Rene Descartes Dream Argument

The third argument against Descartes’ successful refutation is that he admits throughout his meditations that he can in fact be deceived, which means there is no way for him to refute the first meditation in and of itself as explained by the dream argument. “From these considerations it is utterly apparent that, notwithstanding the immense goodness of God, the nature of man, insofar as it is composed of mind and body, cannot help being sometimes mistaken” (140). This statement recognizes that he is capable of mistakes, which encompasses many possibilities but most importantly the fact that his senses may not be absolutely true, thus theorizing something that is false, which proves the necessity of his first meditation. One’s senses cannot be …show more content…
He in fact supports it by stating that humans make mistakes; and, he recognizes flaws and defects in our senses. Thus, one can see that he never actually refutes the strong foundation of the dream argument, and the ultimate point of the dream argument, through his sixth meditation.
Since one’s senses are inherently deceptive and Descartes did not refute himself in his sixth meditation, one can view his description of God and God’s certainty of knowledge as false. The creation of the first meditation was on the basis of God the evil genius, meaning that he must also refute the idea of God as an evil genius in order to …show more content…
Descartes has an image of God, one that is all powerful and good, and that image in his head cannot exist if God as that image doesn’t exist. “[I]t would be impossible for me to exist, being of such a nature as I am (namely, having in me the idea of God), unless God did in fact exist. God, I say, that same being the idea of whom is in me: a being having all those perfections that I cannot comprehend, but can somehow touch with my thought, and a being subject to no defects whatever” (122). Descartes makes no further explanation as to God’s existence and bases the rest of his arguments off of the assumption that he can imagine God so that must be God. He, however, completely ignores that others, as he mentions in his first meditation, believe God to be evil or to not be all powerful, which means that there is an image of God existing in someone else’s head that does not match the image in Descartes’ head. One cannot possibly distinguish between the two images to determine which is truer, meaning two different things. First, one cannot thus assume that God exists just because he can be imagined in an image because others have different images of God than Descartes has. Second, this means that God is not inherently good because other images of God depict him as evil. Descartes uses his imagined image of God to justify that he is not a deceiver. “From these