Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 44
EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY existence was enough evidence of His existence just as the sum of the three angles of a triangle are most certainly equal to the sum of two right angles. . Whether his philosophical proof of the existence of. God was acceptable or not to the generations of philosophers who followed him, at least they were all profoundly influenced by him. Thus, in the subsequent generations of thinkers, logic was freely employed for or against the belief in the existence of God. Dialectical materialism was also born as a subsequent development of the same trend. . This line of thinking continued into the seventeenth century when John Locke, Berkeley and Hume demarcated the boundary of phenomenon and reason as having no common borders with faith and belief. While subscribing to this philosophy, Locke did not specifically rule out the validity of faith and belief but left them alone for the believers to have faith in whatever way they chose. It was left to a later generation of European philosophers to deny the existence of God on the basis of logic - Rousseau and. Nietzsche being most prominent among them. . FIETZSCHE declared God to be dead in his own. N dramatic style. Rousseau, on his part, advocated the synthesis of a new religion in place of revealed religions. He stressed the need for a religion based on a study of human nature and human experiences. He proposed that the human mind itself should create a civic code or rule of life. Rousseau seems to be among the first of the European philosophers who openly rebelled against the philosophy to have anything to do with the belief in. God. It was an age when religion was profoundly and advertently affected by the rationalist movement. . This generation of philosophers was followed by. Utilitarians like Mill and Sidgwick. Essentially they 44