Descartes Had No Further Need Of God Other Than To Set The World In Motion

By Gary L. Morella

Peter Kreeft in the Summa of the Summa presents a brief summary of 24 arguments for God’s existence. He breaks these down into six main categories: I. Ontological (Anselm), II. Cosmological, III. Psychological, IV. The argument from the analogy of other minds, V. The Practical Argument (Pascal’s Wager), and VI. Historical. He notes that this list is not exhaustive, but illustrative. Maritain and Marcel, for example, have formulated other, more complex arguments for God. Rene Descartes’s proof falls into Kreeft’s category III. Psychological, which is further broken down into A. from mind and truth, B. from will and good, C. from emotions and desires, and D. from experience. Category A. contains two subcategories: 1. Augustine: Our minds are in contact with eternal, objective, and absolute truth superior to our minds (e.g. 2 + 2 =4), and the eternal is divine, not human, and 2. Descartes: Our idea of a perfect being (God) could not have come from any imperfect source (cause), for the effect cannot be greater than the cause. Thus it must have come from God.

We will concentrate on Descartes’s concept of God with an initial examination of the effect of Descartes’s thought on modern philosophy.

William Wallace in The Elements of Philosophy gives us the historical perspective leading to the emergence of Descartes’s philosophical thought leading to the existence of God and Descartes’s usage of his psychological proof to attempt communication with a universe heretofore unknown. The impetus for the great 17^th – century systems came largely from the effort of the mechanical philosophers and Descartes to counter-balance skepticism with a positive theory of nature and man. A modest role was played by Francis Bacon even though he did not appreciate the primary lead of mathematics in the study of nature. He gave a new rhetoric to the age by codifying the criticism of scholastic philosophy of nature, by directing attention to the moving efficient causes, and by raising doubts about whether philosophy can say anything about God and the spiritual principle in man. Per Wallace, it was Galileo Galilei who regarded nature as a divinely grounded system of mathematical intelligibles and who bifurcated the primary qualities in nature and the secondary qualities in the perceiver. And although Sir Isaac Newton was less confident about the ontological import of mathematical rules, he worked out their explanatory functions with unsurpassed thoroughness.

The question becomes "How does man fare in the mechanically ordered universe?" Divergent responses were given to this question by Thomas Hobbes and Descartes. Hobbe’s importance lay as much in his presuppositions as in his particular doctrines, for he developed the procedure of generalizing the dominant scientific outlook and, at least in principle, confining the philosophical analysis of man to what is attainable through this generalized method. He postulated a "state of nature" from which man emerges as he builds his political and social world, bartering his freedom through a "social contract" that provides security but otherwise forfeits any objective order of values to be recognized and implemented. Descartes agreed that man can fare well enough in the mechanically constituted universe, but only on the condition that the mechanical conception of nature be integrated with an adequate theory of method, of knowing, and of being. Accordingly, he sought to combine mechanism with a reflective metaphysics of the self and God in a firmly grounded closely knit system that skepticism would be eliminated and the Christian faith would be liberated from an outmoded philosophy of nature. His starting point was a methodical hyperbolic doubt that led him to assert the clear and distinct idea as the criterion of truth, and to invoke God’s existence so as to extend the universality of this criterion beyond his starting principle, cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"). From man’s clear and distinct ideas of soul and body he further deduced a dualism of mind and matter, regarding both as substances, but never satisfactorily explaining how they can and do unite. Some ironies need to be identified, the first of which is obvious. This ambiguity of unity was supposed to be an improvement over Thomism that had no problems whatsoever explaining the relationship between the soul and body.

The second deals with "the father of modern philosophy’s" fundamental principle regarding knowledge that was accepted by nearly all philosophers since his time. This is the view that when we know, what we directly know is what is in the mind, that is, the ideas in which the objects of knowledge are represented. Descartes and many of those who followed him put forward arguments to prove that God exists. But if one accepts Descartes’s view that knowledge is the contemplation of ideas in the mind, one cannot prove the God exists. And in due course a philosopher came on the scene who pointed this out.

This was David Hume. Starting with Descartes’s conception of knowledge, he drew the skeptical conclusion that the human mind cannot have certainty about any reality outside the mind, least of all about God.

Emmanuel Kant, reacting against the skepticism of Hume, endeavored to save the validity of scientific knowledge. But he also accepted Descartes’s theory of knowledge and came to the conclusion that reality as it exists outside the mind, the "noumenon" as he called it, cannot be known by the speculative reason. God, he maintained, can be attained only by the practical reason, as the guarantor of the moral order.

Man, Kant argues, is aware of a "categorical imperative" – a command to do his duty; he is aware also that his happiness depends on his submission to this categorical imperative. But since in this life happiness does not always result from this submission, there must be a future life in which happiness is attainable; and since a future life is inconceivable unless God exists, God must exist.

As pointed out in Duggan’s Beyond Reasonable Doubt, Kant rejected as invalid the traditional arguments from contingency and purposiveness – the "cosmological" and "teleological" arguments, and his criticism of these arguments has been accepted by great numbers of educated men as definitive, absolving them from any further consideration of these arguments. But since his rejection of these arguments is, in the last analysis, only a corollary to his theory of knowledge, if this theory is erroneous, his criticism of the traditional argument fails. And such is the case for Kant.

One of the latest thinkers to follow in the footsteps of Descartes is Hans Kung. In his book Does God Exist? Kung begins with the assumption that Descartes’s theory of knowledge is correct, and ends, logically enough, with the conclusion that atheism and nihilism are irrefutable. If one accepts that God exists – this is not for Kung a matter of rational certainty, but of "fundamental trust" – one chooses to believe in God because the alternative is the complete annihilation of nihilism.

The argument commonly known as the Ontological Argument for the existence of God seeks to establish that God exists from a consideration of what is meant by the term "God." It was first put forward by St. Anselm, and was adopted and expounded, with variations, by Descartes, Leibniz and others.

St. Anselm argued: "God is by definition that being than which no greater can be conceived. But if God did not really exist, it would be impossible to conceive of a greater being, namely one that does really exist. Since the conclusion is absurd, the hypothesis that God does not really exist must also be absurd. Therefore, God must really exist."

St. Thomas rejected this argument as invalid because: 1. not everyone would be prepared to accept St. Anselm’s definition of God; and 2. if the definition is accepted, we cannot infer from it that God exists as a reality distinct from the mind, but only that He exists as an object of thought in the mind. Obviously, this presented no problem for Descartes since getting out of the mind was not his fundamental concern or principle.

In other words, St. Anselm’s "Ontological Argument" contains an illegitimate passage from an idea in the mind to reality as it exists outside the mind. The argument is invalid because our ideas of things express only the essence of things and do not include the note of real existence, and this is true of our idea of God as of any other.

Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, rejects the Ontological Argument for the same reason, pointing out that the idea of a hundred silver coins is the same, whether we have the money in our pocket or our pocket is empty.

Descartes argued from the idea of God as "the infinite being" and Leibniz from the idea of "the necessary being," but both arguments suffer from the same flaw as St. Anselm’s. For the existence implied in these ideas is existence as represented in the idea, not existence as actually possessed in the real world. [See Dugan, Beyond Reasonable Doubt.] From the contemplation of an idea we are not entitled to infer the real existence of what it represents which describes Descartes’s dilemma because of his hyperbolic doubt. He could be certain of nothing other than the cogito. Thus, he irrationally imprisoned himself to his mind alone.

Dugan says "that if we are to prove that God really exists, we must start with the realities of whose existence we have direct experience, namely the things in the world which we perceive with our senses." But Descartes couldn’t trust his senses. Hence, he couldn’t trust the starting point from which the human mind can, by using the first principles that are the natural light of reason, come to some knowledge of God, the Creator of the visible universe.

The only thing that Descartes was sure of was that he was a doubting thing, i.e., a thinking substance, a mind. But there might be more knowledge involved in the act of doubting than the bare certitude of mind and of its existence. He who doubts knows that he does not know as perfectly as he would like to know. He must therefore have in mind at least some confused feeling of what perfect knowledge should be – the idea of perfection. By observing this notion, he becomes aware that there is, present to his mind, the idea of a "perfect being," a being in which all conceivable perfections are to be found. Such is God, Whom we conceive as a Supreme Being, eternal, infinite, immutable, omniscient, omnipotent, and Creator of all things which are outside of Himself. What, in us, is the origin of such an idea? The answer is given in Etienne Gilson’s The Unity of Philosophical Experience, in particular, Chapter VII, "Cartesian Idealism."

Our mind is eliminated, for a doubting and imperfect mind can’t be the model from which it draws its own idea of perfection. It can’t be any of the material things existing outside the mind because Descartes won’t let us venture into that hinterland. We are not allowed to accept any of the recommended proofs of God’s existence that prove Him to be the necessary cause of the physical order because all we know, so far, is the existence of our own mind, and since we aren’t sure yet that there is an external world, we can’t use it to prove the existence of God.

But everything has a cause. So there should be a cause of our idea of God. In fact, it should be such a cause as contains within itself at least as much perfection as there is to be found in its effect; in other words, the model from which our idea of perfection is copied should be at least as perfect as the copy itself. It must therefore be a perfect being, endowed with all the perfections that are found in our idea of its nature. In short, it must necessarily be that which we call God. The cogito has become "I doubt, hence God is."

We are now in a better position to understand in what sense Descartes could say that "it is at least as certain that God, who is a being so perfect, is, or exists, as any demonstration of geometry can possibly be." [See Fifth Meditation.] It is even more certain than any mathematical truth, for as long as we did not know God as a perfect being, we could not be sure that our Creator was not systematically deceiving us in mathematics as in everything else. We are left with a God, albeit existing only in our mind, but no external world as Descartes is forbidden by his own principles to take it as established fact. Better prove it so that it can be known and not believed, the task of the philosopher, the mind first, than God, with the external world the only thing left.

The problem for Descartes as described by Gilson was that the first attempt to prove it turned out to be the first step towards the denial of its existence. Descartes had tried to prove something that could not be proved, not because it is not true, but on the contrary, because it is evident. Gilson puts in the qualifier that "it is evident to a soul, not to a mind." Since Descartes was nothing but a mind, he could no longer accept as evidence that which is such only to a soul, to a spiritual principle substantially united to a body; nor could he hope to find in mind, that is in a thinking substance distinct from, and exclusive of, the body, ground for the demonstration of its existence.

If sensations belong to the mind itself, nothing but the mind should be needed to account for their existence, but then there would be no reason to suppose that there is a material world. If, on the contrary, sensations are in us as coming not from the mind, but entering it from without, the so-called mind is not a true mind but a soul apprehending universals from singulars, which immediately perceives the existence of bodies, as a certainty that neither can be proved, nor needs proof. Descartes had tried to find some possible position between the two horns of the dilemma; but there was none. He wanted a mind, at once so radically distinct from matter that the existence of matter would have to be proved, and so intimately conjoined with matter, through feeling, that the existence of matter could be proved. Per Gilson, "Even metaphysicians know that you cannot eat your cake, and have it; so, as soon as Descartes’s successors realized his failure, they devoted themselves to the task of finding a new answer to the questions.

Let us go back to the medieval world that Descartes was trying to replace. According to St. Thomas, the physical order was essentially made up of "natures", i.e., of active principles, which were the cause of motions and various operations of their respective matters. Each nature, or form, was essentially an energy, an act. This world did not lend itself to a purely mechanical interpretation of physical change; dimensions, positions and distances by themselves are clear things in an analytic geometric sense; they can be measured and numbered. But those energies ascribed to bodies by Aristotle and St. Thomas, could not be submitted to any kind of calculation. Descartes’s main point was that they should not be allowed to stay in such a state since there would remain in nature something confused and obscure, and in science itself a standing element of unintelligibility. Descartes was of no mind to tolerate such foolishness as he wanted physics to become a department of his universal mathematics. Forms, natures and energies had to go from the physical world, so that there should be nothing left but allowable extension and an always equal amount of motion caused by God.

As a result, Descartes’s God was thoughtful and accommodating. He had just created the kind of world which Cartesian philosophy could explain. He was preserving things with so conscientious a regularity that Descartes could explain his (Descartes’s) world without bothering any more about Him. Pascal had perceived that intention, when he wrote that in all his philosophy, Descartes "would have been quite willing to dispense with God. But he had to make Him give a fillip to set the world in motion; beyond this, he has no further need of God." [See Pascal’s Pensees.]

The Cartesian God doesn’t do much in the world since science can freely develop itself as though there was no God. Contrast this with the God of St. Thomas Who was a continuous Creator of all things. The things He created, and which He was keeping in existence were "natures", i.e., active or true causes. Indebted to Him for their actual existence, their operative powers and even the very efficacy of their operations , they nevertheless were efficient causes, and such operations can be said to be their own. Thus, what God has to keep in existence, in a Thomistic world, is a set of enduring, active natures, each of which is an original power with a sufficient capacity to do its own work. This isn’t the case in the world of Descartes. Once all individual sources of energy had been expelled from it, nothing was left but extension and its laws; not natures, but Nature, i.e., those changes that happen in the various parts of matter. As to the "laws of nature", they were nothing more than the divinely and freely created rules, in accordance with which these changes occur; the Divine activity, which does not itself change, remained, in fact, the only active cause still to be found in such a world. [See Descartes, The World.]