Descartes' Proof of God
Discuss and analyse the proofs given for the existence of God in Descartes' Meditations on First PhilosophyWhile all six of Rene Descartes' 'Meditations' contain ideas and concepts that are hard to digest by the average reader at the best of times, perhaps the most difficult-to-swallow is his third meditation on his proof for the existence of God. The first meditation is subtitled 'What can be called into doubt', in which he explains his form of scepticism which can doubt the existence of anything presented by the senses which seems to exist outside of the mind itself. In this meditation Descartes begins by mentioning that he had as a child accepted many things as true which later transpired to be false, and suggests that knowledge he now takes for granted could equally be false. He goes on to suppose that a supremely powerful demon could be deceiving him, and that perhaps it would be safer to doubt everything he has taken for granted concerning the world around him, if indeed there is one, and start from scratch. The second meditation, subtitled 'The nature of the human mind, and how it is better known than the body', begins with this 'clean slate' of scepticism towards anything external to the mind, and concludes that the on
in order for a given idea to contain such and such objective reality, it must surely derive it from some cause that contains at least as much formal reality as there is objective reality in the idea. The concepts of objective and formal reality are trickier to grasp- a footnote in the Cottingham translation of Descartes' meditations describes the distinction between them: '. All these attributes are such that, the more carefully I concentrate on them, the less possible it seems that they could have originated from me alone. He continues by attempting to use these facts to establish finally whether he is alone in the world. His most common mistake, as mentioned earlier, has been to presume that the ideas in his mind of an external world, sky, stars etc. He considers first that the idea of an infinite substance could be arrived at by deduction, 'not by means of a true idea but merely by negating the finite'. He is also on safe ground concerning the emotions, since even though it is possible to (for example) desire something false or non-existent, the desire for the object is still clear and distinct in the mind. They may read about what a nice guy the star is in 'Hello!' magazine, listen to this song lyrics, see him doing work for charity, and form an idea in their mind that the star is perfect, or at least good. He responds by saying that God contains nothing potential and that the gradual increase in his (Descartes') knowledge is 'the surest sign of imperfection'. Consider a teenager idolising a pop star. He also considers matter or substance, and while remaining undecided on whether it exists or not concludes that if it exists it is both changeable and extended. He considers two radically different ideas of the sun in his mind- the one that seems to come from his senses is that of a small, bright ball in the sky, while the one stemming from reasoning or innate ideas is of a huge object many times larger than the earth. Laws of cause and effect provide the first proof for the existence of God.
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