Cartesian Ontological Argument

Of all the recurring questions of Man, one of the most persistent is the question of our origins. Specifically the question of what, if anything, caused us to exist. It has been argued by generations of minds, all seeking the definitive explanation of our existence. One such mind was that of Rene Descartes, a brilliant philosopher of his time, throughout and beyond ours. His ideas on geometry and metaphysics, among others, remain influential upon the thinkers of today.

In Meditations, Descartes formulates the framework and guidelines of his First Philosophy or metaphysics, where methodic doubt is used to discern the nature of being and the world. Here he describes how we can derive a reliable method that can definitively determine what is

Given that a chair's physical existence may be suspect, my idea of a chair may also be suspect in regard of some aspects such as appearance, yet I cannot suspect the fact that I am thinking of scale, quantity, measurement, space, etc. in providing for my mental image of the chair. Hence for Descartes, there are things that are certain regardless of sense experience and it seems mentally impossibly to conceive of them as

This is because something that is existing, can not necessarily be in existence as a thing. Given that I were to think of the concept of God, and God's properties, it follows by Cartesian logic that the only thing I can know to be true is that the existence of the concept God, rather than that God is existing in the world. Therefore, when I think of something, I regard it as existing just by the conception of it, regardless of whether the thing I am thinking of exists as such. So existence does not really add to the idea of something because it already exists as one conceptualizes the idea. It can be seen then that Descartes is sneaking that God is existing in the world, when he can only actually observe that there is a subject such as God, and that God-concept is omnipotent, omniscient, self-necessary, etc. in the world. For it would be different if there were ways we could empirically observe that God existed in the world. If God existed in the world, then we would be able to observe that a part of God's essence is that God is existing since it would be obvious to our senses. Given that God was existing, then there would be more perceivable signs of God interacting with matter that are present, even to the point of having an experience of personally watching God affect