Rene Descartes And God's Existence

Rene Descartes and God’s Existence
Rene Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician and a scientist in the seventeenth century. As a man of science, Descartes wanted to make discoveries in science as factual as mathematics. With Descartes’s faith, he did not eliminate God from philosophy. Descartes, “The Father of Modern Philosophy”, was a Catholic who wrote the Meditations on First Philosophy. “The Meditations is characterized by Descartes’s use of methodic doubt, a systematic procedure of rejecting as though false all types of belief in which one has been, or could ever be, deceived.” In Meditations, Descartes presented the cosmological argument and the ontological argument to prove God’s existence. Descartes also provided reasons …show more content…
“The ontological argument attempts to prove God’s existence through abstract reasoning alone” or the mere idea of God validates God’s existence. In this argument Descartes differentiate the concepts of existence and essence. Descartes described God as being all good, all knowing, all powerful and this is what we think of a God; his essence. He also stated that God has the vital characteristic of the idea of eternal existence. In Descartes’s opinion, if God does not exist God should not have all these properties of a God; His essence and existence is inseparable. Another characteristic of God is perfection and if God does not exist it would show the idea of God is imperfect. Since God is perfect, He does exist. For Descartes, “…whenever we think of a being greater than ourselves, then we are necessarily led to the idea of God, and contained therein is the idea of His necessarily existing… once we think of a certain thing, we are forced to arrive at those …show more content…
God is perfect, not only He is present; He is a good and non-deceiving God. If God is good and non-deceiving why did he create humans to make mistakes? Descartes doesn’t blame God for the error: we humans are short in what we know; we make errors because we are not aware of something we ought to know. An example of this is we cannot read what in other ‘s mind. Not knowing it all is a disadvantage, but not a mistake. Descartes continued that we cannot know the reason behind why God created us with limited knowledge and in reference to the whole creation God has perfect plan for every single one of us. Like us humans, we have opposable thumb for us to able to do our activities of daily living to survive. Why does humans fall into errors? As we already know, us humans are limited in our intelligence, understanding and etc., but we do have the power of will. In other words, we humans have the will to say “yes or no.” We are responsible for our own actions, falling into errors. Descartes stated, “Whence, then, arise my errors? They arise from this cause alone, that I do not restrain the will, which of much wider range than understanding, within the same limits, but extended it even to things I do not understand, and as the will is of itself indifferent to such, it readily falls into error and sin by choosing the false in room of true, and evil instead of good.”