Descartes'
Clear Conception of God

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DOES God exist? This must be one of the most intensely debated questions in history.

René Descartes, who gave the subject much attention, meditated about the human mind that it was unable to really invent anything. Even the most fantastical creatures created by painters were built of parts from known animals, and even if they had not been, they still would have been montages of known colors.

Descartes concieved God as the sovereign, eternal, infinite, unchangeable, all-knowing, all-powerful, and universal Creator of all things outside itself. It would not be within the powers of the human mind, Descartes claimed, for us to create a clear and distinct conception of anything like this by ourselves. The conception had to have an external cause, and this cause had to be as great as the concept it imprinted.

As he in life had not had direct contact with God through his senses, Descartes reckoned that the conception was put in him at the time of his creation, by God himself.

DESCARTES conviction in a sovereign, eternal, infinite, unchangeable, all-knowing, all-powerful, and universal Creator rested on his observations about the unoriginality of the human imagination, but also on his notion that ideas that are clear and distinct in us must be true.

Descartes sought to prove this notion by saying that an all-perfect God could not create anything imperfect. Man's only flaw, Descartes reasoned, was that he was not infinite -- neither in knowledge nor anything else. As long as man saw this, and restrained himself from passing judgement when his concepts were confused and not clear, he would always be right in his opinions.

If it was different -- if we could not trust our reason when it seemed to us we possessed clear and distinct knowledge, it would be because God wilfully deceived us. But as deceptiveness is a sign of wickedness and imperfection, and God is perfect, this could not be, Descartes argued.

ALTHOUGH impressive, the argument suffers from a strange logical flaw. On one hand Descartes wanted to show that an all-perfect God exists because any idea so clear and distinct in him must be true. On the other hand he sought to prove that a clear and distinct idea must be true because an all-perfect God would not have created us differently.

In a circular fashion Descartes attempted to prove two uncertainties by deducting each from the other.

WIELDING another approach, Descartes tried to demonstrate that clear and distinct ideas must be true by referring to cases where this in fact is so. However, as it is easy to find examples of the opposite - of clear and distinct ideas that were later shown untrue - the argument falls flat. To mention some, one can point to Democritus' idea that atoms have irregular shapes which cause them to entangle, Aristotle's physics, and thus, now, Descartes' idea that clear and distinct ideas are necessarily true.

Also one doubts Descartes assertions that his mind of matemathical genius could not invent a sovereign, eternal, infinite, unchangeable, all-knowing, all-powerful, and universal Creator by combining well known principles from matemathics and everyday life. And even if his assertations were true, it still is possible that the conception was put in him by a more imaginative demonic deciever.

By this it is not proven that Descartes' God does not exist. But neither did Descartes, as was his belief, prove the existence of an all-perfect God.