While the fire that is hallucination is fire that is conjured through the ideation of finite spirits such as other individuals. Real fire, since it is a subjective creation of God, has the ability to burn us, while illusionary fires do not have that inherent ability. Therefore all objectives that are not perceived by other human beings are perceived by God and have an existence within the world.
Berkeley's fundamental argument about reality and matter is that they are all sensory perceptions. However, since God creates ultimate harmony within the world and moreover provides a system in which we live in, his rules applies to all objects that we possess and use. Therefore, although arsenic in itself is nothing more than an idea, it is an idea that is regulated by the ideation of God, and therefore it is part of a defined regularity that have specific pre-defined properties. Eating arsenic, since it has dangerous properties that God instilled in it through His ideation, it is still toxic and deadly to human beings. The role of science has a unique position within Berkeley's philosophical system. Since he argues that the true cause of any phenomenon is a spirit and that the spirit in relations to most objects and phenomenon is God, it would appear as if this is against the grain of established science. Berkeley argues that science is about the discovery of regularities in our ideas. The point of scientific inquiry is to reveal the regularities within the system that God has created for us. Therefore, we know that fire heats and the hearts pump blood to the rest of our body; these discoveries are all part of the universal collection of regularities that occur and are dictated through God's ideation process. Science is about uncovering all of the specific regularities that are associated with ideas.
Thus Berkeley sees scientific explanations not as causes but as signs that point to established universal knowledge. Since the materialist system is created by God, the results of scientific inquiry are useful. Scientific explanations are reductions in regularity rather than actual causal explanations for phenomenon.
Berkeley articulates that God, Himself is a spirit that has infinite rather than finite like human beings. His explanation...
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