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Descartes second argument on god
Descartes second argument on god
Rene descartes argument that god exists
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More handpicked essays just for you.
Descartes second argument on god
Descartes second argument on god
Rene descartes argument that god exists
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Descartes second argument on god
Descartes talks about God as if God is infinite because he radiates out in every direction. Descartes imagines that he himself is perfect and has the perfect qualities of God. This leads him to the discussion of disobeying God and turning into what one wants rather than what God wants. By doing what oneself wills, not what God wills, one is basically implying the he or she sees him or herself as God-like. Descartes believes he is partially God because he is on his way to infinite knowledge, but since he is gaining little by little, he is in a state of potentiality.
Descartes then attempts to define what he is. He previously believed that he had a spirit and body, by methods for which he was fed, moved, could sense, absorb space, had a distinct area and think. Each one of those methods are thrown into uncertainty except thinking. Since he can think, he should exist. He thinks about whether he no longer exists once his reasoning comes to a halt.
The Most Dangerous Game In the story “The Most Dangerous Game”by Richard Connell, Zaroff kills people instead of animals. Rainsford believes that the world consists only of predators and prey. Rainsford hears a gun-shot when he was on the ship and then he falls off and travels in the jungle, and soon finds a mansion.
However, Descartes is indeed certain of the fact that he is a thinking being, and that he exists. As a result of this argument, Descartes makes a conclusion that the things he perceives clearly and distinctly cannot be false, and are therefore true (Blanchette). This clear and distinct perception is an important component to the argument that Descartes makes in his fifth meditation for the existence of God. This paper explains Descartes ' proof of God 's existence from Descartes ' fifth meditation, Pierre Gassendi 's objection to this proof, and then offers the paper 's author 's opinion on both the proof and objection.
Descartes gave a few arguments that God exists and is real. Desocrates believed our idea of God is that God is a perfect being, he believed he is more perfect to exist than not to exist. Desocrates also believed that God is a infinite being. Descartes idea would be that God gave us this idea to type this paragraph about him so he must be real. When he thinks negative of an idea or thought he wonders if an evil demon plotted those thoughts.
Descartes declares he has to determine if there is a God and if he does exist, whether he can be a deceiver. The reason he has to determine the existence of God and what he is, rests in his theories of ideas. This is because we do not know if there is an outside world and we can almost imagine everything, so all depends on God’s existence and if he is a deceiver. “To prove that this non-deceiving God exists, Descartes finds in his mind a few principles he regards as necessary truths which are evident by the “natural light” which is the power or cognitive faculty for clear and distinct perception.” If arguments is presented in logical trains of thought, people could not help but to be swayed and to understand those arguments.
The two arguments that will be compared will between Descartes two different proofs for God’s existence. One in which he argues or explains how God has no imperfections meaning that he is perfect and how it ties into people. On another more confusing argument he argues about the distinction between two realities The first argument that he makes is the one he has in his third meditation in which he dismisses his existence to be able to go forth and prove God's existence. At first he goes on to say that “there must be at least as much reality in the efficient and total cause as in the effect of that cause,” or formal reality meaning that something can't come from nothing.
Existence is something that can be imagined and therefore is false and a fallacy. How does Descartes really know he exists maybe he is just imaging it all and that his premises behind the existence of God are fake as well. If someone exist then they must have been born which would mean that Descartes parents where the ones who brought him into existence, and their parents brought them in to existence and so on and so on. This would mean that God did not create Descartes existence but that someone way far down the chain of human existence started it
For how he can be certain that 2+2= 4 and not 5, how can he know for sure that he is not being deceived into believing the answer to be 5 due to a demon. But even if an evil demon did indeed exist, in order to be misled, Descartes himself must exist. As there must be an “I”, that can be deceived. Conclusively, upon Descartes’ interpretations we can come to decipher that in order for someone to exist they must indeed be able to think, to exist as a thinking thing.
Addressing the problems with Descartes is not a very difficult task to undertake. Descartes theory of Epistemology has been the subject matter of countless responses and prolonged debate and has been historically rather resilient. The main problem with Descartes argument, however, is that it relies too heavily on immaterial assumptions. Descartes’s use of god as a main tenet which he bases his theory around provides too much room for criticism. Proving the existence of god is a herculean task which Descartes does an admirable job of proving, but through trying to prove his “ontological argument” he seems to make some illogical leaps in order to reach his conclusions.
The existence of the world is not the result of the "force of [his] perception" (p. 114). So he says that the world may be a projection of the self. The idea of self, cannot exist without god, to Descartes. The reason behind this is that god is represented as an infinite being, and because god is seen this way, Descartes has a reliable measure to gauge the finite nature of his existence, as a relative measure.
Summary: Descartes continues from his knowledge of his own existence to reason the existence of God, His benevolent nature, and the disparity between our knowledge and will. The argument Descartes presents to prove God’s existence is through a series of premises. He states that all ideas he perceives (of himself, corporeal things, and God) can be reduced to a cause for believing them. That is because each effect gets its reality from a cause, meaning that the cause must have reality to begin with.
With all these in mind, Descartes begins to understand how the Universe was created. He knows that he is finite. So the universe must have been created by an infinite force. He understands that God is perfect and infinite, therefore he couldn’t come up with the idea of God.
For example, a rock can exist all by itself. This indicates that Descartes proposed that God if he wanted could create a world of beings that could exist all by itself. Therefore what he means to say is that if the mind and body are really distinct, they could exist all by themselves without being dependant on each other. Although he has changed a bit in his stance from his books like Discourse and Meditations which has versions like the First, the Second, the Sixth and so on, he was still critiqued by two of his successors, Nicolas Malebranche and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Malebranche developed an internal critique of Descartes theory of the mind.
The next step that Descartes uses in the second meditation is the existence of this Godly figure. He questions his own beliefs with that of the God, and argues that a mind should be capable of thinking for them to be of existence, “Is there not some God, or some other being by whatever name we call it, which puts these reflections into my mind? That is not necessary, for is it not possible that I am capable of producing them myself?” He then puts forward that for one to be deceived by this “evil demon” as he describes it, they have to exist to be deceived.