Rene Descartes Meditations On Philosophy

In Rene Descartes’ Meditations on Philosophy, he attempts to prove the existence of God, by lowering things to the most basic truths that can be known. He wishes to prove God’s existence beyond any doubt, so he lays out everything that cannot be proven, in order to get to what can be proven beyond doubt. However, his initial doubts end up disproving the argument he is trying to make. He rightly believes that nearly everything people experience throughout their lives can be doubted, but then tries to use this as evidence for God, which disproves his own point. He ends up saying that God can be proven to be real, but it is impossible to say for sure because of the doubt he has already laid out. He is right to say that almost everything can be …show more content…
After establishing that basically everything can be doubted, he states that the idea of God could not have come from humans because people cannot create the idea of something infinite; so, it had to come from somewhere else. He uses this as proof for God’s existence, but it seems to be incorrect. Being able to create the idea of an infinite thing should not be beyond a human’s ability, and being able to would not make people infinite beings as he believes. There is no real reason as to why people should not be able to imagine something all powerful. For example, if people were truly not able to create an infinite being in their imagination, what is to stop an evil demon from doing so. Surely that being would be able to deceive humans into believing in some sort of all good and all-powerful God if it wanted to. Descartes earlier arguments for why things can be doubted are able to cast doubt on the rest of his argument. Furthermore, did Descartes or someone else not come up with the idea of this evil demon which is seemingly an infinite being? Somebody clearly has to have come up with this idea, …show more content…
For instance, one of the reasons that material objects most likely exist is that God would not deceive us on this idea. Since God cannot be known of for sure, the idea of material objects cannot be proven in this way. Descartes is essentially saying that God could create material objects and would not deceive people so they must be real. However, this method would serve as proof for everything in the world, but because of the doubts he has already laid out, it cannot be proven for sure. This leads to his argument for the mind being independent from the body, as he uses the perfect God he has explained in his argument. Descartes uses the existence of the God he has previously explained to say that God can make things to be independent from each other, and reality is distinct from the body, therefore the mind can exist independent from the body. Regardless of the previous doubts of God, it still seems impossible to say that the mind exists without a body, because there needs to be a brain to be able to process thought and think. Therefore, one needs both a body and some sort of processing structure to be able to have thought. Without a properly working brain people cannot correctly think, so the mind and body are not independent. Also, there is already doubt on the existence of God, which hurts this part of