Rene Descartes Deception

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Leaving all religions aside, it is a commonly held belief that God is omnibenevolent, or all-good. People believe that God serves no power in the negativity brought into our daily lives and is not God who deceives us. The French philosopher René Descartes believes that it is true that God is not our source of deception, but rather an evil demon. This demon arises reasonable doubt in trusting the information we obtain from our senses. Descartes began it all with a revolution in modern philosophy, but he limited himself and he was careful to phrase his works in such a way that it rarely challenged or contradicted the church's doctrines directly. Although he attempted to avoid conflict with the church, Descartes did challenge the church’s authority …show more content…

Descartes establishes the idea that you can prove things are true in reality if they exist in the real world outside of the mind and if they can somehow be verified. Descartes says that we cannot trust our senses when we attempt to verify something because we could be seeing or perceiving things at that are presented to us by an evil genius; this evil genius has the motive to deceive us (Solomon 192). Descartes explains that the you can only be certain that “I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it, or that I mentally conceive it” (Solomon 192). According to Descartes, the evil genius is limited in the things that he can do and as long as a being has self-aware and consciousness, they can be sure that they exist even if an evil genius existed (Solomon …show more content…

We must resist the urge to accept the things society has imposed on us and call these things to doubt. Through our own reasoning we should decide for ourselves whether we agree or disagree with what we have been told. I agree that all the knowledge we have gained outside of things passed down has been discovered through the use of our senses. I do not believe that it is necessary or even possible to call absolutely everything to doubt and I believe that we must carefully reflect on things instead. Descartes claims to call everything to doubt, but Descartes did not do such because this is an impossible task. I do agree that we possess the ability to find truths in reality, but unlike Descartes, I believe we can do such through the careful use of our senses. We can not depend entirely on our senses because they fail us at times, but our senses can aid in discovering the truth if they are used correctly. Through the use of both our mid and our senses, we possess the ability to understand the world that we live in. Although Descartes’ idea of an evil genius seems like a paranoid fantasy, it clearly propose some valuable and revolutionary

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