Why God Cannot Exist Using Descartes' Arguements
Descartes sets about proving the existence of God through his meditations on knowledge in an effort to prove the skeptics of his time wrong. He first determines that human knowledge is based entirely too much on unproved presuppositions. He argues that this makes it difficult to distinguish between truth and error, since we cannot recognize true knowledge. Descartes proposes that the quest for knowledge must be based upon universal doubt. Specifically, he proposes the following in relation to his universal methodic doubt: 1. In order to seek truth, it is necessary once in the course of our life, to doubt, as far as possible, of all things. 2. We ought also to consider as false all that is doubtful. 3. We ought not meanwhile to make use of doubt in the conduct of life… 4. Why we may doubt of sensible things. 5. Why we may also doubt of mathematical demonstrations. 6. We cannot doubt of our existence while we doubt, and this is the first knowledge we acquire when we philosophize in order. Descartes proceeded to strip away his knowledge base in order to determine the one indubitable fact, "Cogito, ergo sum". From this absolute knowledge of his own existence, he set about deducing the existence of God through ontological argument. § In our minds, the idea of God is one of an infinitely perfect Being § An infinitely perfect being must have existence, otherwise it would not be infinitely perfect. § Therefore, God exists. In proving the existence of God, Descartes set the groundwork for determining that God created man. He further postulated that God, being infinitely perfect and not a deceiver, could not have provided man with the deceptive powers of knowledge. Therefore, man's mental faculties are determined to be trustworthy provided we separate what there is of clear and distinct in the knowledge from what is obscure and confused. Using this reasoning, man must discard all previous knowledge which is doubt-ridden, all sensory-based knowledge (as perceptions can be misleading), and all intellection. As a result, skepticism is removed and valid knowledge possible. Descartes primary purpose was the defense of human knowledge against the attacks of the skeptics. He was justified in excluding preconceived notions, presuppositions, and traditions in determining the limits of knowledge. Descartes discarded the ability of the mind to know truth and the human abilities of contradiction and sufficient reason.
At the start of the meditation, Descartes begins by rejecting all his beliefs, so that he would not be deceived by any misconceptions from reaching the truth. Descartes acknowledges himself as, “a thing that thinks: that is, a thing that doubts, affirms, denies, understands a few things, is ignorant of many things” He is certain that that he thinks and exists because his knowledge and ideas are both ‘clear and distinct’. Descartes proposes a general rule, “that whatever one perceives very clearly and very distinctly is true” Descartes discovers, “that he can doubt what he clearly and distinctly perceives is true led to the realization that his first immediate priority should be to remove the doubt” because, “no organized body of knowledge is possible unless the doubt is removed” The best probable way to remove the doubt is prove that God exists, that he is not a deceiver and “will always guarantee that any clear and distinct ideas that enter our minds will be true.” Descartes must remove the threat of an invisible demon that inserts ideas and doubts into our minds to fool us , in order to rely on his ‘clear and distinct’ rule.
after noting that he could be open to error, now by using it as a
In earlier meditations Descartes proved that he existed through the Cogito argument. Descartes must now move on to examine and explore questions about the world around him, but instead of doing this he first stop to examine the question of whether or not God exists. Descartes wants to know that he was created by an all knowing, perfect creator that is good and wants to make sure that he was not created by an evil spirit or demon. If Descartes can prove that he was created by a perfect all knowing creator then his ideas must carry some semblance of truth, because God is not a deceiver and he must of placed these ideas in Descartes. Descartes has good reasons for searching for the answer to the question of God’s existence, now he has to come up with a good sound argument to prove it.
In Meditations, Descartes brings doubt to everything he believes because it is human nature to believe that which is false. He states that most of what he believes comes from the senses and that a lot of times those senses can be deceived. His conclusion of doubting everything is based on his example of a basket of apples. It goes as follows; you have a basket of apples but you fear that some apples have gone bad and you don't want them to rot the others, so you throw all the apples out of the basket. Now that the basket is empty you examine each apple carefully and return the good apples to the basket. This is what he does with his beliefs, he follows and keeps only those beliefs of which he is sure of. Our beliefs as a whole must be discarded and then each individual belief must be looked at carefully before we can accept it. We must only accept those beliefs we feel are good.
Many readers follow Descartes with fascination and pleasure as he descends into the pit of skepticism in the first two Meditations, defeats the skeptics by finding the a version of the cogito, his nature, and that of bodies, only to find them selves baffled and repulsed when they come to his proof for the existence of God in Meditation III. In large measure this change of attitude results from a number of factors. One is that the proof is complicated in ways which the earlier discourse is not. Second is that the complications include the use of scholastic machinery for which the reader is generally quite unprepared -- including such doctrines as a Cartesian version of the Great Chain of Being, the Heirloom theory of causaltiy, and confusi ng terms such as "eminent," "objective" and "formal reality" used in technical ways which require explanation. Third, we live in an age which is largely skeptical of the whole enterprise of giving proofs for the existence of God. A puzzled student once remaked, "If it were possible to prove that God exists, what would one need faith for?" So, even those inclined to grant the truth of the conclusion of Descartes' proof are often skeptical about the process of reaching it.
Rene Descartes meditations on the existence of God are very profound, thought-provoking, and engaging. From the meditations focused specifically on the existence of God, Descartes uses the argument that based on his clear and distinct perception that cannot be treated with doubt, God does exist. In the beginning of the third meditation, Descartes proclaims that he is certain he is a thinking thing based on his clear and distinct perception, and he couldn’t be certain unless all clear and distinct perceptions are true. Before diving into the existence of God, Descartes introduces smaller arguments to prove the existence of God. For example, Descartes introduces in his argument that there are ideas in which he possess that exists outside of him. Utilizing the objective versus formal reality, Descartes states “If the objective reality of any of my ideas turns out to be so great that I am sure the same reality does not reside in me, either formally or eminently, and hence that I myself cannot be its cause, it will necessarily follow that I am not alone in the world, but that some other thing which is the cause of this idea exists” (29). In other words, the ideas of objective reality that resides in Descartes can potentially only come from a supreme being, which is God; God possess more objective reality than he does formal reality. We as humans, as Descartes states, are finite substance, and God is the only infinite substance. The only way for us as a finite substance to think of an infinite substance is possible if, and only if, there is an infinite substance that grants us the idea of substance in first place. After these smaller arguments, Descartes states that while we can doubt the existence of many things, due to the fact that ...
There was one thing that Descartes knew for certain, he existed. If Descartes was able to think, then he existed, which comes from one of his most famous quotes, “I think; therefore I am.” He knew that since he existed, he could not have created himself, so something else had to have created his existence. He believed that one could go down the line and keep asking what caused that person to exist and so on until eventually ending with an infinite self-causing being, which is God. He used this notion of an existing God to prove his distinction of ideas.
In his work, Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes narrates the search for certainty in order to recreate all knowledge. He begins with “radical doubt.” He asks a simple question “Is there any one thing of which we can be absolutely certain?” that provides the main question of his analysis. Proceeding forward, he states that the ground of his foundation is the self – evident knowledge of the “thinking thing,” which he himself is. Moving up the tower of certainty, he focuses on those ideas that can be supported by his original foundation. In such a way, Descartes’s goal is to establish all of human knowledge of firm foundations. Thus, Descartes gains this knowledge from the natural light by using it to reference his main claims, specifically
Having faith is believing in things that you don’t see. According to the Meditations, Descartes gets rid of beliefs that he isn’t certain of and keeps the ones that are undoubtable. He tries to prove that God has must exist since we have such a clear and distinct idea of him. I believe it is impossible to prove without a doubt that God exists.
Understanding Descartes’ philosophy begins with understanding his method of doubt. Think about it like this. Almost everything you believe to be true comes from the senses or through the senses. However, the senses are sometimes deceptive. Since the senses are not completely trustworthy, it is irrational to place complete trust in them. However it is no small leap of faith to presume that everything our senses tells us is false. In fact, it seems almost preposterous to say such a thing. But as Descartes points out, we have dreams regularly and in these dreams everything we experience is a figment of our imagination, or at least not real in the physical sense. So, at least according to Descartes, it is reasonable to doubt everything our senses tell us, for the time being. Now, using similar logic, we can say that everything we have learned from physics, astronomy, medicine, and other such fields are all doubtful. Descartes even believed we could say that such simple, logical statements as 2+3 = 5 or a square has 4 sides could be conceived to be false. “Since I judge that others sometimes make mistakes in matters that they believe they know most perfectly, may I not, in like fashion, be deceived every time I add two and three or count the sides of a square…'; We are now at the point where we are doubting everything – the world around us, that we have a body, and anything else that we could possibly...
In Meditations on First Philosophy, it is the self-imposed task of Descartes to cast doubt upon all which he knows in order to build a solid foundation of knowledge out of irrefutable truths. Borrowing an idea from Archimedes, that with one firm and immovable point the earth could be moved, Descartes sought one immovable truth. Descartes' immovable truth, a truth on which he would lay down his foundation of knowledge and define all that which he knows, was the simple line "Cogito ergo sum": I think, therefore I am. This allowed for his existence.
Baird and Kaufmann, the editors of our text, explain in their outline of Descartes' epistemology that the method by which the thinker carried out his philosophical work involved first discovering and being sure of a certainty, and then, from that certainty, reasoning what else it meant one could be sure of. He would admit nothing without being absolutely satisfied on his own (i.e., without being told so by others) that it was incontrovertible truth. This system was unique, according to the editors, in part because Descartes was not afraid to face doubt. Despite the fact that it was precisely doubt of which he was endeavoring to rid himself, he nonetheless allowed it the full reign it deserved and demanded over his intellectual labors. "Although uncertainty and doubt were the enemies," say Baird and Kaufmann (p.16), "Descartes hit upon the idea of using doubt as a tool or as a weapon. . . . He would use doubt as an acid to pour over every 'truth' to see if there was anything that could not be dissolved . . . ." This test, they explain, resulted for Descartes in the conclusion that, if he doubted everything in the world there was to doubt, it was still then certain that he was doubting; further, that in order to doubt, he had to exist. His own existence, therefore, was the first truth he could admit to with certainty, and it became the basis for the remainder of his epistemology.
Descartes’ attempts to extricate himself from his sceptical doubts of the meditations had a varying degree of success, his doubt of his own existence was well surmounted with the indubitable ‘cogito’ argument. The second of his doubts, that of the existence of God was not extricated as successfully with the unconvincing trademark argument and the out of date ontological argument. Descartes then went on to tackling his doubt regarding the existence of the external world, which was done well but was based on the shady proofs for the existence of God. Descartes may not have proven the existence of God or the existence of the external world however he did produce a new style of philosophy in which he attempted to base all of his epistemological knowledge (or beliefs) on a single indubitable premise, this style of philosophy now known as foundationalism has been and is still used by philosophers today at great credit to Descartes, Rene Descartes proved himself within this book to be the father of modern philosophy.
Descartes argues that we can know the external world because of God, and God is not a deceiver. Descartes’ core foundation for understanding what is important comes from three points: our thoughts about the world and the things in it could be deceptive, our power of reasoning has found ideas that are indubitable, and certainty come by way of reasoning. Once we have a certainty of God, and ourselves then we are easily able to distinguish reality from dreams, and so on. God created us and gave us reason, which tells us that our ideas of the external world come from God. God has directly provided us with the idea of the external world. The concept of existence, the self, and doubt could not have existed on its own; therefore they had to be created by someone to have put them in our mind. That creator is God, who is omnipotent and perfect. God is not a deceiver to me; God is good, so therefore what I perceive really does exist. God without existence is like a mountain without a valley. A valley does not exist if there is no mountain, and vice versa a mountain is not a mountain with out a valley. We cannot believe or think of God without existence. We know the idea of God, and that idea inevitably contains his existence. My thought on god is clear and distinct that he is existent. Descartes’ now has ‘rebuilt’ the world, solely because of his power and reasoning. Descartes’ is only able...
Rene Descartes, a 17th century French philosopher believed that the origin of knowledge comes from within the mind, a single indisputable fact to build on that can be gained through individual reflection. His Discourse on Method (1637) and Meditations (1641) contain his important philosophical theories. Intending to extend mathematical method to all areas of human knowledge, Descartes discarded the authoritarian systems of the scholastic philosophers and began with universal doubt. Only one thing cannot be doubted: doubt itself. Therefore, the doubter must exist. This is the kernel of his famous assertion Cogito, ergo sum (I am thinking, therefore I am existing). From this certainty Descartes expanded knowledge, step by step, to admit the existence of God (as the first cause) and the reality of the physical world, which he held to be mechanistic and entirely divorced from the mind; the only connection between the two is the intervention of God.