The George Berkeley proof of God – and how it evolved and differed from the St. Thomas Aquinas proof of God – was the very first topic we studied in Philosophy 101 back in 1993 at UC Berkeley. I loved it, just because a grown man went out of his way to support the notion you have when you’re four, that nothing exists unless you (a.k.a. God, since every four-year-old is the master of the universe) are conjuring it with your own brain. Nothing can exist just because. Everything that exists exists because the four-year-old in the sky wills it into existence.

The more I think of his theory, the more obnoxious it becomes, because it’s predicated on the notion that the only entity that could possibly be superior to man is God. Happenstance couldn’t be superior to man. Nature itself couldn’t be superior to man unless it’s acting as the agent of a supremely clever mind. If George Berkeley couldn’t conjur objects for his senses to perceive at will – if Berkeley experienced or witnessed things in his life and his environment that he hadn’t purposely decided to experience – then the only explanation is that God put them there for him. It had to be God. Nothing less would do.

In Berkeley’s defense, he lived centuries before philosopher Keanu Reeves would prove otherwise with a documentary called The Matrix.

The actual George Berkeley proof of God:

Whatever power I may have over my own thoughts, I find the ideas actually perceived by Sense have not a like dependence on my will. When in broad daylight I open my eyes, it is not in my power to choose whether I shall see or no, or to determine what particular objects shall present themselves to my view; and so likewise as to the hearing and other senses; the ideas imprinted on them are not creatures of my will. There is therefore some other Will or Spirit that produces them.