the relation of ideas which shows the views that were fully associated within the mind and did not have any external referent. The other belief talked about the contingent existence of nature of things. It dealt with posterior academic experiences that can be declined without fear of contradiction.
He observed that people understand better matters of fact about unseen things by a process of cause and effect using relevant knowledge of reasoning to understand the outcome. Relationship causes and effects of something was learned through human experiences and that nobody can predict the action of objects in future using current statistics as individuals experience gradual changes of nature making the objects to either increase or decrease (Gao, n.d). Leibniz and Hume were right in their statements as they based their discussion on what causes a particular object with its effect to individuals based on their experience and things they can see.
In conclusion, all the three philosophers tried comparing events, creatures and objects to having external explanations why it existed. Despite the different approaches, they discussed, each one of them had a reason for getting factual evidence why things exist the way they are and that people should base their arguments and actions on facts.
References
Pynn, G. (2012). Handout 7: The Descartes-Elisabeth Correspondence.Philosophy 322: Modern Philosophy.Retrieved from http://www.niu.edu/~gpynn/322_H4.pdf
Gao, S. Hume’s Analysis of Causality: Its Limitations and Implications. Retrieved from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.129.191&rep=rep1&type=df
