Assessment of Descartes' Claims About the Existence of God

Assessment of Descartes' Claims About the Existence of God

While reading Descartes book “meditations on the first philosophy” I

noticed some fatal flaws in his reasoning in his 3rd mediation, so I

shall start from the start of this chapter and assess his reasoning’s

as I read through the chapter.

Descartes assesses that he is certain he is a thinking thing, as I

think therefore I am is self-evident, he then tries to go on to see

whatever else he can be certain about!

He notices with “I am a thinking thing” he has a “clear and distinct

perception of what he is asserting”, He then turns this around and

states that things that he clearly and distinctly perceives are true,

and if anything he could find to be false by using this method would

make the method unreliable thus open to doubt but regardless of the

latter consideration he continues to use it as a method for that

“whatever I perceive very clearly and distinctively is true.” So it is

already too late, he has employed it as a method almost immediately

after noting that he could be open to error, now by using it as a

method he will be unable to see any falsehoods that the method may

accompany, thus he is open to accept dutiable beliefs as true. I would

go on to criticize the method in detail, but he never actually

releases details on syntax of the method.

After making this mistake Descartes goes on to Asses whether he really

should use this as a method of finding new truths, but he seems to

continuing using this dutiable method of reasoning.

He goes on to talk about ideas, he notices that his adventitious ideas

do not seem to depend on his will, for frequently he notices ...

... middle of paper ...

...xists,

just the idea.

Most of Descartes ‘proofs’ about god’s existence seem to come from the

idea that we only can have ideas about god if he exists, but the idea

of god needn’t have come from god – it could have come from within me,

people could have based the idea of god on their own limited

perfections and simply imagine degrees of perfection up to complete

perfection which is god, so the idea could come completely from them.

Descartes also backs up his argument about ideas saying they all

regress from one particular source, because every effect has a cause

more perfect and real than the effect, but he fails to explain why the

cause most be more real than the effect?.

And the biggest criticisms of all are; why must infinity be more

perfect than the finite? Why must the cause be greater than the

effect?