Though I thoroughly enjoy reading Descartes and find his logic impeccable (usually), there are a few points of contention which I of course only articulate well after class is over. I am sure some of these points we’ve been over before, but I would like to re-iterate them for the sake of argument. Some of my objections are little more than quibbles with his argument, but hear me out.
1) Descartes states that the cause of an effect must be at least as great as its effect (Meditation 3). Even if this is true, why must “God” have implanted our idea of Him in our minds? When broken down, the concept of God is nothing more than a few characteristics (Omni benevolence, Omnipotence, Omniscience, etc), all of which humans have an idea of. Why then can’t it be that Human imagination created God, as an amalgam of these ideas. Descartes himself states that human will can err; perhaps we merely have willed this idea of a God into existence?
2) Descartes attempts to completely separate the mind and body, considering the mind a Res Cogitans (thinking thing), and the body a Res Extensa (extended thing). He goes on a long rambling set of proofs in order to prove this, however along the way he takes a very hard to follow leap of logic. Descartes states that the mind is a reality distinct from the body, and God can create a thinking thing apart from an extended thing (I.e. a mind independent of a body) and vice versa. He then goes off on the assumption that since God can do this, he has done it. The mind and body surely can not be separated so easily. When you feel pain, you can’t just hide in your brain and shut off your body’s sensory input. And is it anything less than absurd to think that a body could operate without input from the mind directing it to move and how to interact, as well as detecting essences? To put it simply, just because God can create a mind independent of a body does not mean that He did. Perhaps this point is where Descartes’ false judgment willed him to error.
3) Lastly, Descartes states that for every effect there is at least as great a cause. This means the cause must be separate from the effect. This also means that nothing can cause itself to exist. If this is true, then God could not create Himself, therefore THERE IS NO GOD AND DESCARTES IS A DIRTY LIAR. Unless I see some posthumous proofs for the creation of God by the Uber-God, I stand by my theory.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
I can't help you with your first two problems but I'll try to take a crack at the last one. One of the essential properties of God is existence(according to Descartes), so, He never could have not existed. This means that He was not created because that would imply that at some point he could have not existed. He simply always is, He is eternal.
That "essential property" of God is really no more than an idea which people attribute to the greater idea of God.
I admit I was extremely lost on the entire formal reality/cause is greater than or equal to objective reality/effect, but it's terribly difficult for me to articulate why.
I believe Descartes somewhat addressed your first point in Meditation 3, on page 34. He argued that one of the perfections of God is the inseparability of all the other characteristics you mentioned, and from that concludes that these characteristics all come from a common cause.
Personally, I don't believe in gods or souls, and I don't think that the very notion that the idea of perfection exists proves anything. Outside of Descartes' intricate web of logic, it seems obvious that gods were invented to explain natural phenomena and the soul to explain the mind and deal with death.
Let's say we do look at the properties of God, the omni's. I'm not sure if man has an idea of anything that is omnibenevolent, omnipotent, or omniscient without referring back to God. It seems that in all recorded history there is a God or gods, so looking at just that we would be forced to believe that God, or the idea of God has always been around. Therefore, if people always had an idea of God then it would seem more likely that man created the omni's to describe God. THis is contrary to Colin's argument that we had an idea of the omni's and used them to create God.
I feel that another major failing of Descartes (mainly because of the time of his writing) was his ignorance of the idea of evolution. As Justin said, man has always conceived God in some form or another. But I wonder what happened before man became man? Do apes, our cousins, have a conception of God? I guess what I'm posing is the idea that there can be only some answers to that question (i.e. did God exist before man did?):
1. God, as Richard said, has always existed (thus before man)
2. Or, man invented God in the same way that man, through his universally rational nature, imposed on himself the categorical imperative. Maybe God is really just a creation of man that all men have agreed exists (at least as an idea) just like the idea of a universal moral law.
I feel that, either way, the effects are still the same. Whether God exists or not, we (meaning humanity) still struggles with him (or she, or it, or they).
Although most of these comments address your third point, I wanted to comment on the second, the separation between the mind and the body. Descartes proposes that the body is an extended thing and the mind is a thinking thing, therefore a person is truly distinct from their body and could exist without it. Like Collin and myself, people tend to question why a person can feel things exerted on them from the world, like pain, if the body and mind were not intermingled. Wouldn’t the idea of pain imply that the mind and the body are in fact connected? According to Descartes, sensory perceptions are merely a form of thought. Sensory perception could not exist without the mind or the body to contain them. But a body can be created independently from the mind vice versa. This idea still doesn’t make much sense to me. Even when I accept it a whole new set of questions arise: If sensory experience is in the mind and the bodies that cause our sensations are in the world, how can the two interact? What is the connection between the mind and the world?
I investigated this question a little further and discovered that in one of Descartes’ latter works, Passions of the Soul (1649), he argues that the immaterial human soul acts upon the physical body via the pineal gland.
“There is a little gland in the brain where the soul exercises its functions more particularly than in the other parts of the body. We need to recognize also that although the soul is joined to the whole body, nevertheless there is a certain part of the body where it exercises its functions more particularly than in all the others. It is commonly held that this part is the brain...and the heart because we feel the passions as if they were in it. But...I think I have clearly established that the part of the body in which the soul directly exercises its functions is not the heart at all, or the whole of the brain. It is rather the innermost part of the brain, which is a certain very small gland situated in the middle of the brain's substance and suspended above the passage through which the spirits in the brain's anterior cavities communicate with those in its posterior cavities. The slightest movements on the part of this gland may alter very greatly the course of these spirits, and conversely any change, however slight, taking place in the course of the spirits may do much to change the movements of the gland.” (106)
Post a Comment