God Transcendent in Cartesian Philosophy

God and Cartesian philosophy are inseparable. Without God Descartes would have had neither a method to begin his philosophy nor one to conclude it. He was fully reliant on God, and so in that sense God transcended Cartesian philosophy. In achieving the all-encompassing doubt of the beginning two Meditations where he realized the axiom “cogito ergo sum” God necessarily needed to be apart of the reasoning. To rationally reform those conclusions in the Sixth Meditation to form his belief that through the virtue of God his perception of the world did not in actuality deviate from how he perceived it God was this time indispensable to an even greater degree. This belief of God as non-deceiving opened up a major flaw that will be subsequently critiqued. But no matter how erroneous Cartesian philosophy turns out to be, that cannot diminish it significance as essentially modernist. Descartes blazed his own independent trail through the mind, even if he drove the Catholic Church. In the First Meditation Descartes discussed the fallibility of his senses and used it as a starting point to doubt every belief related to those senses or all corporeal things. From there he brought in the idea of God. He describes Him as an omnipotent, omniscient being; one that could have “brought it to pass that there is no earth, no sky, no extended bodies, no shape, no size, no place and that nevertheless [he had] the impression of all these things and cannot imagine that things might be other than as [he saw] them” (p21). And since God had already shown to allow him to be deceived in more trivial matters relating to his sense he observed that the notion that God is a being focused only on doing what is good must be superseded. From that understanding of God he then was able to doubt the entire physical reality perceived by his senses. Anything of corporeal nature or derived from that nature he could deny existence by assuming God had the power to project it through illegitimate images to him. If Descartes were an atheist he could look at this argument and simply deny it by claiming that there is no God. To eliminate that flaw he proposed the evil demon argument. He reasoned that if there were a Godlike creature whose sole purpose it was to deceive him into believing what he saw was legitimate even though it was unreal, then he would not be able to deny that he could be deceived even if he did not believe in God, because he would have no way to know if there was an evil demon. With that in mind Descartes reasoned himself into believing that he could safely step foot into a way of understanding in which nothing he knew or thought really existed except that he thought because denying existence of everything out of necessity entailed thinking. And so he knew as a fact that he was something that thought. Since that notion of him as a thinking thing was the one belief that he could not doubt and since everything else could be doubted he concluded his mind and body constituted different properties. He reasoned this by differentiating between things that could be doubted and could not be doubted; that since they differed in so imperative an attribute they necessarily must be different substances. So not only was he able with God to deny the corporeal world, but God also allowed him to create his mind-body duality. The next major service the idea of God did for Descartes’ philosophy was to allow his mind to travel from the state of all-but-one doubt to a rational understanding and acceptance of the capabilities of man to perceive the truth of experience. Thus, the purpose or function of God in Descartes’ philosophy was switched. This was achieved with the introduction of the argument for God being absolutely a non-deceiver. Through that argument he deduced that his senses had the power to properly discern the truth that is presented by the omnipotence of God. The Sixth Meditation reasoned that since it was against the nature of an omnipotent being to deceive, as deceit was a form a negation, it followed that God as he knew Him did not deceive him, that what he perceived in the world must be actually be what he understood it to be and not a fictitious image transcribed by Him. The point being, that his nature, however less perfect than God was not created in a way that gave him a backward understanding of the world. The capabilities God endowed him with do not confine him to an understanding of the world so backward that the belief he held not only as absolute, but which he relied on to form an idea of who he was, were all artificial. From there Descartes took the long list of beliefs he confined to falsity and examined them with God as a non-deceiver in mind; the result being much of what he doubted given amnesty, including doubt on sensory perception. He reasoned that if his perception of the world told him something which concurred with his capabilities as rational being then by the grace of God (not the deceit of God) he could be confident that the thing which his senses discerned must not be false but be real and accepted as truth. This argument is not sound because of the word deceit, for deceit is a word differentiated by degrees of severity and discontinuous meanings. If God is projecting a false world before us that we interpret as true objective reality it does not necessarily have to be evil. This kind of deceit is really indifferent deceit, apathetic deceit, not evil deceit. What we see as evil anti-reality—the fictitiously projected world— is no more of an evil anti-reality than the world which we have faith is absolute—the objective reality cohering to the way we understand it. For why did God not make instead a world even closer to the perfection that He embodies? There is infinity many different worlds that could have been created by God, so because He could have always made one better than ours the deceit of our world if that deceit exists cannot be called evil. The imagination speaks for itself in showing worlds greater than our own that would make the rational creatures living in them imagine one like ours and believe that they would be living in a state of deceit if theirs was like ours even if our world existed free from any of the deceit here suspected. The unlimited possibility of specific lots which God could have assigned our existence to makes judging the evilness in any deceit therein fallacious. The idea of an unlimited number of possible worlds at the creative hand of God also renders other reasons given to justify the state of our existence untenable. If it is said the world we live in and the truth of our perception of it is due to the divine will of God, so, too, could the same be said of any of His infinite possible creative worlds, because that claim requires no knowledge of God’s divine will but assumes it; it is equivalent and as wrong to say God created everything as it is because it is the only everything knowable. No matter which lot of man is being considered that claim could be made; it is simply a practice of a finite mind attempting to assign a definition to existence. Descartes has pointed out himself the fallibility of man’s intellect, and he relies on the goodness of God to assure us that we are correct in our perception but if there could have been an infinite number of worlds then any judgments on good and bad are inapplicable. Man only perceives a certain world and will wrongly assume its merit for he is ignorant to anything else that is above the capabilities of him to know. And that knowledge is only within the jurisdiction of God. As evident God serves a pervasive role in Cartesian philosophy; He serves both as a means to tie the knot of doubt and a means to untie it, and even though this seems to contradict Descartes’ entire philosophy it is with these contradictions that his philosophy is one infused with the spirit of the modern period. This at first may be difficult to see, being that the final conclusions in his philosophy are mostly equivalent to those of the Churches’ doctrine which is the very worldview the modern philosophers are characterized by not abiding to. The structure of his philosophy being so heavily laden with the notion of God decreed by the Church will also point to Descartes as being actually an anti-modernist. But to see the spirit of the modern period in his work his entire philosophy itself must be examined, not only his final conclusions. From a perspective of that breadth his notions of God that conflict with Catholic dogma are evident in his philosophy. The process by which he arrived at his final notion of God and not the final notion itself is what matters when assessing Descartes’ modernism. The prevailing conclusions of his first two Meditations is in sum that by the omnipotence of God he has overwhelming evidence to believe that the corporeal world does not exist, and by the end of the Sixth Meditation his conclusion is generally that by the omnipotence of God he has indubitable evidence that the corporeal world does exists. Since there is obviously contradiction here and since the Sixth Meditation is coherent and supportive with the Churches’ idea of God then the first two Meditations must go against the Church. And by doing that he is exemplifying a modernist attitude. The two main Cartesian arguments that go against the Church in these first two Meditations are God as a deceiver and the Evil Demon. Why the former of these two does not agree with Catholic dogma is quite obvious—The Catholic monotheistic God is infinitely good so cannot deceive, as that would make him not. The latter needs a somewhat deeper explanation. An Evil Demon coincides with the Churches’ idea of Satan, and so from that level it will not be a deviation. But Descartes does not place this Evil Demon beside or rather underneath God; instead he denies God completely and holds this Evil Demon to be the only transcendent being. This denial of God is obviously atheistic. By showing this early progress in his philosophy which would later be ruled false by its ending conclusions and so needed not be included in the beginning Descartes heedlessly disregarded the Church; allowing his reason to take his philosophy beyond that Church, as far as it could go in finding the truth he was after, no matter if in the end it agreed with the church or not. That is why Descartes was a modernist.