Rene Descartes's Argument For The Existence Of God

In true philosophical fashion, the paper will look into the critique of Thomas Hobbes to Rene Descartes’s argument for the existence of God. Descartes argues that he has the idea of the existence of an infinite, perfect and all-powerful being. In the meditations on first philosophy, Descartes presents the proves for the existence of god with the apparent evidence that I am finite and imperfect being but I have this idea of the existence of an infinite, perfect and eternal being in mind which must have been caused by something infinite and perfect. He claims that something cannot arise from nothing therefore a perfect and infinite substance must exist that is the cause of this idea and therefore perfect (god) exists. In other words, something …show more content…
He actually make a direct inference with his own idea of an infinite being to the actual existence of a deity. His argument is valid because it possess a truth preserving structure. None of the statements used is based on extortion or questions therefore it meets the criteria of being a proposition. If we just look at the structure of argument we can tell that the argument meets the criteria of being called as an argument i.e. it has more than one proposition. The conclusion is drawn directly from premises and the argument doesn’t beg the question. In philosophy if an argument is invalid then it doesn’t prove anything. Taking this fact into account, at this point, we can confirm just the validity of the argument attempting to prove the existence of god. In his argument concerning the existence of God, he tries to prove that God isn’t aiming to deceive him. He argues that a mortal being like him cannot simply bear the idea of the existence of God if in the real sense God doesn’t exist. This is actually one of the most outstanding features of his arguments that he bases his claim on the fact that everything must have a cause. He argues that the idea of perfection has an objective reality therefore the cause must have at least as much reality as the effect of that cause holds. He argues that the objective reality of the idea cannot come from …show more content…
He does well to challenge Descartes premise that the greater isn’t born from the lesser hence he sees this as false thus he argues that the Descartes argument is simply unsound. An argument can only be sound if it has a valid structure and all the premises in the argument are true. Hobbes argued that Descartes’ argument is valid however it is unsound because it contain a false premise. He further contends and demonstrates that we can get the idea of something supreme and infinite from our ordinary, daily life observations. For instance, if there are two buckets, one with holes and other with no holes. We can simply evaluate that one is better than the other in carrying water. We can simply imply that one with no holes is flawless and therefore we have something better than the bucket with holes. Since we are aware that what it means when we are referring “not to be something” therefore we can employ the concept of negation over here. In general, after neglecting the task specific analysis and adding the word “not” to “something better than” we will end up getting the following phrase, “there is not something better than.” In other words if we don’t have anything better than that particular thing it is reasonable to conjecture that the bucket without holes is perfect. It is worthy to note that how trivial and