Religion
In reply to the discussion: The scientific meta-narrative [View all]Joseph8th
(228 posts)... should be leapfrogged. I think the greatest challenge to Cartesian rationalism emanates from the brainpan of David Hume, not John Locke. This is especially true vis-a-vis religion as belief-in-miracles. The reason I say this is Locke's epistemology is underdeveloped (even by his own estimation), whereas Hume's is foundational to the sort of empiricism that many modern atheists default to. (In my case, at least.)
For instance, the OP writes, "Faith in that which cannot be rationally proved, has its own legitimacy." Locke's efforts focused on taking these apart and looking for the limits of knowledge in the presumed nature of things. Hume took the less strictly empirical approach and argued that when our knowledge is empirically limited, we shouldn't slip into metaphysics, so to speak. Rather we should default to our own senses, experience, common sense, and a sort of forensic science. The classic example, of course, was the miracles depicted in the Bible (and by natural extension, god itself).
In other words: in the absence of empirical evidence that anyone can walk on water, we should default to common experience rather than the testimony of long-dead witnesses or elaborate metaphysical speculations. In this sense, Hume's epistemology is more complete than Locke's: when an idea (like beauty or god) doesn't have any empirical basis of fact, we may safely drop it into an 'unfounded' category to be either revisited on new data, or left to languish. It's essentially a convenient way of dispatching topics that are outside the limits of knowledge, and don't have any compelling real-life implications.