What Is Descartes Argument For God's Existence

Throughout the Meditations, Descartes successfully establishes methodical doubt about math and all sensory information, however, his answer to the doubt cast by the Evil Demon ploy does not fully relieve the dilemma of skepticism that his intense application of doubt has brought forth. Ultimately, Descartes is unable to satisfactorily answer the Evil Demon doubt because his argument does not prove that God’s existence would not prevent the serious errors in judgment and perception caused by the Evil Demon doubt.

Descartes uses the Evil Demon hypothesis to prove that all one knows for sure that they exist. All other knowledge can conceivably be the result of a powerful evil demon with malicious intent. To call reality into doubt, Descartes …show more content…
However, Descartes’ argument for God’s existence involves a circular argument, the Cartesian circle, as he relies upon the principles of clarity and distinctness to argue for the existence of God, and then claims that God is the guarantor of his clear and distinct ideas. Descartes says that we are sure that what we clearly and distinctly perceive is true only because God exists. However, how can we be sure that God exists only because we clearly and distinctly perceive this. Before we can be sure that God exists, we need to be able to prove that whatever we perceive clearly and distinctly is true. The proof for clear and distinct perceptions does not hold. So, because we still do not have a solid reason to think that what we clearly and distinctly perceive outside of ourselves is true, we have no reason to trust our ability to reason about other things, such as God, which means we can prove without a shadow of a doubt that God is not a …show more content…
He starts to build the foundation of knowledge with the statement “ I think, therefore I am,” and because that thought is true while occurring, it is a clear and distinct perception. So, Descarte does not need to rely on God to prove the existence of clear and distinct perceptions. However, while it is true that we can clearly and distinctly perceive that the statement “ I think, therefore I am” is true, we only know this is true because it directly relates to our own being. God is a more abstract subject and we have no proof to suggest that our ability to reason about such topics is reliable. God is an infinite being with a higher reality than ours so it is plausible that if he was to exist we would not be able to fully comprehended his existence or his will, so we can not claim with certainty that God is not a deceiver because that would be claiming to have a solid understanding of how something with a higher reality than ours when we can not even fathom its existence on our