The discussion on God’s existence has been a very controversial topic throughout our the history of mankind. In order to fully understand God’s existence, we must first have a wide range of knowledge and understanding on the way of being and existence. The study of metaphysics has allowed us to understand and think about the first principles of things and how they came to be and exist. Some philosophers who discussed their opinions and reasoning for the support on the existence of God were Rene Descartes and Saint Thomas Aquinas.
It is important that we demonstrate the existence of God because if we did not attempt to establish his existence, he would exist only in our minds. In this essay, I will be writing about how the philosophers Rene Descartes and Saint Thomas Aquinas proves the existence of God.
Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician and scientist. He believed in Dualism which means that the body and mind works together as one. He believed that the body and mind work like a machine and that the pineal gland was the connecting point between the body and the mind. He believed in materialism which is the belief that all things work like machines. He used something called “the method of doubt”. This means that he wanted to find a foundation of knowledge that is so secure it could stand up against the doubts of the strongest skepticism. In his book, “First Meditations on Philosophy”, he employs a dialogue between a person employing common sense and a skeptic. The person relying on common sense believes that there are various reliable sources of knowledge while the skeptic claims there is no secure foundation for knowledge. The two sources of knowledge that he writes about are from the senses and the intellect. Descartes presents the question: are the senses a reliable source of knowledge? This brings us to Descartes argument from Dreaming. In this theory, you compare your dreaming state with your waking state. When we are dreaming, we are not aware that we are dreaming. Things that later strike us as fuzzy, incoherent, far-fetched, or impossible, don’t seem so far within the dream. So that brings up the question: how can we be certain that the experiences we have now are reliable? However, it is worth noting that this is not Descartes own position. His own position is stated in the 6th meditation where he suggests that there are marks present in one’s waking experience in which we can distinguish waking from sleeping. The dream images we imagine are drawn from waking experience. For example, like painting, when a painter creates an imaginary creature like a minotaur, he or she will get the parts of the minotaur from things in real life: horse and man. The painter can doubt composite things, things that are made up together, but cannot doubt the simple and universal parts from which they are constructed. This can be quantity, size, etc. We can doubt studies that are based on composite things, such as medicine, astronomy, or physics, but subjects like arithmetic and geometry are undoubtable.
In Meditation One, Descartes believes that there is indeed a God, someone who is as he says, “all-powerful.” Descartes states, “Perhaps, indeed, there might be some people who would prefer to deny the existence of any God so powerful, rather than believing that all other things are uncertain.” In other words, there are possibly other people who would deny that there is a God than to believe that everything else in the world does not exist. Descartes believes that God?
is being and all other things are not being. All other things in the world compared to God are subordinate because God is almighty.
Another one of Descartes’ theories in Meditation One is the Evil Demon Argument. It is also worth noting that is this not Descartes own position, but uses it as an argumentative device. The Evil Demon Argument states that an evil demon has the will, power, and the knowledge to make a person a constant victim of deception. Even one is thinking something is self-evidently true, it’s not.
There is a distinction between the mind and the body. The mind is essentially thinking and the body is essentially extended so that the two have nothing in common. In Descartes’ Meditations on Philosophy, there is a character, the mediator, and he reasons that he might cast all the opinions of others into doubt if he can doubt the foundations of basic principles upon which his opinions are founded.
In the first meditation, Descartes rejects as if false any belief that is open to doubt. He pushes skepticism to its limits by introducing the notion of an “evil demon”, a being that always tricks us into believing true what is actually false. The only certainty that Descartes can find is that nothing is certain. Knowledge acquired through the senses was called into doubt by argument from dreaming and knowledge acquired through intellect was called into doubt by the evil demon argument.
In Descartes Meditation Two, Descartes comes up with the argument of God’s existence because he began to wonder something. He began to wonder if he exists. “I think, I exist.” He had previously concluded that the world, minds, bodies, etc. did not exists and then began to doubt the existence of himself. But, to have been able to doubt this and to have the “deceiver” deceive him into thinking that he does not exist, then he concludes that he must exist in order to have been deceived. Descartes argues that even assuming there is an evil spirit who constantly deceives me, it is certain that my own self exists: for the very notion of an evil spirit assumes that the spirit deceives someone; me. So even if constantly deceived, I can’t doubt that I exist. Descartes holds that the sentence “I exist” must be true whenever I think it to myself. I may utterly deceive as to what I believe but even the most radical doubt of all, which is doubting my own existence, must imply that I exist. He creates the phrase, “cogito ergo sum.” This means, I think therefore I am. So according to Descartes, if he is able to think and reason, he exists. But in addition to that he can sense and imagine. However, Descartes believes that the senses and imagination are not trustworthy. Our senses are sometimes wrong and are not reliable, and therefore doubt is necessary. Our imagination has the ability to make up things that do not exist, and for that reason it is not reliable to knowing our essence. The ability to reason and our intellect prove to be much more reliable to knowing than the body and senses are.
The third meditation is titled “ The existence of God.” In his third meditation, Descartes states, “…as far as my parents are concerned, even if everything is true of them that I have ever thought to be so, certainly they do not conserve me in being, nor did they in any way produce me insofar as I am a thinking thing…” (Descartes 36). Here, he explains that he believes God was the one who created him, not his parents. God allowed for him to have the ability to think and reason, which is why he believes in the existence of God. After coming to the conclusion that he does exist, Descartes attempts to discover how he knows this and continues to use a similar reasoning for how other things that surround him exist. In this meditation, he distinguishes between “objective reality” and “formal reality”. Formal reality is the existence of objects that are outside our perception and is independent of it. The objective reality refers to ideas that we already have inside our minds. According to Descartes, all our ideas already possess a certain degree of objective reality. Each of these ideas has to trace its objective reality back to a source which has as much formal reality as it does objective reality. According to Descartes, this is the case, because an effect can only receive its reality from its cause. By this point, Descartes has already doubted and rejected the belief that there is an external world that resembles the ideas that are already in his mind. He did this because he believes that there is a possibility that he created these ideas out of other ideas which he had about himself. This means that ideas can give rise to other ideas. In order for Descartes to prove that there are other things besides himself that exists, he will have to show that he is not the original source of all of his ideas. He concludes that the only idea that must come from an external force is the idea of God. Descartes mind is limited, and he is unable to come up with the ideas of “omnipotence” or “infinity” by himself. In order for these ideas to have an objective reality in his mind, they must come from an outside force which has an equal or greater degree of formal reality. This source is God himself. This leads Descartes to conclude that our ideas of God are him branding himself into all of our minds.
In St. Thomas Aquinas’s, Summa Theologica, he includes the question as to whether or not God exists. He states, “Because the chief aim of the sacred doctrine is to teach the knowledge of God, not only as He is in Himself, but also as He is the beginning of things and their last end, and especially of rational creature…” (Aquinas 22). The sacred doctrine, or theology, is directed to teach about God’s beliefs and also how he created things, such as ourselves. He divides the topic of God’s existence into 3 articles: “Whether the existence of God is self-evident?”, “whether it can be demonstrated that God exists?”, and “whether God exists?” To the first article, Aquinas responds “ A thing can be self-evident in either of two ways: on the one hand, self-evident in itself, though not to us; on the other, self-evident in itself, and to us” (Aquinas 23). Things can have essence with or without existence. We do not know God’s essence, so he is not self-evident to us, but it can be established by the things that are already self-evident to us. In response to the second article, Aquinas explains that we can establish this by two ways. “One is through cause,and is called ‘a priori,’ and this is to argue from what is prior absolutely. The other is through the effect, and is called a demonstration ‘a posteriori’; this is to argue from what is prior relatively only to us” (Aquinas 25). A priori refers to our knowledge before any experience and a posteriori refers to our knowledge after our experiences. He goes on to explain that if we are more familiar with the effects of something, then we can attempt to find and know the cause as well. An object must always have something that previously existed before it, in order for the object to have been created or derived from the previous one. The effect always follows the cause which is pre-existing. Objects and beings on Earth always have first principles, but how did these first principles come about? Does there need to be a force that initiates change within these things? According to Aquinas, the effects must be proportionate to the causes in order for us to gain knowledge of that specific cause. He states, “Yet from every effect the existence of the cause can be clearly demonstrated, and so we can demonstrate the existence of God from His effects; though from them we cannot perfectly know God as He is in His essence” (Aquinas 26). If God created all things and beings on this Earth, those are the effects and he is the cause of those effects. Since we know the effects, we can demonstrate God’s existence and believe in God’s existence, however we cannot know God. In the third article, the two objections suppose that God does not exist because God is good and if he did exist, there would be no evil in the world but there is evil in the world. Also, not everything in the world must be traced back to being created by God, they could have just been created due to one basic principle, nature. Aquinas responds to these objections with five different arguments. He argues that things in the world are in motion, but something or someone must be able to start the wave of motion. So, he says it is not possible for something to move itself. If something is in motion, it continues to put the next thing in motion and so on. This is similar to Newton’s first law of motion, “Every object in a state of uniform motion will remain in that state of motion unless an external force acts on it.” However, there has to be a “first mover” because this cycle cannot go on for infinity with having had a start. Becasue of this reasoning, the only thing or person who would be this “first mover,” we accept to be God. In his next argument, he states, “ In the world of sense we find there is an order of efficient causes” (Aquinas 27). No object or being is a cause of itself, this is impossible because then it would be previous to itself. If there was no cause, there is no effect. With no first cause, there would not be a final effect, therefore we understand the first cause as God. The third argument Aquinas makes is that things are being and not being. In other words, if something is possible, it cannot be impossible. Everything is a possible being so they either exist or do not exist. This reasoning allows us to believe that at one point everything did not exist, but if they did not exist, then how does the world we live in exist now? From these questions, Aquinas establishes that all things have the possibility to exist because of God. Then in his fourth argument, he says, “Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like” (Aquinas 28). From good things, more good things arise, as they are causes. We consider God as the highest being, he is good and perfect, which is why he is the cause of allo good beings in this world. Lastly, Aquinas proves the existence of God by stating, “We see that the things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result” (Aquinas 28). To achieve an end or purpose, intelligence is necessary. Those who lack intelligence cannot progress towards achieving an end, unless they have something or someone to guide them. This guide to assist beings to achieving their ends would be God. Aquinas also argues that evil would only exist in order for God to bring out the good that is in the bad.
The topic on the existence of God is topic that is filled with controversy throughout history. Both Aquinas and Descartes, respectively offer unique arguments that hold their positions on the support of God’s existence in this world. Ultimately, as our society continues to further advance so does our views on things that are existent versus non-existent, but God in this context is considered to be the only true existence in this world.