 So today we're going to look primarily at arguments for God's existence in Descartes. And I've switched around the material a little bit so that we're looking at some stuff again from chat from meditation 1, a lot of stuff from meditation 3, and then some stuff from meditation 5. The reason that we're doing that is because those are the areas where Descartes actually talks about God's existence. And we've talked quite a bit this semester when we looked at Anselm and Thomas Aquinas and even a little bit with Aristotle about this notion of God and a very metaphysical notion of God, because God's something we can prove. But of God in terms of the highest being or the necessary being or the creator or cause of everything, the ultimate cause, the prime mover, the order of all things. Those are all metaphysical concepts of God. You wouldn't actually have to be a Christian or Jew or a Muslim or committed to any particular religion in order to hold a philosophical idea like that. And then earlier this semester I asked you a bit and we talked a bit about this, why would people want to prove the existence of God if they already believed in God? Some of that was possibly due to wanting to convince other people or maybe not being quite sure oneself or it being a way to give oneself closer in some way to God or to figure out God's attributes or all those sorts of things. Descartes is doing something a little bit different. And I start the class actually with this quote from another philosopher. We're not going to do the same time period as Descartes. He was a contemporary Descartes. His name is, I forgot to put it down here, Blaise Pascal. And we're not going to be meeting him. Simply we don't have enough time in the semester. But we're going to read somebody who's kind of like him in his views about God and about philosophy and that's Kierkegaard. We're going to read Kierkegaard towards the end of the class. And Pascal had this to say about God and about Descartes. He said, I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he did his best to dispense with God but he could not avoid making him set the world in motion. After that he had no more use for God. And I think that that's pretty accurate when it comes to what Descartes is doing with God and why Descartes has these proofs for God's existence. Descartes is not somebody like Anselm who's interested in God for God's own sake to try to know what this infinite or eternal substance is. He's not a monk. He's, if anything, a scientist. If you looked at the material I put in I Learn you realize that you've already learned some things back in algebra class that Descartes came up with, like Cartesian coordinates, the xy plane. Descartes also made a lot of contributions in other areas of mathematics. And he made contributions in terms of physics. Nothing that you'd actually studied today because physics has progressed beyond him. But he did make important contributions that got us on the way to where we are today. And his way of looking at things, his way of treating things, separating the mind from the body, that's been very influential. Treating everything in terms of, everything physical in terms of mechanism. That was very important too. Remember, for Descartes our bodies are just machines. Machines that somehow our soul connects, or our mind connects up with them in some very difficult to explain way, which he never truly succeeded with. But that's a tricky problem. So why is Descartes bringing God in, you might say. So that is that Descartes is a devout committed Christian. It appears that he went to church every once in a while but he doesn't seem to have gotten an awful lot out of it. He actually was a mercenary during the wars of religion that were being fought in Germany in 30 years war between Catholics and Protestants with France taking a rather opportunistic side if you remember your history. And he didn't seem to really care much about that either. He lived most of his life when he could in Holland, which was not a Catholic country. He was supposedly a Roman Catholic. But he chose to live in a place where he could more or less avoid religious problems. So why is he bringing God up? Well, that's what we're going to look at today. And it comes into his philosophy for a very important reason. Descartes thinks that if you can't count on some sort of idea of God that once you've gone this way, you've gone into methodological doubt like we did in the first two meditations, doubting everything, saying maybe there's an evil demon that's deceiving me. Once you start doing that, you want to try to find your way back out of it. If you don't have God in the picture, not a God who comes and saves humanity or wants you to go to a church on Sundays or anything like that, but some sort of metaphysical concept of God, if you don't have something like that, you can't ever be certain about anything other than that you exist. So let's do a little bit of review first, right? Descartes started out talking about these doubts. You know, we get deceived sometimes by things. So people brought up lying, right? Or we talked about hallucinations or some other ways we get deceived. Mirages, right? So you know that your senses are not entirely reliable. You've all experienced that sort of deception. As a matter of fact, we routinely experience it. And we talked about this filming. You know, what are we doing when we're filming? We're actually creating an illusion. Whoever's watching this video, it's as if they're there in the classroom with you, although, you know, you know they're not. Some of these videos, there have been something like 450 views and there's only 25 seats in the classroom, roughly. So there's an illusion to create it, right? Ah, good. So what else? Dreams, right? I like those of you who dream. I had a dream last night, actually. It was a terrible dream that I ran into a werewolf. And I woke up from that and, you know, I was very happy that I didn't indeed do it. It wasn't just like an ordinary Hollywood werewolf. This thing was like 12 feet tall and, you know, I'm driving along and the cops have like cordoned off an area and for some reason I get out of my car and I'm walking. And then I saw a police sniper team, you know. I'm thinking, boy, that's kind of strange. I wonder what they're doing out here. And then as I walked, I realized what they were actually, you know, supposed to shoot as the werewolf who attacked me. Well, you know, none of that happened, thank God, right? But it seemed very real. And I'm willing to bet that most of you dreamed last night, right? And you dreamed about something either very good and you kind of wished after you woke up you could get back to that dream or you dreamed about something bad. And you were very happy that that wasn't real. You maybe even dreamed about being in this classroom, taking a class. You may have dreamed about writing a paper and you wrote this really great research paper and then you woke up and then you realized, oh, it was only a dream. I had to do all that work over again. Have you ever had a dream like that? We talked about dreams where you go to work and you put in a full day and you wake up from it because now you worked. You actually did work in your dream in that sort of reality. But you didn't dream in the outside reality where you'll actually get paid for punching in and putting in your eight hours. How can you tell whether dreams are real or not? I mean, right now you all think that you're awake, right? Hopefully, this isn't just a dream. I'm going to have to teach this again when I wake up from it. Even better would be if this was a dream and I've already taught this and I won't have to re-teach the lessons. But that's not going to happen. We think this is a waking reality, right? How do we tell? Descartes didn't give us any signs for figuring that out, did he? In meditation, one. Instead, he actually just went deeper. He said, well, at least in dreams we can count on mathematics. We can count on the laws of logic. But could we doubt those too? Turns out we can. Could be that there's some sort of evil genius out there that screws you up every time that you try to do mathematics and two plus two doesn't actually equal four, it equals five. It's just that every time you start counting, there's a little sleight of hand that gets pulled. And you never notice. Maybe you don't have any body. Maybe you never have had a body. We talked about all these, you know, sort of movies, right? Remember Dark City or The Matrix or Inception. Maybe you're not actually a human being. Maybe you're actually a program on some sort of computer that thinks it's a human being. Because you were programmed to think that. Of course Descartes doesn't think about this sort of stuff, but that would fit in with this evil genius hypothesis. If somebody else created a world that you would exist, how would you know? If any of you ever get the chance to watch the 13th floor, that one actually deals with that. There's a world in which people live, like somewhere in California, and they're working on these computer projects to create a virtual reality. You know, we're all relatively familiar with virtual reality. And if you play The Sims or any first person shooter games, any of those other kind of first person games, any of you play those? Those are virtual reality, right? It's not as if you completely lose yourself unless there's something wrong with you. That does happen to some people. But imagine it could be made even more extensive. Do those characters in the game think that they're real? Yeah. They wouldn't be very good characters if they didn't. How do you know you're not a character like that in some sort of game? That's something else great. You could be. Use it at the inception movie. How do you know you're not one of those stock characters in somebody else's dream? Can you prove it? Well, Descartes doesn't deal with that so much, but he does deal with this idea of being without a body and having all these sensations being given to him by some evil deceiver. And he says that I can be sure of one thing that I exist. So even if you're a program or a figment of somebody's imagination you exist. As soon as you can start questioning whether you exist or not you exist because who's doing the questioning? If you can be deceived and think you're something other than what you are you exist. Right? And what do you exist as? What do you remember he said we are? We're not our bodies, right? Thinking substance, a thing that thinks, right? Substance means you exist over time. You last. There's something real there. And you are thought. You are your memories, your imaginations, your intellect, your will, all these sorts of things. That's you. So stop and think about what this means for a minute. How old are you guys? 18. Is anybody here not 18? Besides me, of course. Kind of strange. 18-year-old love here teaching, wasn't it? That happens. You should probably ask for your money back. Because they didn't possibly go to graduate school. How do you know you're 18? What births you take? Okay, that works. And you can count, right? So if you're 18, what year were you guys born? 92. 93. 93. Do you remember being born? Any of you remember being born? Any of you remember being 1-year-old, 2-year-old, 3-year-old? Do you remember being 4? Most people remember about that far back. I remember some vague stuff about 3-years-old that everything before that was just total work. Some people claim to remember when they were 1, but who knows if they're actually remembering anything or anything. It's just sort of imagination. How do you know your memories are actually real? Maybe they were implanted in your head. Maybe you only started to exist yesterday. You can't be completely sure of it, can you? Any more than you can be completely sure that I'm not, say, a robot of some sort, you know, unless you cut me open? What you can be sure about is the things that pertain to thought, that part of it. Some of you are men and some of you are women, right? That's just your body. There's no gender to a soul as far as Descartes goes or to a mind. That's just part of your body. Your height, your weight, how strong your body is, skin color, hair color, eye color, all those sorts of things. Those are purely bodily. That's not really who you are according to Descartes. What you really are is a thing that thinks. And that body of yours that you have, which, you know, I'll be happy that you've got it right now because I'll tell you, 18-year-old bodies are a lot better than 40-year-old bodies. That's just sort of like a car that you're driving around. And, you know, theoretically you could put that mind and it wouldn't really make much difference other than maybe you would be so happy with the model that you get, right? But we know we're sensing things, though, right? You're hearing me right now, you're seeing me. How do you know that that's real, though? You know that you actually have those sensations. Do you know they correspond to something real? I mean, you could say, well, you know, this is solid. Well, sure, but if this was a dream it would sound like that, too, wouldn't it? Or if this was some sort of computer-generated reality it would sound like that, as well. Or if there was an evil genius, you know, setting things up to fool you, he or she or it would make things out like that, as well. So you can trust that you actually have sensations, that you have memories, but at this point you can't actually trust that they give you the real story. So this is where meditation 3 begins. And Descartes is gonna say, well, let's think about the origins of our ideas. Let's think about the different parts of our mind. So we're a thing that thinks what does that mean? What are the different ways in which you think? Well, you know that you have sense impressions or sense data, right? Like the hearing me right now, like the computer in front of most of you, like the sensation of your clothes on you, like the feeling that you have those sitting in a desk, all of those are sense data that's coming to you. You're looking at me, and some of you, some of you are looking at your computers, things are coming into your perception, your perceiving things. You don't actually know what things truly exist, or that they are the way that you think that they are yet, but you certainly are perceiving things. And if I say what's the movie that came out recently that would work? Have any of you seen any movies recently? Bless you. New movies? Nobody? Why don't you get out and watch anything? What have you guys seen on TV lately? Oh, it was Halloween recently, right? Have you seen any scary movies? What scary movies? What's that? Oh, that's a good one. That looks really scary. You saw the number three one, or the first one? Okay. Yeah, those look really scary in part, and those deal with that issue of like seeing things on a camera and can you be sure that they're real or not? They're exploring some fairly Cartesian things. Okay, so ghosts, right? Are ghosts real or not? We don't know. If we're Cartesians, at this point we say, I don't know. I don't have evidence one way or the other. What do the ghosts look like in paranormal activity? Well, they do look like demons. Okay. There's no like screenshot where you actually like see them full on or anything? That makes it scarier when you can't actually see what's going on. Okay. So imagine a entity that you can't actually see and can screw up your life in a whole bunch of different ways. Imagine that. Now have you actually seen anything like that? Is that part of your memory? Hopefully none of you came in contact with some sort of paranormal activity at one point in which case it would be memory. And memory is things that you actually did in fact see, right? That comes to mind. What else can you do though? You can use your imagination. You can take your things that you've seen and heard and all that and rearrange them and put them together. Have any of you ever seen a unicorn? I don't mean just like on posters, or key chains or stuff like that. Anyone ever seen a unicorn in real life? No? Can you? It's possible, right? I mean somebody could make one, you know, cut some hair here and glue a horn on to its head and say there's a unicorn, or maybe do some genetic modification. But all of you can imagine a unicorn, right? How do you do that? Well, you take the image of horse, and you take the image of horn and you stick them together. Now imagine a blue unicorn. Can you do that? Now imagine it with wings. Combine a pegasus and a unicorn again. Everyone able to do that? You've never seen anything like that. But what you've done is you've combined images and bits of them together. Now imagine, and it doesn't always have to be sense data, it could be other things too. Now imagine a unicorn who loves you. Can you imagine that? What would that be like? How would a unicorn show its love for you? What do you think? You'd have to imagine it on, you know, with some sort of analogy to something else. Cats or ferrets or what might love you. Imagine it like that. Now imagine a unicorn that hates your guts. And every time it sees you, it gets angry. Better watch out for that horn, right? You can do that. You're taking ideas and you're putting them together. You're compounding them. That's an activity of your mind. That's not something that your body's doing. That's something that your mind is doing. In addition to that, these are the lower faculties. We also have faculty of will. We're going to talk about this more next class. You have the capacity to choose things. Stop thinking about a unicorn now. Make yourself stop. Who succeeded in it? Has anyone still stuck with a unicorn in their head? Now think about a giraffe. Can you do that? Who's thinking about a giraffe now? You chose to do that, right? You did it because I told you to. But if you wanted to be perverse, you could have said whatever Dr. Sadler says, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do something else. I'm going to think of a rhinoceros instead. Well, that would be your choice. You can make yourself do that. With your will, you can bring things to mind. You can make yourself think about things. You can force yourself to understand things. You can also use your will to move your body. I'm willing to raise my hand right now. And then, of course, you have intellect or understanding. All of these are what you are. All of these are you. All of these function together. All of these are modes of thought. Now, these are all places that we can get things from. So let's think about our ideas now. Some ideas we think that we got from external sources. You all are familiar with the idea of pain, right? Some of you may be in pain right now if you're sick. Where did you get that idea from? At the beginning. Because you started out as a baby screaming. And then people did things to shut you up. Right? Because you were in pain of one form or another. You felt it. It was something from we think, from the outside, affecting you. Or it could have been internal. It could have been your body. Your stomach wasn't happy with what you were eating. And crying. As you get older, you learn how to manage these things. But you have those ideas and these are coming to you. We think from the outside. What about other ideas? Well, some ideas we make up ourselves. Like, what's the flavor of gum that hasn't been invented yet? Can you think of anything? When I was a kid there weren't a lot of flavors of gum. And then suddenly they started making all sorts of things. You could have like blue raspberry gum. And we thought that was really great. Now there's like, you know, you walk into a grocery store. There's like many different kinds of gum. What's the flavor you wouldn't make? Because you think that would be terrible. Dirt flavored gum. Okay. Perfect. You can open the gum. Now you can imagine that. You just did, actually. And what did you do? You combined two things. The sensation of what dirt tastes like. Which is not pleasant at all. Is that any of you? You combined ideas. Where did that idea come from? You. You created it. Other ideas might be implanted in us. Maybe they were there from the start. And Descartes actually thinks that there are a lot of ideas that we were sort of born with. Now, why do we believe that we have ideas of things that actually correspond to real things outside of our mind? Why do we believe that other things exist besides ourselves? Again, can we be absolutely sure of that? Descartes thinks at this point we can't. And this is where he's going to talk about God's existence. With pretty much anything else you could think of it and you could say, well maybe I made up that idea. Maybe that idea really came from me that doesn't correspond anything outside of myself, outside of this thinking thing that I am. But what about the idea of God? Well, what does that idea include? Let's think about that for a moment. What is Descartes' idea of God? Again, it's a very metaphysical concept of God. Does he have a white beard? Yes or no? Does Descartes say in the meditations that I'm thinking of God, I'm thinking of a guy in the sky with a white beard sitting on a cloud. Do you remember running across that anywhere? Why not? Why doesn't he talk about God that way? That would just be sort of a sense idea, right? I mean, I hope most of you don't think of God as some guy with a long white beard all in white robe sitting on a cloud that you have a broader conception. Whether you believe God exists or not, hopefully you have a broader conception than just that. What does he think God is? He tells us that at one point he says that the idea of God includes God as a substance, right? So God is like us. God exists. God can have different attributes. A substance and it has what sort of qualities? Well, it's infinite, eternal. We don't really need to bother with eternal at this point. Infinite, eternal, independent, all-knowing, all-powerful, and by which I myself and every other thing that exists if there be such things were created. He says these properties are so great and excellent the more intensively I consider them, the less I feel persuaded that the idea I have of them owes its origin to myself alone. And there's two other things that go into his idea of God that may be really important. One is supremely perfect, right? And the other one is all good. And he's not going to talk about the goodness of God very much in this portion of the text. So that's going to come up later on, and that's going to be very, very important. I think back to Anselm when we talked about powers. This is taking a sort of little detail, but this is going to show you where we're going. If God is all good, could God be a deceiver? Yes or no? Can you think of any cases where it could be good to deceive somebody? Maybe if somebody wants to shoot themselves and I tell them, well, if you do that, you're going to automatically go to hell, and that's going to be worse than whatever you're enduring right now, but I don't know that that's actually the case. I would be deceiving them, wouldn't I? Maybe that would be a good reason to deceive somebody. Could God do something with that? First off, he wouldn't need to, he's all powerful, he can do whatever he wants. It's usually a sign of weakness or a lack, or being imperfect, or lacking goodness to be a deceiver. So if God's not a deceiver, that means that we can count on things actually being the way that we think that they are. Provided we're going to talk more about that next class when we get to meditation four. We're going to look more at this infinite and perfect. So, again, let's think about these ideas. You can all think of something infinite, right? Where did you get that idea from? Did it come from the outside world? Have you ever seen anything infinite? We've seen some things, maybe some of you have seen some things kind of like infinite. How many of you have gone to the ocean? Or at least to one of the Great Lakes? You've looked out, you know, you can't see the other shore, you can just see the horizon, you can see waves as far as you go. That might be like sort of a picture of infinity. If you try to wrap your head around it and think about all those waves and all those movements, it almost makes you kind of feel like a sense of vertigo, doesn't it? When you try to think of that. But that's not yet infinite, right? Because the Great Lakes only contains so much water, right? You could put a number on it, I don't know what the number is, but apparently it's something like 25% of the world's fresh water is in those Great Lakes, which is good for us. Because, you know, we've got them. At least not around here. What about the world's oceans? Those are bigger, right? There's a given number that we could assign to it. So you haven't seen something infinite. Could that notion have come from you? Could you? By, you know, working with your imagination and putting ideas together. Or could it have come from you yourself? Maybe you're infinite. Do you think you are? You're actually quite limited, aren't you? Just like I am. All human beings are. We can't do. The very fact that, for instance, right now, you don't know exactly what Descartes says at every single point in his book means that you're finite. The fact that you probably haven't read Emmanuel Kant yet, who we're going to read later in the semester. That means you're finite. If you were infinite, you could major in every single subject. Well, actually, you wouldn't need to major in any subject. You wouldn't have to go to school. You'd already know everything, wouldn't you? Well, if you're not getting it from the outside world, where is it coming from then? You have an idea of it, because you understand this, right? God is an infinite, supremely perfect, all-good substance. That makes sense to you? You may not believe that such a thing exists, but you can at least think of it. Where is that coming from? Think about perfection, too. Have you ever experienced perfection? Have you ever experienced perfection? Maybe a perfect cup of coffee, a perfect day, a perfect song, even a perfect piece of chalk. I don't even know what a perfect piece of chalk would be. I don't know what would go into making a piece of chalk particularly great, so I certainly can't think of what would make it perfect. Is there a perfect number? Okay, so where are we getting this idea from? This is where Descartes starts some terminology that it's really important to be clear about, because otherwise it won't make much sense to you. Put that in your eye-learn. He talks about two things. One is cause and effect, and the other one is kinds or modes of reality. Let's think about the easier one, cause and effect. We've talked about cause and effect before. Here's Descartes' meditations. What is the cause of this? You could come up with a whole bunch of causes. What's the most immediate cause of this book actually being here? That you could think of right off the bat. How did it get here in the classroom? You brought it. Right, so I'm the cause of it being physically here in front of you right now. How did it come to be in a broader sense? What books? Where do they come from? Well, it came from the bookstore. Where did the bookstore get it? How did this come to be? Somebody wrote it. That's actually further on in the process. But we can jump right to that. Printing processes and all that. Somebody wrote this, so Descartes wrote this book. Somebody actually edited it. This is the Descartes version that has the French, by the way. Descartes wrote it in Latin even though he's a French guy. And then somebody else translated his Latin into French because he didn't think his French was really that great. And then he looked at the translation and said, yeah, that looks okay. So Descartes is responsible for this book existing. He's the cause of it, right? Now at each point along the way, if we're thinking about reality, the cause has to have at least or more reality. And the effect which has less or the same. Descartes was in some sense more real than the words on this page because those came from him. Right? Just like when you're writing your papers do you want me to take your paper as being in some way more real than you? Your paper belongs to you, right? It's a reflection of you. It's not like the paper made you you make the paper. You write the paper. Similarly, anything else that we can say with cause and effect? The cause is in some way more real than the effect that comes from it. It has to have more reality or at least the same amount of reality. Where would be something with the same amount of reality? Well, think about your appearance. They're equally real as you are. Or at least they were when you were conceived. You know? They were human beings. If you have kids your kids are going to be equally real as you they're not going to be more real or less real they're going to be the same kind of thing as you. But things like this are in some sense less less real. They have less reality, a lesser degree. Ontologically they're not as great. Just like the words that I'm speaking right now are coming from me. I'm the cause of them. And in some way they're not as good not as real, not as true not as whatever you want to say as me. What is the same way with ideas? If you have an idea for instance, again I hold this book up. You don't actually know what's in this. Maybe it's not really words maybe I use this to like some people have to take the Bible and they cut out a thing and they bless you. They put their cash or their gun or their stash of whatever it is they want to hide in there. Maybe I've done that with this. You don't actually know. All you have is a sense impression in your mind. And when you leave this classroom you'll remember this as part of the lecture today but it will just be sort of a bunch of sense data together in your memory. That's less real than this actual book, right? The image in your mind this crosses it, right? Because you look at it and you see certain characteristics matter of fact not even as a hand this around you can, you know now you're actually feeling it you're adding more sense characteristics to it but your sensation of it is less real than that is. Your idea of all of you came in from the outside, right? So it was raining when you all came? Remember that rain. That memory is an effect of the real rain that you encounter. That rain is more real than the image in your mind. You remember back to Plato, right? Plato had kind of a similar idea about images that copies are not as real as the things that they're copied from. Okay, well the things in your mind are copies, aren't they? You have a copy of that book that's being passed around, you have a copy of all sorts of things. You have a copy of this, you know blue corduroy blazer that I'm wearing right now in your mind. You have a copy of the words on the chalkboard and the image of the chalkboard itself. So that gets us to cause an effect. Now let's think about different kinds of reality and the important distinction here is between what he calls objective reality and what he calls formal reality. What objective reality is it's the reality that something has in your mind as an idea. That's kind of hard to wrap your head around so I'm going to say it again. Objective reality is the reality that something has in your mind as an idea. So if you think about that book that's going around again, not everyone can see it right now. Certainly not all of you can be touching it right now experiencing that, but those of you who have seen it that book exists in your mind but it exists in your mind with the reality of an idea. Let's say we burn the book now. Does the book exist anymore if we burn it? It doesn't exist in reality, it still exists in your mind, doesn't it? There's other things that only exist in your mind like the blue unicorn that hates you that we talked about earlier or the purple unicorn who loves you. Those only have objective reality. They don't have formal reality. Formal reality is actually existing outside your mind to somewhere else. What does this sound like to you? Does this bring back anything that we did earlier this semester when we started talking about medieval philosophers? This distinction about being real in the mind and being real outside of the mind in reality. Does this remind you of anybody? Give me a hint, somebody we talked about about two and a half weeks ago? What was the similarity there? What was the similarity there? What was the similarity there? What was the similarity there? What was the similarity there? And he said God could just exist in the mind or you could call that in the understanding or you could exist in reality outside of the mind. Well, Descartes is doing something very similar here. So Descartes is going to say let's think about this idea of God. This idea of God exists in your mind along with a whole bunch of other stuff. Your mind is cluttered like a whole junk drawer with a million different ideas. But this idea is kind of unique, right? This idea is of something that is infinite, perfect. As an idea, this idea has the greatest reality. What kind of reality? Objective reality. Now, remember a cause can only you can only have a cause for something if that cause is greater or at least has the same amount of reality as the thing that's its effect. So what about this idea? This is like the best idea you could possibly have the greatest idea. What could its cause be? Could it be me? No, because I don't eat it myself. Formal or let's call it actual reality. There must be some cause for this effect in my mind. What could it be? It can't be me. It can't be anything that I've observed in the world that I'm used to. So what could it be? Well, it must be something else that is infinite, perfect, and has all the other qualities that we attribute to God. Maybe it's not God though, right? Maybe it's something else. What would it be God? I mean, that's what we mean by existing and being infinite and perfect and all that. Now notice, this is a little bit different than Anselm's proof. Anselm's proof had to do with you know, take the idea of God and then you sort of explore the idea and unpack what it must mean and all that. This is saying, if we have ideas in our mind those ideas had to come from somewhere and the idea the thing that it came from has to have at least as much reality as the idea does and this idea has the greatest degree of reality possible so it must have come from something that actually has the greatest degree of reality possible. The only thing that could possibly satisfy that description is what? Can you think of anything else that's infinite and perfect? Besides what people call God? If you can't then God must exist. If you could think of something else you could get off the hook here, right? Now this is one way to try to argue for God's existence and Descartes actually ends up saying God must have put this idea of himself itself or whatever you want to call it into me. That must be part of my that must be part of my very being. So this is kind of like Anselm's argument but it's kind of hard to say exactly what kind of argument it is because it deals with cause and effect a lot of people want to call this a cosmological argument like Thomas Aquinas's argument saying you can't have infinite regress or those sorts of things. Not a lot of people want to see this as an ontological argument. Descartes later on in meditation 5 will actually make it an ontological argument so let's look at that one next and then if we have time we'll look at what may be an argument for God's existence. So now remember ontological arguments they work by taking the idea of God and then somehow unpacking or pulling the idea open or working with them and saying that thing must exist. There must be something like that. If we want to take Descartes argument and boil it down to sort of its absolute, its simplest form, it would be something like this. This is the fifth meditation argument for God's existence. I have in myself the idea of God an idea is what? of a supremely perfect being and existence is a perfection better to exist than not to exist. Anybody here want to not exist? Anybody here want their money in their pocket not to exist? You prefer those things to exist right? It's better for those things to exist than not to exist. Really the only things you don't want to exist are bad things right? You prefer your pain not to exist or if you really hate somebody Aristotle says one way to define hatred somebody else not exist and be wiped off the face of the earth we want to come up with good things to exist is a perfection therefore God must exist Descartes says not everybody is going to buy this because it doesn't seem a little fishy to you. I have the idea of God the idea is a supremely perfect being existence is a perfection the idea is a perfect being that has every single perfection that includes existence so God must exist. Descartes says yeah okay this looks sophisticated that means it looks like an argument that's trying to trick you and he thinks that something stands in the way of seeing it right away and here's the way you talk folks with everything else that we experience the language between its essence what it is and its existence so we use an object like for instance there's a pen right this pen has a certain essence a certain form to it you can define it we can all point to it and say pen nobody looks at this and says ruler or kitty cat or anything like that those are other kinds of beings right this is a kind of being does this have to exist this probably didn't exist until a couple of years ago I'm willing to bet that it's only a few years old and once it's no longer used I'm gonna throw it out and it'll be destroyed broken down into its component parts I don't necessarily exist I could have easily not have existed I'm you know the product of two people getting together one time and one time only and that could have easily not happened does that mean that another doctor would have popped up somewhere else no anyone of us could not exist any of these chairs, desks the tiles on the floor pieces of chalk all those things are contingent so we're used to thinking about things as here's what the thing is and then here's whether it exists or not God is one of those kind of things Descartes is saying where the what it is includes existing we're not used to thinking in those sort of terms we're not used to thinking about necessary beings so our way our habits lead us to saying ah this isn't a good argument because we're not thinking in this case of God we're thinking of other things so he says what we're doing there is we're actually looking at things the wrong way Descartes says that existence in essence for God are sort of like valley and mountain can you think of a valley without a mountain without a valley they go together right and it's not like you know chocolate and peanut butter and Reese's peanut butter cups those don't have to go together right you can have the chocolate by itself you can have the peanut butter by itself they've recently started showing ads where just like when I was a kid you got your chocolate my peanut butter you got your peanut butter in my chocolate that didn't have to happen but if you have a mountain the mountain has to have a valley and if you have a valley bless you you don't have a valley without having a mountain well existence in essence are like that for God Descartes says now do you see any way to defeat that any way you might object to that do you have to have mountains and valleys in a world that doesn't have any mountains and valleys? yeah so the mere fact that if you start thinking about a mountain you also have to think of a valley doesn't mean that just because you think of God and what God would be that God has to automatically exist that's what Descartes says is a possible objection and Descartes says yeah I admit the fact that I can't conceive a mountain without a valley means that only if there's a mountain there has to be a valley along with it but what's the along with it in God's case it's existence it's to actually exist to be real so from the fact that I cannot conceive God without existence it follows that existence is inseparable from God and that he really exists and he deals with another objection too the other objection is isn't this kind of taking your thought as sort of imposing order or existence or whatever you want to say on reality because you think something is the way it is because you have this idea in your mind therefore boom it now exists out there and we saw this problem with Anselm too Anselm's proof kind of made it look like well I just have to have the idea and now the idea exists does that work with anything else imagine a 10 foot long chocolate bar does that have to exist because you think of it I mean it could exist let's think of something that couldn't exist the thought of it exists the thought of it exists in your mind but does the thought of it existing in your mind sort of projected out into reality that's the worry about this because you can have the thought of this in your mind if you don't believe in God you can at least say yes but I don't think there is then you're saying it's just in your mind Descartes is saying once it's in there and you adequately understand the idea you see that it has to include existence but what you're doing there is just recognizing something that already does exist out of your mind because of the way it's made your mind you're able to grasp that so again this is kind of similar to Anselm similar process not just in carrying out the proof but in explaining why somebody else might find the proof unconvincing Descartes is a very famous advocate of the ontological argument probably the strongest proponent of it since Anselm's time his version is a bit different though than Anselm's right he didn't say God is a supremely perfect being he said I'm not saying God is a supremely perfect being I'm calling God what that which do you remember the rest of that nothing greater can be thought that's a different idea than supremely perfect being Descartes is actually going to a place that Anselm chose not to go he's using a different idea of God Anselm's idea is kind of a negative idea that damage nothing greater can be thought Descartes idea is a more positive idea Anselm didn't think that would work by the way Anselm wouldn't buy this argument Descartes does and whether we agree with Descartes or not it's going to be important for us to see where he goes with this at this point it's not going to be whether God exists or not because Descartes believes himself to improve it it's whether God could actually be a deceiver because remember the whole goal of this is not just to decide whether God exists Descartes is never going to make any more use of God once he's proven his existence and gotten him to not be a deceiver it's going to be whether we can trust reality as we see it whether we can trust what we experience whether we can trust science whether we can trust our own minds whether we can trust logic and being able to trust that there's a God out there that created everything and is not a deceiver so it didn't set things up just to screw with us like an evil demon would have that's going to be an integral part of Descartes philosophy so the last thing I'm going to say is that if we go back to meditation one Descartes says something that some people take to be a proof of God's existence he says I could have come to be in a couple ways how did I myself as a being, as a thinking thing how did I come to exist so what's one possibility God what are some other possibilities we can look at our own culture for this if you don't believe in God how do you think you got here people will say things like evolution instead says chance fate or a set of interlocking cause how is this supposed to work well there's all these different causes and effects and they're all connected to each other so we find out for instance that what's an example why do we walk around like this not like ape men like monkeys or apes well there was an evolutionary usefulness to standing erect and what was that they think cause it's not actually good for your back to stand up like this it's actually better for animals to be hunched over dogs don't have a lot of back problems for the most part except for, you know, inbred dogs not a lot of gorillas have a back problem what advantage does this give us we can see a lot farther so you can see the lion coming a long ways off before it eats you there's the gorilla doesn't see it until it's right on top of them and the other thing was what are these good for just about everything right? this and the big old brain and then of course the capacity to speak that's what made us human we're the tool-using and tool-producing creature yeah I know monkeys but not monkeys apes a stick into a termite thing and pull the termites out that's kind of like using a tool but they don't make iPhones or computers or chalkboards so that would be like interlocking causes how does evolution actually work? chance, right? if we were just going by just straight out evolution and not using medicine or anything most of us would be dead by now most of us would have succumbed to some childhood sickness or there was something about our genetic make-up that wouldn't work like my ankles over pronate that means the lion would have gotten me or I wear glasses wouldn't have been passing my jeans on because it's hard to throw that spear and kill whatever it is that you're going to get if you can't see the back of the room so chance plays a role they don't think with evolution that it's fate although you could think of some sort of cosmic fate if you had that sort of view these are all possibilities now if here's where the something like an argument for God's existence comes in remember Dick Heart is all about resolving doubt being able to be certain about that if I was created by God then I could have the chance of figuring everything out because now I would have structured the universe and structured me in such a way that I would be able to do that provided he's not like a screw with you kind of God just make people and set them up to fail provided he's a good guy it would be possible for the universe and for the human being to be what we call intelligible to be understandable but if it's chance what then if we're just the product of things coming together in certain ways is there any necessity that we actually figure out once what that we not be deceived there isn't I mean it could turn out that way but maybe we won't there's no purpose behind it if there's a purpose behind it but it's not God so it's not something all good something that doesn't care about human beings are we likely to actually be able to figure everything out it all depends on what fate would have decided we have no way of knowing what fate decided right there's just a whole bunch of causes all coming together just the right way at the right time does that hold out a lot of possibility that we could ever truly know what we are what the world is what's true, what's false not much this is actually I'm not saying that this is a good argument this is God's existence but people do make this kind of argument they say if it's all just evolution how could you even know if evolution is true maybe we're set up in such a way that we're deceived even about that there's something to be said for that that's considered by some people to be an argument for God's existence that you can find in Descartes more by French scholars than American or English scholars but the ones that are really important are the fifth meditation so next class we're going to pick up with the fourth meditation and see what mileage we get out of assuming that God exists I'll see all of you Monday