There is no gainsaying that he rejects the possibility of tolerating atheists, whom he claims have no motive for keeping rules, since they lack fear of divine punishment. John Locke (1632-1704) was also known in his lifetime as a staunch defender of religious toleration. [Essay IV xix 12-16] Perhaps the most central concept in Locke’s political philosophyis his theory of natural law and natural rights. Even though faith can play a role in human life, reason remains the most important basis for genuine human knowledge. By what authority does he draw on to make this claim? His mother was Agnes Keene. Its initial publication was in Latin, and it was immediately translated into other languages.Locke's work appeared amidst a fear that Catholicism might be taking over England, and responds to the problem of religion and government by proposing religious toleration as the answer. God. Locke frequently expressed significant reservations about the demonstrabilityif not the very truthof Cartesian dualism. Locke repeatedly appealed to the idea that Jesus demonstrated and Paul taught that no one should be coerced into violating his or her conscience (e.g., Romans 14:5). “If the Gospel and the apostles may be credited, no man can be a Christian without charity and without that faith which works, not by force, but by love.”, Locke closed his essay by stating that Christians seeking to advance the Christian Church through “arms that do not belong to the Christian warfare.”, "If, like the Captain of our salvation, [Christians] sincerely desired the good of souls, they would tread in the steps and follow the perfect example of that Prince of Peace, who sent out His soldiers to the subduing of nations, and gathering them into His Church, not armed with the sword, or other instruments of force, but prepared with the Gospel of peace and with the exemplary holiness of their conversation. Divorcing the (properly complementary) resources of revelation and reason, Locke supposed, is dangerous because it tends to encourage the promulgation of reckless claims of the revealed origin of otherwise incredible propositions. No one, of course, least of all Locke, would suggest one must agree with or even respect ideas with which we disagree. John Locke and the Ethics of Belief (Cambridge Studies in Religion and Critical Thought) Paperback – January 26, 1996 by Nicholas Wolterstorff (Author) › Visit Amazon's Nicholas Wolterstorff Page. For in all the states of created beings capable of law, where there is no law, there is no freedom. Locke spent his childhood in the West Country and as a teenager was sent to Westminster School in London.Locke was successful at Westminster and earned a plac… The site navigation utilizes arrow, enter, escape, and space bar key commands. Here, as always, Locke depended upon the formation of ideas on empirical foundations. In a sense, then, reason emerges from Locke's discussion as the ultimate arbiter of all legitimate human assent: either it discovers the demonstrative connections through which the truth of an individual proposition can be established with certainty, or it plays the most crucial role in certifying the legitimacy of a revealed proposition as divine rather than merely delusive. The John Locke Foundation was created in 1990 as an independent, nonprofit think tank that would work “for truth, for freedom, and for the future of North Carolina.” The Foundation is named for John Locke (1632-1704), an English philosopher whose writings inspired Thomas Jefferson and the other Founders. This was His method.". And, wrote Locke, the use of violence to enforce particular religious views would only make citizens religious hypocrites and unworthy believers. The conflict no doubt shaped Locke’s views and Christian philosophy. A deeply religious man, Locke made the case for religious tolerance in a famous letter he wrote in 1689 titled “A Letter Concerning Toleration.”, "Since you are pleased to inquire what are my thoughts about the mutual toleration of Christians in their different professions of religion, I must needs answer you freely that I esteem that toleration to be the chief characteristic mark of the true Church. What is more, Locke argued, it is likely (though not, technically, demonstrably certain) that this first eternal being is actually immaterial. ... Locke also advocated a separation of powers in government and wrote powerful arguments in defense of religious tolerance. [Essay II i 10-16] Like many of his English contemporaries, Locke was deeply interested in matters of faith and religion. Of the conduct of the understanding. Since I know intuitively that I exist as a thinking thing, and since nothing can be made to exist except by something else which both exists and has powers at least equal to those of each of its creations, it follows that from all eternity there must have existed an all-powerful cogitative being. Locke a Unitarian Formally, Locke belonged to the dominant Anglican Church, but within the Anglican Church, he was an advocate of the broad church, or latitudinarianism. For propositions about which the certainty of demonstrative knowledge is unavailable, our assent may be grounded upon faith in revelation; but Locke argued that the degree of our confidence in the truth of such a proposition can never exceed our assurance that the revelation is of genuinely divine origin, and this itself is subject to careful rational evaluation. When born, the mind of the child is like a blank slate — “tabula rasa”, to be filled later with the data derived from sensory experience. Presbyterians are not burning Catholics at the stake; Episcopalians are not stoning Jews. In principle, this idea differs from any of our other ideas of thinking things only in the infinity of the divine attributes. Given the powerful nature of Locke’s case for religious tolerance, it comes as a shock that, near the close of the Letter, he excludes atheists and Catholics from toleration. The English philosopher’s ideas are at the core of the American Founding; in fact, it can be argued that his thoughts shaped the minds of the American Revolution more than any single thinker. Locke was also interested in traditional issues about the relation between faith (assent to revealed truth) and reason (discovery of demonstrative truth) as alternative sources of human conviction. [Essay II xxiii 22-25]. It is easy enough to employ an empiricist version of Descarte's cogito ergo sum as a demonstration of my own existence, of course. 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