In part 4 of Discourse, Descartes discusses God and some reasoning to prove his existence. He explains that since most objects in the world are imperfect, they could easily be delusions of our imperfect minds and could simply be objects our minds have created, but since our minds are imperfect, it is impossible for them to create the idea of a perfect God, basically concluding that there must exist the perfect mind of God to account for himself and anything else in the world that is perfect.
I don't really agree with Descartes on this point. Maybe he is correct by saying that we rely on our senses too much, but there's no way to know God is perfect if he can't been seen. Yes, there are millions of unexplainable things in the world, but there is also a lot that science has explained in the past thousand years, many of these things are things people concluded God was responsible for. I think things that are still unknown will be figured out eventually...it just takes time.
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3 comments:
In reply to your comment "there's no way to know God is perfect if he can't be seen":
I also don't think that Descartes argument does too much work, but I do think there are good points along the way. If God was already proven to exist via the cosmological argument (the argument that says that God is a necessary first cause of everything which exists except himself), then it might be possible to prove that God is perfect. Imagine anything good in existence, in fact, imagine everything in existence that is good. Now if God is the cause of existence itself, that means that he is the source of all goodness. This would mean that he does not lack any amount of goodness. IN the same way, God being the source of all power that exists would almo mean that he lacks no power at all, but is in fact all powerful.
The problem here is that these things can only be said if it is already proven that God exists, but instead Descartes is arguing backwards. He is saying that since God is perfect, then God exists.
Yes, I think that if there was a way to prove God's existence, Descartes might have an argument. I agree he has a couple of decent points, but his conclusion is horrible (in my opinion).
I agree with you sandy that this is sort of a bad argument. He talks about earlier being able to not know anything then we can conclude God exits because we could not come up with it own our own that a devine mind had to put it there.
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