Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Descartes and His Perfect God


If God is infinite and all powerful then nothing is impossible for him. Descartes however writes that deception is malicious and God is incapable of anything malicious. Immediately he has placed a limit on God by declaring him incapable of something. If God is all powerful then it would seem that he is completely capable of making us think that he is incapable of deception. Descartes writes that he is incomplete and dependent and that his existence each and every moment depends entirely on God. He then goes on to suggest that his will is separate from this dependence as it is not determined by an external force. Descartes refers to his faculties of imagination and memory as "feeble and limited" but then claims to understand these same faculties to be "boundless" in God. It does not follow that something perfect should generate anything less than. Either God is perfect and us along with our existence is perfect despite what we may believe about it or God is not perfect. It is not enough to simply say that God is perfect, we are from Him and he the reason that He did not give us the capacity to understand anything more than we do is just his will. We may agree with Descartes that simply by thinking we can know that we exist, but thinking that we know we exist because we are thinking does not speak to the validity of the content of our thought. Like most "proofs" for the existence of God, Descartes lead up to the moment of truth so to speak is thought provoking, ultimately however, what still remains is a giant question mark.

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