Descartes and I and God
This is a post I wrote some time ago but left unfinished. When asked about the issue recently, I went back to this post for reference and, in my interest, finished it. I decided that I might as well publish it, which is why it represents the first published post in some time.
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Descartes seemed to dislike circular reasoning. I expect that was to his benefit as a philosopher. Despite this, in my classroom analysis of Descartes Meditations, Descartes is himself guilty of the type of reasoning that he vocally rejects. I won’t go into details on the meticulous nature of his argument, but he attempts to prove that God exists based on clear and distinct ideas of perfection that could not have begun in the mind. After Descartes famously decides that he is a thinking being, he tries to prove God exists based on the notion that the ideas of God could not have originated in his own thought. And how does he know that he is not being deceived? (as he noted was possible earlier in the same work) He knows this because within those clear and distinct ideas of God is the notion that God is not a deceiver.
This is the most in depth review of Descartes Meditations that I have yet been given in class, but it is not the first time I have studied it. Each time I am given Descartes (in high school, in Bible College and in a significant number of my classes now) I am given his work with a more in depth analysis, and each time he is analyzed, he goes all to pieces over his attempt to prove God exists, marred by his wretched circular reasoning.
It is out of this same vein of criticism that St. Anselms’s famous Ontological argument is criticized, (though the conclusion of the argument is based on different principles, and is an argument which I find far more enjoyable and reasonable than Descartes) Anselm makes our conception of God a pointer towards the existence of an actual God, and in that, I feel, we find a basis for, or at least an agreement with, many theological ideas of revelation. As God exists, so he is shown to exist in us. We must be careful not to mold this thought into “as God exists in us, so he exists,” not only because this may give birth to false Gods, but also because it in no way proves that God exists.
Now I want to come to a point, or a problem that I have. This problem comes up for me whenever I look at Descartes, or particularly his third meditation, in which he works to prove God exists. What we find specifically in Descartes argument, but in other forms of the ontological argument as well, is a lovely explanation of what God might have done, without any proof of what God did do. To place your proof of God in the hands of human cognition, a priori or not, is practically absurd.
Hopefully the force of this problem shows as much as I want it to, for it is the main reason that I find Descartes’ argument troubling. Descartes and Anslem want me to imagine a quality that can be carried into its extreme. It is in seeing this extreme as an infinite that I see that I have a concept of infinity. It is in this concept of infinity that I see the level of reality the idea holds, and in understanding that level of reality, I see that God must have imprinted it onto my mind.
My problem begins with a problem that I believe Descartes and Anselm could respond to. I might say “well what about perfect evil?” They might respond out of Augustine’s reasoning, that evil is a lack. So it becomes a sort of anti-perfection – a complete lack of the goodness that, if shown in its perfection, proves God’s work in our minds. But now I want to shift to more neutral concepts – opposing positives. If good is positive and evil is negative, what about red and blue. Positives and opposites. Blue and Red cannot both exist in perfection in the same place and moment, but the complete absence of one is not the completeness of the other.
Did that sound confusing? Maybe. But I feel that this problem rests at the heart of any trouble people have over this argument. Let me try and talk more honestly about God. I think God, as God is a perfection of perfections, exists as a perfection of both the male and female type. I don’t think God is male or female. This is an aspect of God which must, to my understanding, be contradictory in my perspective. Similarly God must be omnipotent, but God must also allow us to have free will. God, as God exists to my mind as a character full of contradiction. But that contradiction is a key part of the way I relate to God – it puts me in my place and God in his, and it reminds me that if God does exist, he will come into my time/space existence in such a way that is contradictory, by the sheer force of his mind being the mind of God and mine not being so.
So I can say again – maybe the ontological argument shows us how God might really reveal himself to us, but it does not necessitate that he do so in this way.
To close, I want to briefly address what it even means to argue for the existence of God reasonably. God created reason, so it seems to me that we can meet Him reasonably, but the contradictions I have shown suggest that the entire project of trying to explain God’s existence with reason will fail due, in part, to who God actually is. God encompasses reason, but reason cannot encompass God. I have learned that my greatest proof for God’s existence is to show that the world in all it’s complexities, involving reason and emotion and experience, falls into a system which makes God important. The sphere of the world which I create with God in it is more whole than one that does not include Him. This means that philosophical arguments like the ontological argument, or the argument for a first cause may fit in to what I believe about God, showing how complete his universe is, but they cannot create God for me. God is not so small as that.
