Does God Exist? (Descartes) - a podcast by Dre Carlan
from 2021-02-08T01:00
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Contact: thesummitstudyhall [at] gmail [dot] com
Material referenced:
“Thus the idea of God is the only one left about which to ask the question: does it contain something that could not have originated from me? By the word ‘God’ I understand some infinite substance, which is independent, supremely intelligent and supremely powerful, and by which both I, and everything else that exists (if anything else exists), were created. All these ideas are surely such that, the more carefully I examine them, the less likely it seems that they could have originated from myself alone. Therefore one should draw the conclusion from what has been said that God necessarily exists.”
-Meditations on First Philosophy, Third Meditation
“By reflecting on the fact that I doubted and that, consequently, my being was not completely perfect—for I saw clearly that it was a greater position to know than to doubt—I decided to find out where I learned to think about something that was more perfect than myself, and I knew clearly that this had to be from some nature that was in-fact more perfect. As regards the ideas I had of many other external things, such as the sky, the earth, light, heat and thousands of others, I did not have any comparable difficulty in knowing where they came from, because I did not notice anything in them that seemed to make them superior to me and therefore I was able to believe that, if they were true, they depended on my nature to the extent that they contained any perfection and, if they were not true, I got them from nothing, that is, they were present in me because of some deficiency in me. But the same would not apply to the idea of a being that was more perfect than me. To get such an idea from nothing was something manifestly impossible. And I could not have received it from myself either, because it was just as impossible for something that is more perfect to result from and depend on something less perfect as for something to proceed from nothing. Thus the only remaining option was that this idea was put in me by a nature that was really more perfect than I was, one that even had in itself all the perfections of which I could have some idea, that is—to express myself in a single word—by God.”
-Discourse on Method, Part IV
Contact: thesummitstudyhall [at] gmail [dot] com
Material referenced:
“Thus the idea of God is the only one left about which to ask the question: does it contain something that could not have originated from me? By the word ‘God’ I understand some infinite substance, which is independent, supremely intelligent and supremely powerful, and by which both I, and everything else that exists (if anything else exists), were created. All these ideas are surely such that, the more carefully I examine them, the less likely it seems that they could have originated from myself alone. Therefore one should draw the conclusion from what has been said that God necessarily exists.”
-Meditations on First Philosophy, Third Meditation
“By reflecting on the fact that I doubted and that, consequently, my being was not completely perfect—for I saw clearly that it was a greater position to know than to doubt—I decided to find out where I learned to think about something that was more perfect than myself, and I knew clearly that this had to be from some nature that was in-fact more perfect. As regards the ideas I had of many other external things, such as the sky, the earth, light, heat and thousands of others, I did not have any comparable difficulty in knowing where they came from, because I did not notice anything in them that seemed to make them superior to me and therefore I was able to believe that, if they were true, they depended on my nature to the extent that they contained any perfection and, if they were not true, I got them from nothing, that is, they were present in me because of some deficiency in me. But the same would not apply to the idea of a being that was more perfect than me. To get such an idea from nothing was something manifestly impossible. And I could not have received it from myself either, because it was just as impossible for something that is more perfect to result from and depend on something less perfect as for something to proceed from nothing. Thus the only remaining option was that this idea was put in me by a nature that was really more perfect than I was, one that even had in itself all the perfections of which I could have some idea, that is—to express myself in a single word—by God.”
-Discourse on Method, Part IV
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