The Road to Atheism
There are many people in the world who claim to have proof of god’s existence, the proof comes in many forms and is usually quite different from evidence and is usually in the form of a random occurrence or a personal experience or personal interpretation of an event. Opposed to all those kinds of proofs Descartes’ proofs are much better and more well thought out than most. Some people claim that if something is complex and that person is unable to see a way that it could have evolved they automatically claim that it is irreducibly complex (and therefore god exists) unfortunately for them this is usually an argument from either personal incredulity or ignorance. There are people who claim that there are proofs of other worlds in the electromagnetic spectrum and since there are anomalies in random places it is proof of spiritual influence of some kind, but this is unfounded and only plausible to people who are not acquainted with how electromagnetic fields can be produced. Some say that they have had personal revelation, but I fear that most of them are liars, opportunists or people who have a certain form of epilepsy that causes experiences similar to out of body experiences or near death experiences. In none of these does Descartes make his case and his proofs are harder to disprove than the others though he falls very short of finding evidence for God.
The cause of the dilemma – does god exist or not? The dilemma is caused by many issues of the human condition that have been proven and evidenced in history, anthropology, psychology, and other sciences. It is as simple as asking the question “why do people believe in god?”. People are probably inclined to believe in god or at least were inclined as such because of the lack of knowledge of natural phenomena and it’s causes. The original belief of early humans was likely that of animism. Animism is a belief that everything has a spirit and a consciousness. Because in early humans it was probably easier to get along with this belief and had some advantages because things were understood to be another being, perhaps even on an equal footing with ones-self. After this it became something a little less animistic and it is the belief that all things have a god behind them that is the cause of them. Perhaps all things is a bit of an overstatement but not by much, many times in ancient history there are gods for almost everything. This polytheism was the common belief for a long time after the neolithic revolution in which men began to live not as wandering vagabonds but as food growers and animal raisers. It was only but recently – about 2000 years ago – that monotheism became popular and with it came large organized religions, the majority that we have today are monotheistic and this is the god that Descartes is trying to prove in both “meditations on first philosophy” and in his “Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking for Truth in the Sciences” though the former will be the focus of this text.
Almost in the beginning of the fourth meditation Descartes states “That it is impossible that god should ever deceive me.” (Meditations on First Philosophy 510) This belief perhaps was not proven wrong then and some would say even now it is still true. Though the proof for god is non existent at least in the form of tangible evidence. Every piece of evidence that is found supports a universe where not random chance nor a designing god is the reigning power but something even simpler and more majestic in every way I can imagine. When he states that “it is impossible that God should ever deceive me.” (Meditations on First Philosophy 510) it seems that in order for a god that cannot lie, in order for him to exist in a world where evidence for him to exist he would have to have planted evidence contrary to his existence for all of the things that we now find. Such as the tree ring dating system which is accurate to the year proves that the world is at least 13,000 years old so young earth creation would be impossible. The fact that the only evidence for the beginning of the universe points to a big bang and not to a designer.
Descartes also tries to give God all the credit for the judgment that is inherently in him. Judgment in itself is in no way proof of a God or a designer. The faculty to judge things is not inherently human nor is it in any way perfect in any thing that we now know to exist. The ability to judge is something that would have been weighted high on the scale of values of things that were naturally selected for. Things without the ability to judge or without the power to use it would die off quickly for either being too ineffective in hunting for food because they couldn’t judge many things such as distance, speed, direction or intent. All of these things are part of the ability to judge.
There was not a valid alternative to belief in a god or gods. So his understanding of how natural things are can probably be understood, and it is because of the fact that he was probably raised in religion his whole life so as to make his belief in god a part of his subconscious and as such probably superseded all his other preconceptions. This is probably why when, try as he might, he attempts to remove all of his preconceptions but fails in this one because it is so inherent in his nature because of it being a part of his life from during his primary enculturation in which most of a person’s understanding of the culture in which they live is learned. For him it included the belief in god and in such a way as to be imperceptible to him. He then tries to assert that “he surely did not give me the kind of faculty which would ever enable me to go wrong[...]” (Meditations on First Philosophy 510.2) And in this he does a fairly good job in proving that if one removes all assumptions and attempts to try to find only those things which can be known without doubt. Though in this he is mistaken in the fact that he can imagine himself without his body and that there must surely be a self separate from the body. There is indeed the mental perception of having an consciousness outside that of the body and is perhaps hard to overcome even with the evidence to the contrary. If the body was separate from the intelligence behind it it would certainly not be damaged along with the body though this is inevitably the case that when the brain is damaged it can limit speech, mobility, understanding, and many other things which would be considered part of the soul and yet the ability to use them are damaged when certain parts of the brain are impaired.
In his third meditation he says “The mere fact that God created me is a very strong basis for believing that I am somehow made in his image and likeness.” (Meditations on First Philosophy 509.2) But how can this be? He claims that he is made in Gods image simply because God made him. The idea sounds poetic and pleasing yet there is something very wrong with it. God also made the hideous angler fish and every disease and every planet and moon by his thinking and they cannot all be in Gods image for the simple fact that they do not all look alike, nor do they even have the same scale. If he were a dog would he think that he was made in God’s image even though religious men claim that right for their own? Yet he made the dog as well as man by his thinking and they do not share in likeness.
Descartes also states “that I exist and have within me an idea of a most perfect being, that is, God, provides a very clear proof that God indeed exists.” (Meditations on First Philosophy 509.2) This is total fallacy! I cannot imagine how one could think that just because they have an idea of something perfect that it is proof of the existence of the thing. Perhaps my imagined perfect thing is not the same, could it be that it exists because I can have a clear idea of it?
Perhaps this was taken a little out of context, perhaps he means that he can imagine only two constants so far, his mind and God. Though his mind he would consider his spirit because his body may not even exist and God he believes to be the body of perfection that every thing that is good is embodied in is this one being called God. But even that must not be so, if everything that was good was placed in a being, as well as unlimited power, knowledge and intelligence could that being possibly be in existence because with benevolence comes the necessity to do good and not just know good. If there was one who was in existence who knew the best thing for the human race, or the entire world for that matter would not such a being be pressed to help out? In all that we have here, in all that we have done to one another and to the other creatures and even to the earth, could he not be good enough to help? We are fighting wars against people who think killing infidels is how you get straight to heaven, men and women are dying fighting a group of people who would use handicapped people to blow innocent people up. The most atrocious wars ever fought were fought in the name of God and in his name millions have died. No Rene Descartes does not prove God, he only proves that he can only imagine a world where God exists also known as the argument from ignorance.