Descartes
Many readers follow Descartes with fascination and pleasure as he contends in the midst of all the skepticism in the first two Meditations. Descartes refutes the skeptics by means of his famous axiom, "cogito, ergo sum". From this premise that a clear consciousness of his thinking proved his own existence, he argued the existence of God. However, many readers find themselves baffled and repulsed when they come to his proof for the existence of God in Meditation three and five. In large measure this change of attitude results from a myriad of factors. One is that the proof is complicated in ways which the earlier discourse is not. Secondly, the complications include the use of abstract mental constructs for which the reader is overwhelmingly unprepared-including such doctrines as the Cartesian version of the Great Chain of Being, the heirloom theory of causality, and confusing terms that are used in technical ways which requires clarification. Lastly, we live in an age which is largely skeptical of the whole enterprise of giving proofs for the existence of God. Descartes's cosmological argument of causality raises questions among critics in the Preface of the meditation about what he meant by the term "idea" and other key c
He begins the argument with a discussion of mathematics to describe the essence of God. Before beginning his support for the existence of God, he strived first to lay out a strong foundation in which he could refute his skeptics. If God did not exist then He would not be the most perfect being, but we clearly have the idea of the most perfect being so therefore He must exist. This reference to the natural light marks this claim both as one which Descartes claims to know for certain, and as an important step in the proof of God. This claim is based on the causal principle that he states: "Now it is indeed evident by the light of nature that there must be at least as much reality in the efficient and total cause as there is in the effect of that same cause" (36). Of his ideas of God, Descartes claims that only God Himself could be causally responsible for it. His first point in rebutting this possibility is to note that "just as the objective mode of being belongs to ideas by their very nature, so the formal mode of being belongs to the causes of ideas, at least to the first and preeminent ones, by their very nature" (37). The idea can be caused by another idea. With this in mind, Descartes states that no one would have enough power to maintain their own existence; therefore there must be a higher being. However, a thing cannot possess a characteristic unless it first exists. In order to demonstrate God's existence, Descartes should not assume, or presuppose, that which he is attempting to conclude. He could derive the notion of infinity from the negation of finite. On the contrary, I clearly understand that there is more reality in an infinite substance than there is in a finite one.
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Acceptance Essays
