Examples Of Descartes Argument For The Existence Of God

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Descartes’ Argument for the Existence of God

In Descartes’ second meditation, he offers up an argument for Defective Nature Doubt that brings forth the idea that we can’t be certain of anything we perceive being actual and real (153). Descartes thinks that there is a possibility that we are constantly being deceived due to the fact that we don’t know, with perfect certainty, know where our ideas originate from (154). He tries to describe a method in order to dispel this Defective Nature Doubt by giving an argument for the existence of God. I think that the argument he gives for the existence of God is valid, yet I find it to be unsound due to the fact that a few of his premises are can easily be debated. In order to express this opinion, I will first provide explanations of the premises and conclusions of the argument, and then I will critique the premises that I find to be inadequate in order to support my opinion that Descartes’ argument is valid but unsound. Descartes’ argument for the existence of God begins with him describing himself as a thinking thing (157). Descartes casted doubt on almost …show more content…

The first conclusion that he comes to is that due to the five premises, God had to have been the entity that placed the ideas of God into Descartes’ mind (157). Through the five premises, Descartes casts out the idea of his thoughts of God coming from inside of himself, and he is able to pin the cause to God. In short, Descartes argues that he is a thinking thing with an idea of God that could not in any way originated from himself due to his imperfect nature. After determining that God must have been the entity to put the ideas into his mind, Descartes’ finalizes his argument with one last conclusion; God must exist (157). After determining that there was no other way that the ideas of God could have came from anywhere else but God, Descartes was able to come to the conclusion that God

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