Name: John Gabriel L.

Guillena Date: November 19, 2020

Grade: 2nd year college AB-2 Professor: Rev. Fr. Jose Conrado A. Estafia

Descartes sought to found our knowledge of things as much in experience and in

experiment as in things a priori. He says, “I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of

my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted

to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.” Descartes begins by

reflecting on the unfortunate fact that he has had many false beliefs. He sets out to devise a

strategy to not just prevent having false beliefs but, more dramatically, to ensure that scientific

research reveals truth, not error. To avoid any false beliefs, his strategy is to doubt any belief he

has that could be false or that he could be mistaken about.

Ignorance towards my true self is something I lived with for a long time. Self-discovery

means many things. It means finding your purpose in life. We all have a purpose, it means

digging deep into your childhood and revealing the experiences that shaped you good and bad. It

means realizing what your beliefs are and living by them. The effects of self-discovery include

happiness, fulfillment, clarity and maybe even enlightenment. The journey however is not

always an easy road. The journey includes fear, confusion, misunderstanding, doubt and literally

re-visiting all your choices in life. What I know for sure is that I have been very hard on myself

for most of my life. I have not been truthful with myself and have had unrealistic expectations

therefore, setting myself up for disappointment. What I know for sure is that being true to my

feelings and acknowledging them as well as validating them has released so much fear in me. It
has released my fear of not being good enough as well as my fear of not living up to the

expectations I set for myself. What I know for sure is that we are usually our own worst enemy.

We hold ourselves back in so many ways and I am ready to move away from that pattern. I’m

not suggesting that these fears no longer exist within me because they certainly do and, I don’t

think they will ever go away but now that I am aware of my true feelings and now that I am

becoming conscious of my real beliefs, they no longer have a strangle hold on my life. Instead, I

have a hold on how they can or cannot affect me. And that the journey is worth taking. I am

slowly becoming calmer, more aware and more tolerant. I am learning how to pay attention to

my feelings and understand myself better.

The Cartesian doubt is methodical because it aims to doubt everything. The problem of

explaining how knowledge of (or justified belief about) the external world is possible given the

challenge that we cannot know (or justifiably believe) the denials of skeptical hypotheses.

Descartes concluded that many of his beliefs turned to be false. Consequently, this made him

realize that many of the things he believed in were false. Since false beliefs can’t be count

as knowledge, he questioned whether he had knowledge at all. For this reason, Descartes wanted

to create a method to discover which beliefs are correct. To start this process, Descartes started

by putting aside all beliefs that created him any doubt. By this, he wanted to find the beliefs that

don’t create them doubt those beliefs which he can be certain of.  On that process, he concluded

that all beliefs gained through perception (through the senses) could be questioned hence, he

treated as false all beliefs of this kind.

 The basic strategy of Descartes's method of doubt is to defeat skepticism on its own

ground. Begin by doubting the truth of everything not only the evidence of the senses and the

more extravagant cultural presuppositions, but even the fundamental process of reasoning itself.

If any particular truth about the world can survive this extreme skeptical challenge, then it must

be truly impossible to doubt and therefore a perfectly certain foundation for knowledge. 

Being a thinking thing, Descartes knows that he has ideas. He notices that one of these

ideas is the idea of God, i.e., something eternal, infinite, all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good, and

the creator of all things. His idea of God could only have come from God. According to

Descartes, a cause must be at least as real or perfect as its effect. The idea of God however

represents much more reality and perfection than the idea of himself, or of anything else. There’s

only then one possible cause: God. So, God exists. This is Descartes’ causal argument for God’s

existence. Descartes is indeed a believer. Though his arguments go beyond just believing.

Whether we believe that God exists or not, we are certain that we have an idea of him. And this

idea for Descartes is always clear and can be defined. Since he is a Christian, he cannot easily

detach from his God or religion. Methodical doubt is not to make conclusions but to follow a

path to attain knowledge. God can never be false. Yet Descartes is showing us a path towards

achieving this knowledge. Descartes' proofs rely on the belief that by existing, and being born an

imperfect being (but with a soul or spirit), one must, therefore, accept that something of more

formal reality than ourselves must have created us. Basically, because we exist and are able to

think ideas, something must have created us.

 Descartes dives into examining the philosophical possibility of God's existence in his

Third Meditation. Descartes argues that, by evidence, he is an imperfect being who has an

objective reality including the notion that perfection exists and therefore has a distinct idea of a

perfect being (God, for example). Further, Descartes realizes that he is less formally real than the

objective reality of perfection and therefore there has to be a perfect being existing formally from

whom his innate idea of a perfect being derives wherein he could have created the ideas of all

substances, but not the one of God. Then goes on to question who it is then that keeps him

having an idea of a perfect being in existence, eliminating the possibility that he himself would

be able to do. He proves this by saying that he would owe it to himself, if he were his own

existence maker, to have given himself all sorts of perfections. The very fact that he is not

perfect means he would not bear his own existence. Similarly, his parents, who are also

imperfect beings, could not be the cause of his existence since they could not have created the

idea of perfection within him. That leaves only a perfect being, God, that would have had to exist

to create and be constantly recreating him. 

This is the consequence of Descartes’s method. It is a method that has a great impact in

the Western mind. Pope John Paul II has an interesting criticism of Descartes’s method. Pope

John Paul II frequently insisted that each man and woman finds their full perfection in self-

giving, in dedicating themselves to God and to others. And he himself gave his life to God and

the Church with a constant generosity and self-sacrifice. The difference between the Pope so

filled with physical strength who took the helm of the Church.
 According to Descartes, God’s existence is established by the fact that Descartes has a

clear and distinct idea of God; but the truth of Descartes’s clear and distinct ideas are guaranteed

by the fact that God exists and is not a deceiver. Thus, in order to show that God exists,

Descartes must assume that God exists. Descartes brings us to conclude that Descartes is a

believer. God for him necessarily exists. Though in the method that he uses, God is a clear and

distinct idea, but second only to the Cogito. It appears here that God exists only after the Cogito.

Though Descartes will contest this opinion since for him the cogito cannot create God for the

simple reason that the finite cannot produce what is infinite. And for him the non-existence of

God is unthinkable. The idea of God does not come through the cogito, but rather it is innate in

man. God has placed this idea in man. God is therefore distinct form man. God is objectively

real.1

1
Jose Conrado Estafia, “Lecture Modern Philosophy Descartes on God”