Descartes Concept of God as a Congenital - Essay Example

Name Institutional affiliation Tutor Date Descartes idea of God as an innate Thesis Statement: The thesis statement of this research paper is to establish the validity of Descartes claim that God is an innate idea. Rene Descartes was a French citizen who lived between 31st of March 1596 and 11th February 1650. He was a successful mathematician and philosopher and he was nicknamed “The Father of the Modern Philosophy” because of the contribution he made in the field of philosophical study. Rene Descartes is credited of the contribution that he has made in the modern philosophy among others such as Aquinas Before his demise, Rene Descartes was a strong catholic believer and he believed in existence of God. his believe in God is rightly manifested in his First Philosophy Meditation when he writes that human beings must believe in the existence of God because it is taught in the Holy Scriptures and he further says that we should also hold beliefs in the Holy Scriptures since they come from God. However, Descartes seems to hold doubtful thoughts in his third meditation where in search for absolute certainty about existence of God, he writes and I quote “I do not yet sufficiently know if there is even a God.” basically, Rene Descartes does not firstly make out existence of God with certainty. Descartes begins making deliberations of whether there is God and although he puts the idea of Gods existence into question, he still holds an innate ideology of God as a being that is autonomous, never-ending, and extremely intelligent/clever and a-all powerful being who is the creator of everything. Basing on this, he therefore makes a conclusion that because of his innate ideology of God, there must be a-all powerful being (God) who is the resultant of this idea. He further states that because he (Descartes) exists holding an idea of God in himself, he then concludes that God must also be existing. Descartes makes this explicit conclusion when he says that, “I have no choice but to conclude that the mere facts of my existence is and of there being in me an idea of a most perfect being, that is God, demonstrates most evidently that God too exists.” Descartes further states that most likely, he is created in the likeness and image of God who he refers to as the creator. In addition, Rene Descartes progresses with his meditations pointing many other things that portray the likelihood of existence of God. In his Fifth Meditation, Rene Descartes declares to present a proof manifesting Gods existence and his proof bases on the ideology of a triangle which portrays particular determinate essence, nature and/or forms which are eternal and consistent. He further progresses proving his affirmation that the components of a triangle are not engineered or rather formulated by, or reliant on his mind. In particular, his proof advocates that there isn’t less challenge visualizing an extremely perfect being who lacks existence than there is in visualizing a triangle whose its interior angles fails to sum up to 1800 thus he presume and further deduces that because we visualize an extremely perfect being, then we need conclude than an extremely perfect and all powerful being exists and that this being is God. Before tracing his idea of existence of God, Descartes points out that he has varied ideas all falling into what he termed as “sensible objects” such as sounds and images; feeling/volitions such as hope, anger, and finally, judgments which refers to the reflection on the truth and so on. Descartes states that he is very certain about the first two (ideas i.e. sensible ideas and the feelings) and thus he states that he cannot be wrong about them though he states that errors may occur in the third i.e. judgments. He states that if you see; take for example a mango, then you are damn sure that what you have seen and/or that is what is appearing in the minds and eyes; if you desire a mango, it is a factual that you are rightly experiencing the desire though if you judges that the mango does not exist in your mind, then you may be making an incorrect and inconceivable judgment. Therefore, Rene Descartes postulates that God is an idea conceived in human beings minds. Descartes points out that in his sources of ideas, there are three main possibilities. First, he points out to innate ideology which refers to ideologies built into our minds as they were. He states that innate ideas may be formulated by our minds meaning that these ideas may have gotten into our minds adventitiously. In some of his arguments, Descartes produced an account of what he referred to as astrophysical argument to show that the idea of God must be innate. First, we have the first connotation which brings us to a supernatural being he refers to as God as the cause of everything that revolves around the world. He says that according to how we know about the world, everything has a cause thus if everything in nature and/or within our surrounding has a cause, then this cause must be originating from outside nature i.e. something which is basically supernatural. Secondly, he pinpoints that in every cause, the resultant effects can’t be greater than that cause. According to Descartes, we have formal and eminent causes which results to less effect than that of the cause. For instance, formal causes refer to the causes which generate resultants which tend to share traits of the causative agent for instance, fire causes fire. On the other hand, eminent causes generate resultants with different traits for instance, a potter producing or molding a pot. The ideology of Gods existence by Descartes includes all what he calls as perfections i.e. omniscience, omnipotence and ideal goodness and he states that whatever causes this idea means that it has an equal or the greatest amount of deliberate reality as an eminent or formal cause. Therefore, he states that since he (Descartes) possess the idea of God, then this idea can only be caused by God and that God has put this idea in Descartes mind as well as other people minds so that manifestation will always reassure that He (God) is with us. However, Descartes perception about God posses a number of challenges with the first challenge basing on his argument questioning whether Descartes is validated in asserting that the God that he (Descartes) has in mind is in reality an “idea” as he labels it. For instance, Rene Descartes connotes that he has an idea of an infinite and knowledgeable (omniscience and omnipresent) being and thus further saying that he could not have obtained knowledge of the infinite from knowledge of the finite though the question is whether he can essentially have an idea of an infinite bearing in mind that one cannot figure/picture out infinity. If then Descartes cannot truly hold the “idea of God,” then this challenges/weakens the soundness and legality of his argument in that it necessitates that he justly has the idea in mind Secondly, arguing against Descartes argument, one can get at an idea of infinity which is not essentially innate. For instance, this one can be demonstrated with a simple explanation where for example you can pick a string, cut the string into halves each time repeatedly and finally, you realize that you can generate infinitely small stringy objects. Thirdly, we refer to the general cosmological arguments basing on the knowledge that there is a cause and an effect in the universe greatly relies on the existence of a universe and further existence of causation and effects. Therefore, an ontological argumentation is needed so as to present proof of existence of God. Rene Descartes presents an account of this later in his Meditations. Conclusion In conclusion, it seems that Rene Descartes has presented a compelling argument that the idea of God can’t have ensued from himself although he hasn’t generated a clear argument because of the above outlined objections. According to Descartes, God is an epistemology necessity in his argument lacking the proof thus serving to weaken his projection for instituting knowledge on coherent and rational principles of God’s existence. The ideology of God’s existence can be more comprehensible and well explained more logically as an idea that has been produced and engineered from the richness of human beings minds together with its interactions with the universe’s richness. Work Cited Rene Descartes, (1999), Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings Read More