 Welcome to another one of my doctors at their chalk and talks. This time I am discussing a question that was given to me by a student through BU. Here she said what was Descartes's position on God and they said that they try to get some answers out of their own professors but that there was some disagreement between them. And so I want to talk about why I think there might be some disagreement in part because there's an ambiguity in the way the question is put to begin with. When we're talking about views on God we might mean a lot of different things. Descartes definitely has some views about God that are articulated in his various works, the discourse, the meditations, principles, really throughout his work because God is an important part of his philosophical system. Now that's not the same thing as saying that Descartes believed in God in the way that some religious believer out on the street might mean if we went up to him or her and we said hey do you believe in God. Those aren't quite the same set of commitments, those aren't the same set of meanings. So let's think about a bunch of different things that people mean when they talk about views on God or believing in God. Descartes has a metaphysical position, all of us do actually, whether we understand ourselves to or not because we have some beliefs about the nature of the universe, reality, human beings, other animate things. We have all sorts of metaphysical commitments that we're making, whether we're materialists or idealists or whatever you like. So we can talk about views on God in terms of metaphysical position being along the lines of do you believe that there is some sort of being out there corresponding to what people, do you see that as something that can be proven? If so how? Do you see that as something that could be disproven? If so, does God interact with the rest of the universe, in religious terms, with creation? If so how? Those would be metaphysical views as well as being other types of views. We can talk about religious beliefs and we can talk about the discipline that's more concerned with those of theology. You know, once we get to things of a more positive nature, like did God really give the Ten Commandments to Moses Ambulance? Now we're dealing with beliefs that are no longer metaphysical beliefs. They're about, you know, what you might call empirical events. And that's a different sort of question than asking about, you know, a philosopher's metaphysical beliefs. There are also a lot of things, if we want to distinguish between philosophy and theology, in a way that's similar to how people were at the time of Descartes. There are truths that we could know by use of human mind unaided, you know, simply applying natural human reason. And then there are other truths that we could know only by being given them as a revelation and then perhaps using reason to unpack them. So the notion that God is, that Christians have, that God is a trinity, that by most philosophers has been seen as one of those, the other type of truth that has to be known through revelation, so theology would handle that. We can also talk about religious practice. Does, you know, somebody's views on God, or they reveal that religious practice, if somebody believes God to be good, how do they interact with God? If they believe that prayer works, you would expect, which it could be a metaphysical belief, you would expect them to actually be praying, because, you know, if prayer works, why the hell wouldn't you, right? If you are committed to, you know, theological views like God is met through the sacraments, you know, teaching the Catholic Church and actually quote a few of the Protestant churches of Descartes' time, then that would, you know, lead to a certain kind of behavior. We can also talk about Descartes' attitude towards religious authority as well. Does he, does he take religious authority as sort of speaking for God or not? So let's look at each of these in turn. Very clear that Descartes has metaphysical views on God. He tells us what those are. As a matter of fact, we're going to talk through the rest of this, mostly about those. He's clearly committed to the view that God exists. He's clearly committed to the view that you prove that God exists, that you can know certain things about God, that God interacts with other things in certain ways. So, you know, we can put a check in his column on that part. What about more specifically religious beliefs? You know, Descartes is an interesting and cagey fellow when it comes to this sort of stuff. You get the impression that he wanted to keep himself out of any sort of predicaments or trouble. So he refrained from saying too much and rocking the boat. And this goes along with what's often called the provisional reality. Descartes, you know, according to the Great Cartesian Project, is going to supply an ethics at one time. Never actually does that. You know, out of metaphysics and physics should ultimately come. Mechanics, medicine and morals, according to this whole great tree thing. He does provide us with something that you can call provisional ethics, though. And in those provisional ethics, he says, well, you know, whatever the beliefs happen to be of the place where you are, you should probably go along with them. In part, you keep yourself out of trouble that way and you're not likely to lead yourself astray. It's not as if he sees an intrinsic value or truth in doing that. Instead, it's more like, well, if you want to do philosophy and you don't want other people to be bothering you with all these other things that they do get really worked up about, go along with what the majority of people are okay with and keep your mouth shut most of the time about that. So I think that when it comes to Descartes' religious beliefs and other scholars think differently on this, most of them say, yeah, he's not really committed to Christianity in any sort of robust sense. And you can see this really clearly when it comes to religion. Descartes, you know, goes to masses when he needs to. Doesn't appear to feel their lack when he's in other places, never really talks much about the sacraments. I mean, there's a few bits and pieces here and there in letters, but it's hard to tell how much of that is actually just trying to show that his philosophy is compatible with that of the Catholic Church. Well, not the philosophy of the Catholic Church because there's no such thing, but the theological views of the Catholic Church. He's not committed to Christianity as a way of life. This is not a central part of who Descartes is. If you compare him to some of his contemporaries or some of the other Cartesians, you know, like you say compare him to Blaise Pascal or you compare him to Nicholas Malbridge, it's very clear by looking at their lives that Descartes is not very interested in religious practice. So his views on God would apparently be something like, well, God doesn't particularly care so much about doing all these religious rituals and things like that. What about religious authority? Well, you know, again, Descartes is very keen on getting his philosophy accepted and he's doing something fairly revolutionary at the time. And he's also keen on not getting himself into any sort of unnecessary trouble. So, you know, his views on religious authority basically end up being something like, hey, I'm just doing philosophy here, natural reason. I'm going to leave that higher up stuff to you religious authorities that are doubtless, better suited to that and have, you know, better access to the divine revelation than I do. I'm just going to stick with this. Now, that sounds like a very humble way of putting things, but since Descartes is sort of claiming to present us with what reason itself would say, how reason itself would see itself, what the right method in using your mind has to be, what all the right metaphysical views are, he's not actually putting himself below the theologians and the church authorities, he's actually in a certain sense placing himself above that. One way of actually making religious authorities and their claims irrelevant is to say, ah, you're so far above reason we can't understand you. We just have to take you on faith because then as soon as that faith has gone, they're down here. Okay, so to sum this up, Descartes is making metaphysical commitments very clearly having to do with God. When it comes to the other stuff, it seems to be fairly along the lines of window dressing. It doesn't appear to be things that were really courted as philosophical product, Pascal. So let's now look at what were some of those metaphysical commitments that he made. Well, first off, he makes arguments about God's existence, and I'm confining myself here just to the two most popular early red works of Descartes' Meditations in the Discourse Method, because he does talk about this in other places as well, but he makes arguments for God's existence in meditations three and five and arguably perhaps even in meditation one. He makes arguments for God's existence also in the Discourse on Method Four. His arguments for God's existence tend to be either what we call ontological arguments based on the idea of God and unpacking that so that it must include somehow necessary existence. You see him doing an argument like that in Meditation Five, also in the Discourse on Method, or they tend to be an interesting variety of cosmological arguments. It's kind of tricky to get your head around this. Made in Meditation Three, where he's saying something essentially along the lines of if God didn't exist, then where did this idea of God come from in our minds? Given that this idea itself has a greater type of reality than those of other ideas. And it's a very tricky proof, and I'm not going to try to do justice to it here, but essentially there's good grounds for seeing as a sort of argument from causality to confine the things that go on in our mind. Maybe also in Meditation One, like I said, in part because he's saying if you think about how I came to be, if I'm not designed by God, if I wasn't created by God, then I have even less likelihood of ever getting to the truth. If that's an argument for God's existence, a fairly weak argument for God's existence, I think. But it might be one nonetheless. What else? He thinks that God is a substance. Substances are the things that are most real. In the Cartesian system, there are three kinds of substance, bodies or extension, physical things that interact with each other that are extended in space and time. Minds, not extended in space and time, connected up with bodies in tricky to explain ways. Again, much more to be said there. And the third one, God. God is his own kind of substance, totally unique, infinite, perfect in every conceivable way, anything that it's better to be than not to be. God is that. And he's also good. Dick Hurt does seem to think of God in a fairly non-anthropomorphic way. He rejects some very crude forms of anthropomorphism. He does think that God is similar to us or at least we are similar to God in having an intellect and having a will. As a matter of fact, he thinks that what it means for human beings to be in the image of God is not our intellect, which was a fairly traditional, say, Thomistic and patristic way of looking at it, but in our will. He thinks that our will makes us more like God. And Dick Hurt's view of God is what we call a volunteeristic view of God. If God wanted to change the rules for how things work, he could do that anytime he wants to. On why are the laws of mathematics or the laws of logic or even those of physics set up the way they are, God chose them. That's the end of the explanation there. God provides in the Cartesian system, God provides the possibility of attaining something that's really important for Descartes, and that's certainty. If you think about the whole project of the meditations, it begins with hyperbolic depth. It begins by rejecting previous opinions, stripping them away, first starting with the senses, then starting with even like to know the truths of mathematics, and finally getting to the point where Descartes can say, well there's one thing I know, that's I exist. And then it can start working out from that. What is this I exist? What is it for me to exist on the thinking thing? Here are these different modes of thinking. But without God, he gets stuck in what we would call solipses, which is where you just have the self, and the self can only have knowledge of the self and what is appearing to it, and it can't be sure that there's anything truly outside. Anything other than the self. God gets Descartes out of that predicament. He allows him, first of all, to think, well there is God, there's something greater than me, so that puts things in perspective. And then he also, by the midpoint of the meditations, is allowing Descartes to say that he can trust that things are the way that he perceives them clearly and distinctly, things that he perceives through his mind, things not through the senses, but through reason, through the intellect. So you can trust that a triangle actually does get angles that add up to eight degrees and it's not going to change tomorrow. And then you can even get to the point where you have an external world that you can more or less reliably believe in. You can be an error about something, but you don't have to be worried about the idea that it's all just a dream. The last thing I'm going to say about this has to do with this use of God, Blaise Pascal, I'm going to let him have the last word. Blaise Pascal was a much more committed religious thinker after living a kind of libertine existence. These things would apply to Blaise Pascal, the ones that don't apply to Descartes do apply to Pascal. And he says, Descartes uses God. He brings him into his system just to set the world motion and then he has no more use for it. And I think that's actually a good interpretation of Descartes' view. So if your view in asking about Descartes when you read all this God talk is, well was he a religious guy? He wasn't really a religious guy. It's possible to have all sorts of views on God or the divine without having very strong or even any religious commitments. And I think that I'm not going to say Descartes had any religious commitments but they certainly were not an important part of his life.