Structured Reading

Descartes' Meditations

Overall Summary

Descartes's Meditations focuses on the religion of God and questioning if He exists. Descartes's goes into depth on if God actually exists outside of the Holy scriptures. He states we believe there is a God because the scriptures tell us there is. Descartes's gives points of natural reasoning of God existing (not basing it just on the scriptures of God).

Main Ideas

Descartes's has five different meditations of his points in proving that God actually exists. In his first Meditations, Descartes believes that all truths must be completely certain. If there is absolutely any doubt in something, then the belief should be rejected. Any truths that aren’t rejected are the ones that are certain in the end. If a belief is rejected based on any doubt, any other belief that is based off of that belief is automatically doubted also. “I set forth the reasons for which we may, generally speaking, doubt about all things,” Descartes states in his first Meditation. He also says that most fundamental beliefs are based on the fact that senses tell people the truth, but sense the senses are not an absolute truth. This conditionally leads to everything being believed by a person, actually having doubt in it also.

In his second Meditation, he questions that if all beliefs are technically doubted in some way, can anything actually be absolutely certain? He answers yes. Experiences exist and cannot be doubted. The experience leads absolute truth in the experiencer existing. He leads to the experiences actually being within the mind, so the mind exists, but the mind is separate from the body. In certainty, only the mind truly exists based on experiences.

Meditation three Descartes says that any idea must be caused. For it to actually be caused, the cause has to be as real as the idea itself. Any idea that is caused by something other than the person that is causing the idea, then something else must also actually exist. “It is similarly impossible that the idea of God which is in us should not have God himself as its cause.” The idea of God cannot be originated by a person. The idea of God actually is caused by God himself. Since God is the cause of the idea of God, then God must truly exist.

In Meditation four if someone is perfect, then they couldn’t actually deliberately cause deception. Since God is perfect, He is not a deceiver of any kind. Since God gave people free will, this cause them to be able to deliberately can cause deception. This free will causes people to be able to jump to their own conclusions about things they actually know nothing about. Since God isn’t a deceiver, anything you know with complete certainty, then it is real.

Meditation five goes into certainty on material objects. The shape, size, motion, and things along the line of that are actually ideas from a person, but by thinking about these things the person can gain facts about that object that are certainly true. Geometrical shapes are things people cannot imagine because it is based on mathematical science. The definition of perfect is lacking nothing. A person cannot be perfect, but it doesn’t have existence. This means existence belongs to God, not a person. Even though God is the cause