Berkeley's argument for the existence of God

[Mystic]

 What they keep failing to realize is that if god truly existed, he would be capable of proving his own existence.

Which is why I advocate to study religions, because I know there is not a single proof I offer but Quran does it better, and more eloquently, and it offers even more proofs.

[Angrboda]

So, what do you think, where is the fallacy in the George Berkeley's argument for the existence of God?
For those who don't know, it goes somewhat like this. There are things for which obviously "esse est percipii", that is, they exist only because they are being perceived by somebody. Light, for instance, exists only because it's being perceived, because, if it weren't perceived, it wouldn't by light by definition (a natural agent that enables vision). Since perceptions are ideas, they have to be caused by other ideas. Ideas have nothing in common with material things (they don't occupy space or have mass), and therefore they can't be caused by material things. Since perceptions, which are ideas, can be caused by the natural agents such as light, it has to be that those natural agents are also immaterial. Now, here is the important part: if those natural agents are being caused or affected by something, that is, the things we perceive as material, it has to be that those things that affect them are also immaterial. If they were truly material, they couldn't affect the ideas through which we perceive them (such as light), and therefore they couldn't be perceived at all. Therefore, the material world has to be an illusion. All we can actually perceive are ideas.
Now, if those things are ideas, how it is that, if we open our eyes in the middle of the day, we can't choose what we will see or whether we will see anything? It has to be that those ideas aren't ours, but that those are actually ideas of a supreme being, and that we are also one of his ideas. That being is called God.
It actually sounds smart. The argument for the material world being an illusion is quite convincing, isn't it? I'd like to hear your thoughts.

This is actually two arguments. The first being primarily an argument for monism, under the assumption that substances must have something in common with each other to interact. He oversteps, however, in calling this one type of stuff immaterial. It's like the existence of dark matter, which we know about because it weakly interacts with gravity. If dark matter didn't interact with gravity, we would have no way of knowing about its existence. But it would be silly to then posit that one type of matter is material and the other immaterial. You would simply have stuff #1 and stuff #2. Berkeley simply assumes that the substance of thought is in some sense 'immaterial'. If we had several thousand substances, none of which interacted with the other, we would run out of categories relatively quickly.

[Minimalist]

 What they keep failing to realize is that if god truly existed, he would be capable of proving his own existence.

Which is why I advocate to study religions, because I know there is not a single proof I offer but Quran does it better, and more eloquently, and it offers even more proofs.

[Mystic]

Yet, like he said, God would prove himself best. That is a fact.

[Minimalist]

When he does, give me a jingle.

Until then, it's just ancient superstition which has no place in the 21st century.

[vulcanlogician]

In modern times, there are some people who think we should reinstate compulsory prayer in schools.

Why, according to empirical data, is that a bad idea?

Why not implement theocracy instead of a democracy?

 If only there were a field of study that addressed such questions...

Politics, psychology, sociology and (according to economists in the introduction to their books but at no other time afterwards) ... economics.

None of those fields are equipped to answer the questions I asked in my first post and only draw upon their relation to philosophy when they do so. Show me empirical data which favors democracy over theocracy.

I know why democracy is better than theocracy, and it's not because of empirical data. I draw upon something else when answering this question, namely reason, values, and an assessment of the human condition (all firmly within the wheelhouse of philosophy).

[The Grand Nudger]

Sounds awfully empirical to me.

[I_am_not_mafia]

None of those fields are equipped to answer the questions I asked in my first post and only draw upon their relation to philosophy when they do so. Show me empirical data which favors democracy over theocracy.

I know why democracy is better than theocracy, and it's not because of empirical data. I draw upon something else when answering this question, namely reason, values, and an assessment of the human condition (all firmly within the wheelhouse of philosophy).

If it does not use empirical data why then should we trust philosophers to answer this question for us over any of the fields I mentioned?

You say these fields are not equipped to answer why democracy and not theocracy, and why we shouldn't enforce morning prayer, but why not? (I should have also add history as a field)

I don't know whether philosophers have the answers or not, but fact is, no one is listening to them when these questions get raised and the answers decided. If the field isn't equipped to provide convincing answers and to get people to pay attention to it for whatever reason then the field is irrelevant in its current form.

Isn't it the case though that if philosophers do talk about these issues, that they do use empirical data obtained by many different fields and draw it together into a bigger picture? And that it's when they do this that they get listened to? That's when philosophy becomes useful.

[FlatAssembler]

Science doesn't need to be entirely empirical. Economics is mostly like geometry. You start with some axioms, and then you search for the theorems that logically follow from them. The axiomatic set of the Austrian School of Economics, for example, is called praxeology.

[The Grand Nudger]

-and if that's all you did you wouldn't be doing economics or science.

You then have to match what you expect with what happens in some demonstrable case, and in light of that data, refine your axioms and start all over again. Coincidentally, that's the failure of the argument we're discussing. It axiomatically presented ideas-as-immaterial, as something with no similarity to the material and so no potential causal ability. Turns out that was wrong.