Descartes and God

After reading the excerpts from Descartes' meditations for this week, I was struck by how convincing the logic of his reasoning is. When I first heard of the idea that Descartes had decided to doubt everything that his sense's told him, I thought the idea a bit outlandish. I've always been a firm believer in that which I can perceive by my senses, and the idea that he could dismiss everything you can see, hear, feel, smell and taste sounded absurd. However the way that he approached it seemed very convincing to me. His argument about how the senses can be deceived indeed seemed logical and rational. Even in my own life I have seen how natural phenomena can fool the senses. My favorite one that my uncle taught me when I was younger was how the moon seems bigger at the horizon. When I would see the moon appear during the late afternoon or night, I thought it was remarkable how the moon, so large when it first peeked over the horizon, would seem to slowly grow smaller as it ascended into the sky. On one occasion when my family was having a barbeque on the beach I mentioned this to my uncle who explained that it was an optical illusion. He told me to take a coin and hold it over the moon when it was at the horizon, and then repeat this once it was higher in the sky. True to his word, the moon was covered by the coin both times. 

Although Descartes doesn’t talk about this example, I thought it was useful to come up with an example of how the senses can be fooled that I had experienced in my life. Through thinking of experiences in my life that supported Descartes theory I managed to agree with something I didn’t think was possible. So nothing our senses perceive is real. Okay cool, I’m on board with you René.

From this point it also made sense to me that what proves our own existence is thought, and the ability to formulate even the idea that our senses can’t be trusted. If nothing we perceive can be trusted to be real, then the only thing we are left with is our mind, which since it is being used must certainly be real. I think therefor I am. Thank god I can think.

But there’s one thing within the excerpts from meditations that I had some trouble with, and that’s his position on god. In the part of his work that we read Descartes says, “is there not a God, or some being, by whatever name I may designate him, who causes these thoughts to arise in my mind?” From the slight amount of research I have done it appears that Descartes was a Catholic, but I wonder how he arrived at a position such as the idea that there is a god? In my mind, if we are to doubt all of our senses, does this not invalidate much of what religious practice is based off of? If we cannot trust the senses, then we cannot trust the words and writings of religious practitioners. If our eyes cannot be trusted, then how can we trust the word of the Bible, the Torah, or the Qur’an? To take this a step further, if the senses can’t be trusted then we can’t trust the word of those who first wrote these holy books, since it is entirely plausible that what they thought they witnessed or experienced could very well be complete fabrications.

Perhaps the answer to this then is that he who creates the fabrications, the deceptions that make us think we perceive things with our senses is as Descartes says a “being who is possessed at once of the highest power and the deepest cunning.” However I would argue that if we are completely distancing ourselves from everything all philosophers and thinkers have thought of in the past, then we can’t ascribe to the idea of god either, or at least take the idea of god as a given. There are other forces that could explain this deception. Though it sounds outlandish, we could be living in a matrix, an alternate reality created by some alien race, or perhaps even humans, and it is this that creates the deceptions that our senses perceive.

Or looking at it from a biological/evolutionary perspective, one could argue that humans developed the ability to perceive using the senses just as all other life forms have, through slow adaptation and evolution. The same can be said for thought, many animals other than humans think to some extent. The ability for Humans to perceive the self, and think deeply about life, existence, and other profound things could be argued to have been a natural step in our biological evolution, and have nothing to do with a creator, or a god. Simple, cold, spiritless science. 

Perhaps you could harken back further and say that the creation of life itself had to have been ordained by some higher power. The first bacterium shot down from some unknown place to begin the spread of life forms throughout the universe. But then you could also argue that it has always just been, life has always exist, there is no beginning, no end, that time is endless or goes in a loop or some other intricate idea that explains the workings of the universe without the need for a god or higher power. The universe is so vast, and we understand so little of it that the existence of some higher spiritual power is just as likely as there being some other explanation for all the mysteries of human existence and the beggining of life. 

Well that got slightly wacky, and I suppose Descartes couldn’t have thought about his idea of God as deeply as this seeing the theory of evolution didn't exist, and the thinking about biology, astronomy hadn’t progressed as far they have today. I would be interested to see what Descartes would think given the scientific knowledge of today. Then again, perhaps he has a rational argument for the existence of god that I just haven’t read yet. I’d be interested to see what his argument is as I’m sure it exists somewhere in his writings, but I have too much reading about decelerating levels of violence in the Donbass to do so I think finding it will have to wait.