[Flieger]

We discussed Descartes' 3rd Medetation today. The cosmological argument for the existence of God leaves a lot to be desired no matter which way you interpret it. If the cause of the idea of God must be at least as real as the idea, then Descartes could have caused it himself. If the premise is that the cause must be at least as real as what the idea represents, then there is a problem with that because it seems that the only idea of God anyone can get is by observing finite qualities like strength or knowledge and extrapolating to infinity. No one can fully comprehend inifinity or eternality, even if they understand what it means. What you visualize is just something really big or from a long time ago but you can't get past something causing itself. So can anyone really have an idea of what Descartes' all powerful, all-knowing, eternal creator is?

When the teacher said that Descartes' reason for "proving" the existence of God was purely motivated by philosophy (as opposed to theology) so that he could say that he knows things in the scientific world, I tried to bring up that he also did not want to be killed as a heretic but he did not seem to go for that so I just let it slide.

It seems to me that he could also get where he wanted to be by proving that no God or evil demon exists. The teacher seemed to imply that only God could fill the missing step. But there would still need to be some sort of infinity. Infinite nothing from which something comes? Or with a more modern idea, maybe infinite membranes of "space" on which M-Theory (String Theory) is founded. The teacher then asked me how I would prove those things and I just said how would you prove there is a God? (That was before we discussed the argument).

He did say that most agree that God's existence or lack of existence is not something that can be demonstrated to be true, or at least easily demonstrated. And he agreed that Descartes' first argument for God was not very convincing.

This class is getting interesting now. But it does raise a lot of tough questions. I don't know what I believe anymore now.