Why did René Descartes take God on faith?

[Clinton Huxley]

Feck wins the thread

[Hermit]

Feck wins the thread

...then gets disqualified for quoting Diderot in his signature.

[Clinton Huxley]

Feck wins the thread

...then gets disqualified for quoting Diderot in his signature.

Huxley gives and Seraph takeths away....

[Gawdzilla Sama]

One time he got so drunk they had to put him in a wheelbarrow. They were planning to dump him on the sidewalk outside a local brothel, but realized that would be putting Decartes before the whores.

[Tero]

It was a popular meme. Peer pressure.

[Faithfree]

And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart: "I drink, therefore I am"



Of course you can tell they are not real Aussies because of the corks on that hats and the fact that they're drinking Fosters.

[apophenia]

Errr... why are you dragging Pascal into this? The two, despite superficial similarities could not be more opposed.

It was a brain fart. I meant the meditations. The rest, is correct. (Though I've momentarily misplaced my copy of Graham Oppy's book on the ontological argument to verify details.)

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Descartes' Ontological Argument

Descartes' ontological (or a priori) argument is both one of the most fascinating and poorly understood aspects of his philosophy. Fascination with the argument stems from the effort to prove God's existence from simple but powerful premises. Existence is derived immediately from the clear and distinct idea of a supremely perfect being. Ironically, the simplicity of the argument has also produced several misreadings, exacerbated in part by Descartes' failure to formulate a single version.

The main statement of the argument appears in the Fifth Meditation. This comes on the heels of an earlier causal argument for God's existence in the Third Meditation, raising questions about the order and relation between these two distinct proofs. Descartes repeats the ontological argument in a few other central texts including the Principles of Philosophy. He also defends it in the First, Second, and Fifth Replies against scathing objections by some of the leading intellectuals of his day.
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Version A:

• Whatever I clearly and distinctly perceive to be contained in the idea of something is true of that thing.
• I clearly and distinctly perceive that necessary existence is contained in the idea of God.
• Therefore, God exists.

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In the Fifth Meditation and elsewhere Descartes says that God's existence follows from the fact that existence is contained in the “true and immutable essence, nature, or form” of a supremely perfect being, just as it follows from the essence of a triangle that its angles equal two right angles. This way of putting the a priori argument has puzzled commentators and has led to a lively debate about the ontological status of Cartesian essences and the objects which are purported to “have” them. Some commentators have thought that Descartes is committed to a species of Platonic realism. According to this view, some objects that fall short of actual existence nevertheless subsist as abstract, logical entities outside the mind and beyond the physical world (Kenny, 1968; Wilson, 1978). Another commentator places Cartesian essences in God (Schmaltz 1991), while two recent revisionist interpretations (Chappell, 1997; Nolan, 1997) read Descartes as a conceptualist who takes essences to be ideas in human minds.

[apophenia]

Oh, and cogito ergo sum is not reductionist. So your first premise is flawed.

Reduction involves breaking something into smaller, usually tangible, parts. Descartes meditation on doubt was minimalistic, not reductionistic. He was seeing what could be proved in spite of the efforts of a deceiving demon. It has nothing to do with reductionism.


And I just took a second look at the OP. Criticizing Descartes arguments for realism is, imo, misplaced. The arguments that I run into for believing the real world exists are even worse. Many people don't even have an argument. It's just, "Duh, it exists. How can you be stupid?" All the way to G.E. Moore's two hands proof of existence, which I think is crap. I know of no good argument that the real world exists. So, in that sense, the second half of the OP is also flawed for essentially implying there are arguments for realism that are better than Descartes without actually referencing one or showing its superiority.

[Svartalf]

OK, problem is, as I stated above, that the ontological argument, beside being a logical falsity as anybody knows, has no part in Descartes' philosophy, having been added, maybe even as an afterthought, to make sure nobody would accuse the author of being a bad christian, or worse, some kind of freethinker.

[apophenia]

OK, problem is, as I stated above, that the ontological argument, beside being a logical falsity as anybody knows, has no part in Descartes' philosophy, having been added, maybe even as an afterthought, to make sure nobody would accuse the author of being a bad christian, or worse, some kind of freethinker.

And your evidence for this assertion is what?

[Svartalf]

The say so of my philosophy teacher, back in high school. I don't know if HE had specific sources on that, but his explanation about the discrepancy of the bits dealing about the divine and the rest of the discourse, and the fact that they did not mesh seamlessly with the rest of the work, which is otherwise pretty impeccable in its building up from solid foundations, was pretty convincing, and I spent the whole year trying to tear that prof's teachings to pieces.

Also, even contemporaries, like Blaise Pascal, accused him of trying to dispense with God.

[apophenia]

There is a line of interpretation of Descartes’ Meditations that treats the work as an attempt to construct a self-consistent unity, a geometrical whole whose structures can be revealed or whose elements can be shown as interconnected, a totality, however, that cannot fruitfully be analyzed by psychological or historical methods. The Meditations it is asserted, resembles Euclid's geometry and to understand a given geometrical system it is necessary to grasp its demonstrations and its sequences. According to Martial Gueroult interpreters who "see in Descartes only a biographical succession, and not a rational link-age … merely observe the simple chronological sequence of topics . This is evidently a way of doing things that is repugnant to the spirit and letter of Descartes' doctrine" (Guerolt 1984: vol. 1. xx.). … Gueroult is probably the most noted interpreter who held such an internal, developmental reading of the Meditations, though many commentators in the Anglo-American tradition might appropriately be thought to accept this kind of approach. …To support this interpretation, he cites various passages from Descartes' corpus.
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Descartes says to Mersenne in a 1634 letter: "Now I shall tell you that all the things I explained in my treatise, which included that opinion about the motion of the earth, were so completely dependent on one another, that the knowledge that one of them is false is sufficient for the recognition that all the arguments I made use of are worth-less ... This presents Descartes with a dilemma: he cannot give up the motion of the earth without abandoning his whole system, but the motion of the earth, which he thinks has been supported by "very certain and very evident demonstrations," has been prohibited by the Church. He hesitates: "I know very well that it could be said that everything the Inquisitors of Rome have decided is not for aII that automatically an article of faith, and that it is first necessary for the Council to pass on it." But he decides: “I am not so much in love with my own opinions as to want to make use of such exceptions, in order to have the means of maintaining them … I would not for anything in the world maintain them against the authority of the church". … So he stops the publication of Le Monde. …
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[So] Descartes has no problem ultimately keeping most of his system together with the negation of the condemned proposition, deciding that "strictly speaking the earth does not move…”

So, although Descartes does at times claim the complete dependence of his principles on each other, such that none of them can be changed without the whole set collapsing, it is also obvious that he did make such changes…

The Blackwell Guide to Descartes' Meditations

[Svartalf]

Indeed he does not, since he himself admits that his renouncement to that proposition is due not to his admitting that it is factually wrong, but his bowing to authority.

I will not claim that every aspect of descartes' system is dependent on the rest of it, as I'm not really a scholar of that subject (plus, you could build a completely crazy system according to the same principle, and it would work so long as you refuse to think out of the box, or so long as you are not confronted by unbelievers), but I have to state that what I read of him, and particularly the dscours de la methode (but also his Meteors, and his Optic) shows an excellent and perfectly rational mind, and flawless construction.

Also, the divine is not a pervasive influence in Descartes. He seems to have believed in a 'god of starts', a creator who made the world, set its laws, and let it run. The accusation by Pascal makes terrible sense.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

I am pretty sure that Descartes' appeasement of the church in his philosophical treatises was mentioned in something that I read fairly recently. I thought it might be TGD or GING but he does not appear in their indexes. I also checked Breaking the Veil but it wasn't there either. I was hoping to find sources for that argument (other than speculation) - if I remember where I saw it, I will pass it on.

[apophenia]

I'm certainly open to the argument that Descartes' religious thinking is disingenuous, but so far the claim rests on rather unimpressive arguments.

I'm something of an amateur philosopher, concentrating mainly on philosophy of mind and epistemology. I am strongly materialist, yet as noted, worship a goddess, and hold a view supportive of Platonic realism. In practice, I'm likely to appeal to nominalism, yet have publicly advocated an argument for Platonic realism. Arguing that either my Hinduism, my Platonic realism, or materialism is inconsistent lies somewhere between an argument from ignorance and a non sequitur. These are all my views and their superficial inconsistency is neither an argument against them being mine, nor even an argument that I am inconsistent. At best, it's an argument from hermeneutics and literary analysis, which makes it even weaker.


Anyway, I don't see any way to bring this argument forward other than to do research and reading into Descartes, which I have no intention of doing.

(For what it's worth, I also have strong views on ethics, though I am not an ethicist, and dabble in the philosophy of religion and science.)