Berkeley's argument for the existence of God

[vulcanlogician]

Okay, so Berkeley distinguishes himself as an empiricist by founding his philosophy on the following (uncontroversial) assumptions:

(note: modern science has no disagreements with the first quote below)

Colours, sounds, tastes—in a word, all that are termed ‘secondary qualities’—have no existence outside the mind. But in granting this I don’t take anything away from the reality of matter or external objects, because various philosophers maintain what I just did about secondary qualities and yet are the far from denying matter. [In this context, ‘philosophers’ means ‘philosophers and scientists’.] To make this clearer: philosophers divide sensible qualities into primary and secondary. •Primary qualities are extendedness, shape, solidity, gravity, motion, and rest. They hold that these really exist in bodies. •Secondary qualities are all the sensible qualities that aren’t primary; and the philosophers assert that these are merely sensations or ideas existing nowhere but in the mind.

http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/p...ey1713.pdf

The next part is controversial and represents the fundamentals of immaterialism:

Wouldn’t it seem very odd if the general reasoning that covers all the other sensible qualities didn’t apply also to extension? If you agree that no idea or anything like an idea can exist in an unperceiving substance, then surely it follows that no shape or mode of extension [= ‘or specific way of being extended’] that we can have any idea of— in perceiving or imagining—can be really inherent in matter. Whether the sensible quality is shape or sound or colour or what you will, it seems impossible that any of these should subsist in something that doesn’t perceive it. (Not to mention the peculiar difficulty there must be in conceiving a material substance, prior to and distinct from extension, to be the substratum of extension.)
... [p. 15]
But there are many possible explanations, one of them being that ·those philosophers were influenced by the fact that· pleasure and pain are associated with the secondary qualities rather than with the primary ones. Heat and cold, tastes and smells, have something more vividly pleasing or disagreeable than what we get from the ideas of extendedness, shape, and motion. And since it is too visibly absurd to hold that pain or pleasure can be in an unperceiving substance, men have more easily been weaned from believing in the external existence of the secondary qualities than of the primary ones. You will see that there is something in this if you recall the distinction you made
between moderate heat and intense heat, allowing one a real existence ·outside the mind· while denying it to the other. But after all, there is no rational basis for that distinction; for surely a sensation that is neither pleasing nor painful is just as much a sensation as one that is pleasing or painful; so neither kind should be supposed to exist in an unthinking subject.