the nature and attributes of God are beyond the grasp of man's finite and limited mind

he nature and existence of gods is unknown and inherently unknowable due to the nature of subjective experience

a form of Monotheism in which it is believed that one God exists, but that this God does not intervene in the world

a non-interventionist creator who permits the universe to run itself according to natural laws

derives the existence and nature of God from reason and personal experience

a natural religion as contrasted with one that is revealed by a God or which is artificially created by humans

do not view God as an entity in human form; they believe that one cannot access God through any organized religion or set of rituals, sacraments or other practices; they do not believe that God has selected a chosen people

every event, decision and action is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences

This does not necessarily mean that humans have no influence on the future and its events (a position more correctly known as Fatalism)

the level to which humans have influence over their future is itself dependent on present and past

Free Will and Determinism are logically incompatible categories and therefore mutually exclusive

Determinism is the reality, and therefore Free Will is an illusion

Recently challenged by the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics

a reaction against traditional philosophies, such as Rationalism, Empiricism and Positivism, that seek to discover an ultimate order and universal meaning in metaphysical principles or in the structure of the observed world.

religious belief depends on faith or revelation, rather than reason, intellect or natural theology

it objects to evidentialism, the notion that no belief should be held unless it is supported by evidence

metaphysical and epistemological doctrine that ideas or thoughts make up fundamental reality

the only thing actually knowable is consciousness (or the contents of consciousness), whereas we never can be sure that matter or anything in the outside world really exists

It is also contrasted with Realism (which holds that things have an absolute existence prior to, and independent of, our knowledge or perceptions)

he external world of real objects, so that the resulting world is essentially an idea of the monads’ perception

God, the "central monad", created a pre-established harmony between the internal world in the minds of the alert monads

knowledge must be based on our perceptions and that there was indeed no "real" knowable object behind one's perception

all we can know is the mental impressions or phenomena that an outside world creates in our minds

the mind shapes the world as we perceive it to take the form of space-and-time

the mind is not a blank slate but rather comes equipped with categories for organizing our sense impressions, even if we cannot actually approach the noumena (the "things-in-themselves") which emit or generate the phenomena (the "things-as-they-appear-to-us")

objects exist by virtue of our perception of them, as ideas residing in our awareness and in the consciousness of the Divine Being, or God

developed it out of the foundations of Empiricism: emphasizes the role of experience and sensory perception in the formation of ideas, while discounting the notion of innate ideas.

Berkeley further argued that it is God who causes us to experience physical objects by directly willing us to experience matter

the world "out there" is in fact Mind communicating with our human minds. It postulates that there is only one perceiver, and that this perceiver is one with that which is perceived

It accepts common sense Realism (the view that independent material objects exist), but rejects Naturalism (the view that the mind and spiritual values have emerged from material things).

agrees with Berkeley that there is no such thing as matter in the materialist sense, and that spirit is the essence and whole of reality.

However, he argued that there is a perfect parallel between the world of nature and the structure of our awareness of it.

Although, this cannot be true of an individual ego, it can be true of an absolute consciousness. He also objected to the idea that God is separate from the world, arguing that reality is a single, absolute, all-inclusive mind, which he (and Hegel) referred to as "The Absolute Spirit" (or simply "The Absolute").

the Absolute is all of reality: no time, space, relation or event ever exists or occurs outside of it.

Hegel's system of Objective Idealism has also come under fire for merely substituting the Absolute for God, which does not make anything clearer in the end

Like Plato many centuries before him, Hegel argued that the exercise of reason enables the reasoner to achieve a kind of reality (namely self-determination, or "reality as oneself") that mere physical objects like rocks can never achieve.

Hegel started from Kant's position that the mind can not know "things-in-themselves", and asserted that what becomes the real is "Geist" (mind, spirit or soul), which he sees as developing through history, each period having a "Zeitgeist" (spirit of the age).

each person's individual consciousness or mind is really part of the Absolute Mind (even if the individual does not realize this), and he argued that if we understood that we were part of a greater consciousness we would not be so concerned with our individual freedom, and we would agree with to act rationally in a way that did not follow our individual caprice, thereby achieving self-fulfillment.

the interaction of opposites (or dialectics) generates all of the concepts we use in order to understand the world. This occurs both in the individual mind as well as through history. Thus, the absolute ground of being is essentially a dynamic, increasingly complex historical process of necessity that unfolds by itself, ultimately giving rise to all the diversity in the world and in the concepts with which we think and make sense of the world.

Existentialists have also criticised Hegel for ultimately choosing an essentialistic whole over the particularity of existence.

Schopenhauer objected that The Absolute is just a non-personal substitute for the concept of God.

how spirit externalizes itself and how the concepts it generates can say anything true about nature; otherwise his system becomes just an intricate game involving vacuous concept

all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions, with no accounting of spirit or consciousness

Physicalism, however, has evolved with the physical sciences to incorporate far more sophisticated notions of physicality than just matter, for example wave/particle relationships and non-material forces produced by particles

Thales, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Democritus, and then, later, Epicurus and Lucretius

or human beings to survive, they need to produce and reproduce the material requirements of life, and this production is carried out through a division of labor based on very definite production relations between people. These relations form the economic base of society, and are themselves determined by the mode of production which is in force (e.g. tribal society, ancient society, feudalism, capitalism, socialism), and societies, and their cultural and institutional superstructures, naturally move from stage to stage when the dominant class is displaced by a new emerging class in a social and political upheaval.