Relationship b/w certainity and evidence

While reading Descartes I wondered what is evidence?

In AT [18] he states when discussing his ways in which he will learn, “ the first was never to accept anything as true that I did not know evidently to be so…” Then in AT [19] he claims that only the mathematics have been able to find any demonstrations that had certain and evident reasoning.

Does Descartes mean that thoroughly self examined experience can be the equivalent to examples if said examples are certain? Even then what is certain? He puts great stress on this characteristic of knowledge but yet I cannot recall him addressing what is certain. To my knowledge mathematics do not support religion yet Descartes does. He only gives what things can be certain through his method. If I were to try and reason with one on what is certain I think it could be done with greater ease by defining (with the use of examples, like Descartes does) by what is not.

On the Soul

Descartes states in AT 33 "From this I knew that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is only to think, and that does not need any place or depend on any material thing in order to be ."

If the soul is not anchored to any physical land, why is our entire conception of the soul attributed to the physical anchor of our bodies? Descartes claims that dreaming one is in another body is proof of the soul's transcendence, but if the soul transcends the physical realm, why does our memory and experience not? Why does everything that we associate with our-selves derive its existence from this world? Moreover, our 'soul' is fixed to our body in a powerful manner, and to me dreams appear insufficient to end the reliance of thought on the body.

In the Spirit of the Reformation

While at AT14 Descartes maintains that he does not approve of "those confused and restless temperaments who... are always thinking up some new reformation," one cannot help but see many similarities between his reformation of the sciences and the reformation of the church. Specifically, we see that Descartes wishes to make science something taken up by the individual alone. One is to consult one's own reason and trust no other outside received opinions. Looking to the Reformers of the Church, we see the same attitude. Sick of the authority over the scripture given to the Priests of the Catholic Church, the Reformers claimed that every man had a right to read scripture and to have his own interpretation of it. It was through close personal reflection on the scriptures that one attained a relationship with God. It is likely that Descartes only maintains distance from them for political reasons, but we, who need not fear The Inquisition, can see that he and the Reformers share a spirit of individualism.

But are we really safe? Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition...

Geometry & God

In part four of his Discourse on Method, Descartes presents his argument for the existence of God by implementing basic geometry. He recognizes perfection in such principles as the angles of a triangle and the equidistance of the points on a sphere from the center. However, he realizes there are no such cases in the natural world of this perfection. Descartes reasons that the imperfect physical manifestations of these perfect shapes must come from a perfect being, God (36).

This (seemingly) simple explanation for the existence of God isn't quite enough for him to convince me. Could it not be possible that the these perfect shapes are discovered by man, through geometry, after man has observed the imperfect examples of nature? The perfection of these simple geometrical shapes do not seem enough to explain Descartes' conception of God: "infinite, eternal, immutable, all-knowing, all-powerful" (35). I fail to see how Descartes derive such a complex and powerful God out of this observation.

Is God or Does God?

Throughout his Discourse on Method, Descartes repeatedly focuses his attention on the traditional Christian notion of a creator God. All the same, Descartes forwards a rather non-traditional approach to the idea of natural law. As he notes in section 45 of Part II,

It is indeed more probable that God has made [the world] from the beginning such as it was to be […], so that although he had not given it, at the beginning, any other form than chaos, provided that having established the laws of nature he lent to it his assent to act as it customarily does, we can believe, without doing any injury to the miracle of creation, that […] all the things that are purely material could have rendered themselves in time such as we see them at present.

Essentially, Descartes is arguing that because God ordered the laws of nature in such a way as to develop and maintain themselves, one can promote a more scientific, dare I say, pre-evolutionary approach to the creation story wherein God sets the earth in motion, hurrying its natural processes, and, in turn, lets the earth develop as it naturally would if separated from Him, but still within the realm of His perfect will and ordinance.

But herein rests my question: Did God create the natural laws or did he merely set them to work in the natural world?

I take up this question as I think of the language used to quantify God’s nature according to Descartes’ Christian perspective. Essentially, God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent. He was, is, and ever shall be. In short, God is all things good. He is a creator, but He was not created. By His nature, He cannot be anything other than the embodiment of the perfect things that, as Descartes would argue, give us proof that such a God exists. God does not, then, define perfection because He created it, He defines perfection because He is made up of it. Thus, since qualities like perfection, goodness, and truth were not created, they simply are as a result of the fact that God, whose nature encompasses them, is.

From this notion my question arises, what do we do with the natural laws? Did God out of his perfect and unlimited power create the rules of motion, sound, light, etc. or did He out of his perfect understanding set them to work in the world the only way in which they could? Are the laws of nature, like God himself, of a substance having always been?

I am honestly unsure of how Descartes would answer, and I am equally unsure of whether or not he would think this question merits an answer. All the same, it seems to me that if God is, in fact, perfection and not simply the author thereof, so also would the products of his nature be perfection. But then again, what about the problem of humanity?

P.S. My apologies to PC users for the earlier font confusion.

Final thoughts on Bacon and a first impression of Descartes

This course’s progression from Francis Bacon to Rene Descartes has been appropriate because of nature of their stylistic differences. Unlike Bacon, Descartes’ philosophical works are aimed for a scholarly audience as well as the general public. Despite this, Descartes maintains depth in his colloquial style. The “history or fable” approach he utilizes supplies his readers with provocative insights. In comparison, Bacon executes prolepsis effectively, but I find Descartes holistically more persuasive due to clarity. Bacon provides to be a difficult “guide” to follow through many of his ambiguous aphorisms. For instance, the reference to “Magic” as “the practical division of metaphysics” found in aphorism 9 of book two is an insufficient explanation. I would be much more satisfied with Bacon if he would expand on these seemingly arbitrary claims. Descartes’ primary contribution to my scholarship thus far is his ability to resolve the many questions I raised after reading Bacon. Descartes’ first principal of “I think therefore I am” in section four is a more substantial foundation than Bacon’s method of self-contradictory deduction which must assume each category of Form exists to evaluate it. I speculate that Descartes’ logic will continue to have more structure as class advances.

Descartes and Doubt

“Among these, one of the first that I was drawn to consider was that often there is less perfection in works composed of several pieces and made by the hand of diverse masters than in those at which one alone has worked. Thus one sees that buildings undertaken and completed by a single architect are customarily more beautiful and better ordered than those that several have tried to refashion by making use of old walls that had been built for other ends.” (21)

In the first three parts of his Discourse, Descartes (like Bacon in Book I of The New Organon) seems to be engaged in explaining 1) why old foundations and forms of knowledge are not to be trusted; and 2) where we should look for true and certain knowledge. The answer to both of these inquiries is implied in the building metaphor quoted above: old foundations of knowledge and inquiry are diverse and do not tend towards the same end (“one can imagine nothing so strange and inconceivable that it has not been said by some philosopher [23-4]) and we have only our individual selves to rely on when constructing new foundations (or at least we have Descartes the individual to rely on). Descartes repeats numerous times that he is not intent on tearing down all the walls and foundations of the ancient “city” of knowledge in which he was reared and rebuilding it from the ground up, he merely intends to do it with regard to himself and his own ways of thinking (of course, it seems he intends for his analysis to serve as a model): “…as regards all the opinions that I had hitherto accepted as credible, I could not do better than to undertake to reject them once and for all and replace them afterwards by better ones…when I had adjusted them to the standard of reason”. (22) To this end, Descartes proposes four precepts by which to govern his thought, the first of which (“never to accept anything as true that I did not know evidently to be so…” [25]) is most important for this post. My question, then, is that if Descartes truly takes this precept to heart, how and why does he not only continue to adhere to Christianity, but do so “provisionally”? The case could be made, as it was in our discussion of Bacon, that it would be dangerous, given the political and religious climate at the time, for Descartes to doubt the Christian principles on which he was raised, despite the fact that it was not something he could not know it to be true “evidently”. But the fact that he accepts it “provisionally” seems to suggest something different from the case of Bacon: it seems as if it is something which could potentially be disputed and shown to be false, whereas in Bacon, it seemed to be merely a moot point as religion had little or no impact on his own method (or at least, so says I). I know a doubting of religion (and of everything) is coming later, but as regards the method being described in the Discourse, it seems pertinent to ask whether he would be more consistent if he rendered unto faith what is faith’s (as Bacon does), or else doubt religion, along with everything else, from the get-go rather than “provisionally” accepting Christianity under the guise that it will help “not remain irresolute” in his actions. Or am I reading too much into “provisionally”?