Analysis Of Descartes Third Meditation

Descartes has written six meditations on First Philosophy, with some being more important than the other. The third meditation does seem to stand out among the rest as the most important. The goal of this meditation is to find out if there is a God and whether or not God is a deceiver. After reading the third meditation, you take a step back to realize the importance of what the meditation had uncovered.
There are different types of Ideas, which might not seem so important to the whole meditation but they are the basic building block. Innate ideas are one of the three types of ideas, innate means that they are inborn in us or in other words, they come from within. An example of innate idea would be Descartes statement, “I am, I exist.” Another …show more content…
This argument states that the thing with enough formal reality to create the idea of the infinite is the infinite itself, which means God is real because he is the infinite. Descartes uses this argument in order to resolve what he had questioned in the beginning of the meditation; he had questioned whether or not there was a god. The cosmological argument accomplishes finding the answer to Descartes question by proving through the meditation that God is real.
Another certainty that Descartes was trying to reach with the third meditation is that God is not a deceiver. The idea of God is the idea of infinite, which also means that the idea of God is perfect. Perfection is when something does not lack and for God to be deceptive, would mean that he would be lacking. By the time it is clear what Descartes is saying, he proves that one, there is a God and with this idea of the infinite, two, God is no …show more content…
When speaking of formal and objective reality, the evil genius has less formal reality than the objective reality contained, therefore, he could not have created the idea of God. If the evil genius did not create the idea of God the only thing with enough reality to create this idea is God himself. The rule of causality also works in disproving the evil genius. One of the consequences of the rule is that something more real and more perfect cannot come from something less real or less perfect. Since the evil genius lacks, because he deceives, he is less real than God. The idea of God could not have come from the evil genius because then the cause would be smaller than the effect. Descartes proved God 's existence. This is why the third meditation takes on such a huge role. The third meditation would be the most important even if it only proved God 's existence because God 's existence is a pretty big deal. This meditation holds a lot of weight because if Descartes had not delivered the meditation the way he did we might not have realized the significance of what he was saying or we might not have realized what he was trying to