rational worldview
...dern philosophy including Decartes, Spinoza, and liebniz. The rationalists maintain that everything is determined therefore there is no chance, and no accidents, if there was, that would mean that the world and events were unorderly, unpredictable and without purpose. The empirisists, on the other hand, while still maintaining the law of causality deny that it applys to the whole universe and reject the aspect of reason and purpose that the rationalist claims. Liebniz was considered the "biggest" rationalist as his worldview was the most extreme. Liebniz developed his principle of sufficient reason as an alternative to a chance view of the world. For Liebniz, everything must have a reason why it is the way it is rather than some other way. This principle of sufficient reason claims more than the law of causality. Thus we arrive at Liebniz's cosmological argument for the existence of God. For liebniz there are two ways that something can exist. It can necessarly exist or it can contingently exist. What follows, for liebniz, is that every contingent event in the world exists because of some other contingent existence (and could have not existed at all). now this successoin of contingent existences whether finite or infinite makes up the world, but the cause and reason for the world itself cannot be found in this succession of contingent causes and events but only in a nessessary existentce, something that must exist, and would be a contradiction to assert otherwise. Now for liebn...