Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Discourse on Method, part 4, paragraph 2

Descartes continues you to discuss the existence of God through the perfect and imperfect mind. He believes the imperfect mind creates the delusions of imperfect objects such as the earth, the sky, etc... but the perfect mind holds thoughts of God which are not delusions. He concludes that God is a perfect mind and all perfections embodied by Descartes and others are a result of God's perfection. Another proof to God is seen through the use of a geometric proof that is all too familiar. This proof is one referring to triangles having three angles and the angles must add up to equal 180 degrees. God's existence is as certain as this proof. When contemplating God, existence is as much essential to being a property of God as having three angles in a triangle adding to be 180 degrees is a property of triangles. People have difficulty with these proofs according to Descartes since they exclusively rely on them using their senses and imagination. Unlike the geometric proofs, God's existence is percieved only by reason and not by the senses and imagination.
-- Chris Rehonic

2 comments:

Jimmy VanValen said...

i just wanted to add that descarte is saying that he couldn't possibly be god because he has imperfections, but there must be a god, because he could not have come up with any of his thoughts about god or anything if they weren't put there by god himself. i find it kind of funny that he asks us to just except that wishy washy proof as truth but the first thing he says in this discourse is that you can't except any knowledge that you can't prove. He's kinda contadicting himself here and i think that opens a lot of disscousion...

stephanie said...

I agree when you say he is kind of contradicting himself because you say that "This proof is one referring to triangles having three angles and the angles must add up to equal 180 degrees. God's existence is as certain as this proof." However, when i was reading in my section he said that we can not even try to prove that God does not exist but we can only prove if he does? And we should believe that God's existence is as certain as the triangle example, just because it's in favor of his beliefs? That didn't make sense to me because we should be able to atleast try to prove something false if we wanted.