In the first meditations Descartes established foundational certainty by doubting all truths he once held. In meditations three he brought up the idea of the evil genius, a being that is systematically deceiving you about everything. A question brought up in class asked; “Why wouldn’t Descartes doubt the evil genius?” The answer was that it was impossible to know. When I heard this answer I immediately assumed that Descartes view on the nature of God would relate to agnosticism. One who does not deny the existence of God and heaven but holds that you cannot know for certain whether or not they exist. This to me seems to be a pretty logical interpretation, but Descartes took it a whole other direction. He walked a fine line between two extreme philosophies’ of mind, eliminative materialism and idealism. The first claims that a person’s common understanding of the mental states are false and do not exist and that the mind can only adequately be explained by biology. The second concerns the fact that we only have knowledge about the world we know through the contents of our mind and conscience. Idealists assume that the only things we know for certain are ideas. Those two epistemologies are quite contradicting. After reading Descartes medications three and five concerning God, I was even more confused. His standpoint, also called the ontological argument asserts that God is proven by intuition and reason alone and that if it is possible for us to conceive the idea of God, then he must exist. Atheism is eliminativist about God, and denies the existence of a supreme being. There is contradiction number one. Concerning idealism and Descartes view, whatever I clearly and distinctly perceive to be contained in the idea of something is true of that thing. I must contradict this idea by stating that just as it is possible to comprehend anything existing it is equally possible to comprehend anything not existing, so it is unthinkable to image God not existing. Everyone has the will to believe what they please, but putting these ideas together makes me believe that Descartes, a man with a love for the sciences, abandons the fundamental theories for a more peaceful and comforting explanation.
1.31.07
Daniel Estrada | 08-Feb-07 at 2:44 pm | Permalink
I’m not exactly sure I understand your point. Descartes rejects both the elminitivist position and the idealist position, so the fact that his view is not compatible with either is not a contradiction.
Furthermore, he claims to have independent reasons for postulating the existence of God, in the form of a deductive a priori argument that doesn’t depend on experience. Whether or not his argument is valid, its not exactly clear that his use of God in his argument is merely for ‘comfort’.