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2.3 DESCARTES ON THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

René Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy consists of six meditations. This

section however is a reading of his third and fifth meditations. The content of these two
meditations is on the argument of God’s existence. The thesis of this lecture is that in
Descartes, God is not a product of the Cogito. This we will show after turning to one
preliminary consideration.

2.3.1 On Abandoing God

Sapere Aude! Dare to know! Again, there goes the motto of the Enlightenment.
Reason, at last, has emancipated itself from the clutches of external forces, for it “has
been fettered throughout history by the greed and the lust for power of certain identifiable
historical groups.”1 Religion has been charged of chaining reason for so long. The
“theocentric” character of the Medieval times no longer holds true at the dawning of
Enlightenment. Man has been released already “from his self-incurred minority, primarily
in matters of religion,” as Kant would put it.
And yet at the outset we ask: What has man got from such emancipation? What
is left after the abandonment of God? The Seventeenth Century has been an “age of
industrious ideology and enterprise.” It is when such a disturbing question is asked: “What
profit a man…?” Could it be the possession of the “universal knowledge” which could
disclose the “great machine” and expose its secret? Some would suggest. Though the
laws are yet to be uncovered, Francis Bacon is already confident that he can one day
through “Natural Magick” transmute the elements of nature. This new generation makes
science a new God. This is scientism – when science considers itself to be “omniscient
and omnipotent.”2

1
T. Z. Lavine, From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (New York: Bantam Books, 1989),
187.
2
Floyd W. Matson, The Broken Image: Man, Science and Society (Garden City, New York: Anchor
Books, 1966), 5.

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The modern3 man abandons his belief in God only to find him trapped in a god
called science. As Matson observes, “Modern man may have succeeded in emancipating
himself from his belief in the magical powers of supernatural agencies only to plunge into
an equally naïve commitment to the magical powers of science – ‘a belief that precise
measurement and prodigious calculation will lead not only to widespread human
happiness… but to a knowledge of ultimate reality, which philosophers have vainly sought
through the ages’.”4
The modern man is unique in the sense that what has long been uphold by him to
be true becomes now subject to doubt and denial. René Descartes dramatizes this in the
opening of his Meditations. He writes thus,
Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had
accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole
edifice that I had subsequently based on them. 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.5

And this also includes God in the demolition. It seems that Descartes, just like
most of his contemporaries, has abandon God for man. Here is a shift from “theocentric”
to “anthropocentric,” that is, from medieval to modern. In contrast to the medieval man,
the modern one is strangely different. Carl Jung has this vivid comparison.
How totally different did the world appear to medieval man! For him the earth
was eternally fixed and at rest in the center of the universe, circled by a sun that
solicitously bestowed its warmth. Men were all children of God under the loving
care of the Most High, who prepared them for eternal blessedness: and all knew
exactly what they should do and how they should conduct themselves in order
to rise from a corruptible world to an incorruptible and joyous existence. Such
a life no longer seems real to us, even in our dreams. Science has long ago
torn this lovely veil to shreds. That age lies as far behind as childhood, when

3
During the late 5th Century, the term “modern” was first used to make a distinction between the
“pagan and Roman past” and the present Christian world (Jϋrgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished
Project,” in Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on the Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity, ed. Maurizio Passerin d’ Entréves and Seyla Benhabib [Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1997], 39). Now during this time “modern” also is employed to distinguish
between the Medieval and the new age of Renaissance, Enlightenment and the advent of sciences and
discoveries.
4
Matson, The Broken Image, 5.
5
Rene Descartes, “Meditations on the First Philosophy,” trans. John Cottingham, in The
Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 12.
Henceforth cited as Meditations.

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one’s own father was unquestionably the handsomest and strongest man on
earth.6

From our presentation above, we see that modern man has abandoned the long held God
of the medieval. It is a kind of emancipation from religion. However, it is not our intention
to dwell more on this topic for this will bring us further afield. Our task here as mentioned
in the beginning of the section is to read Descartes’s third and fifth meditations concerning
the existence of God. We have seen from our preliminary consideration above that the
modern man has tried to emancipate himself from God. Descartes has been considered
as the Father of Modern philosophy. And yet reading closely the two mentioned
meditations, it is clear that he is a believer of God. God is not even a product of the
Cogito. This we will see immediately below.

2.3.2 On God’s Existence

Descartes’ Cogito become the underlying assumption of Modernity. The whole of

Modernity from Descartes to Hegel and Husserl rests on this assumption. We shall see
this further in our lecture, when we reach Hegel and Husserl. For the meantime we take
note that the Cogito took several shapes in the whole of the modern period in the history
of Western philosophy. It is Kant’s pure reason, transcendental apperception, or pure
apperception; Husserl’s pure consciousness; Hegel’s Geist; Locke’s mind as “tabula
rasa”; and Berkeley’s perceiving mind, etc. “Universal thought,” observes Levinas, “is an
‘I think’.”7
In this part of our lecture, we focus our attention to the fact that after Descartes’
cogito comes the idea of God, which has become Descartes’ eighteenth principle. God

6
Carl G. Jung, Civilization in Transition, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Bollingen Foundation,
1964), 81.
7
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1979), 36. But after Modernity, there is already the breaking of totality.
The Cogito, Levinas continues, “hearkens to itself thinking and surprises itself being dogmatic, foreign to
itself. But faced with this alterity the I is the same, merges with itself, is incapable of apostasy with regard
to this surprising ‘self.’ Hegelian phenomenology, where self-consciousness is the distinguishing of what
is not distinct, expresses the universality of the same identifying itself in the alterity of objects thought and
despite the opposition of self to self” (Ibid.).

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for Descartes is “distinct from ourselves.”8 God alone is supremely perfect. And this idea
brings him to conclude that the thinking being is not the source of its being when it
recognizes something more perfect than itself. Hence the cogito cannot be the cause of
its own being, for it recognizes something more perfect than itself. Such supreme
perfection is only caused by something that possesses such perfections and that is, God.
For Descartes “we did not make ourselves, but were made by God; and consequently he
exists.”9 Therefore it is clear that in Descartes, God is not a product of the cogito, which
cannot produce such a perfect idea.
In his Third Meditation, Descartes inquires whether God exists, and if he does,
whether he can be a deceiver. Or else, without this knowledge, certainty of anything else
is impossible.10 The Cogito as a thinking being has an idea of God. Now Descartes
examines whether this idea of God comes from himself. Or is it something coming from
without? He discovers that from the idea of God the following attributes are seen:
supreme, eternal, infinite, immutable, omniscient, omnipotent, and finally a creator. And
this idea of God is seen to have more “objective reality” than those which are only
representations of “finite substances.”11 Descartes defines God as both “substance and
creator.”12 Between the cause and its effect, there must be much reality in the cause.
What is more perfect cannot come from what is less. When one idea originates from
other idea, an “infinite regress” is impossible. There must be a “primary idea.” Descartes
discovers this through careful examinations. He says thus,
If the objective reality does not reside in me, either formally or eminently, and
hence that I myself cannot be its cause, it will necessarily follow that I am not
alone in the world, but that some other thing which is the cause of this idea also
exists.13

8
Principles, 199.
9
Ibid. This is Descartes’s twentieth principle.
10
Meditations, 25.
11
Ibid., 28.
12
A. Boyce Gibson, M.A., The Philosophy of Descartes (New York: Russell & Russell, 1967), 241.
13
Meditations, 29.

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In his analysis, Descartes discovers that an “objective reality” resides apart from
him. He continues,
Among my ideas, apart from the idea which gives me a representation of myself,
which cannot present any difficulty in this context, there are ideas which
variously represent God, corporeal and inanimate things, angels, animals and
finally other men like myself.14

After thorough elimination, Descartes recognizes that all other ideas - except the idea of
God – reside in him. These ideas therefore find their origin in him. But the idea God is
different. He concludes further,
So there remains only the idea of God; and I must consider whether there is
anything in the idea which could not have originated in myself. By the word
‘God’ I understand a substance that is infinite, <eternal, immutable,>
independent, supremely intelligent, supremely powerful, and which created
both myself and everything else (if anything else there be) that exists. All these
attributes are such that, the more carefully I concentrate on them, the less
possible it seems that they could have originated from me alone. So from what
has been said it must be concluded that God necessarily exists.15

Thus apart from the Cogito, the idea God is clear and distinct. This is the second
certitude of Descartes. And yet one cannot comprehend God since he is infinite, but in
Descartes what the mind can attain is that “God is supremely knowable.”16 As he claims,
“it is in the nature of the infinite not to be grasped by a finite being like myself.” 17 The
infinite can only be understood and all the attributes of perfection that can be known reside
in God, though one may be ignorant of all other things about him. This is enough for
Descartes to consider God as “the truest and most clear and distinct of all my ideas.”18
God is all actuality, nothing in potentiality. Nothing can be added to his perfection. This
Descartes contends.19

14
Ibid.
15
Ibid., 31.
16
Gibson, The Philosophy of Descartes, 252-253.
17
Meditations, 32.
18
Ibid.
19
Ibid.

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To exist and to have an idea of a supreme being is a proof that clearly indeed God
exists. This idea of God does not come from the senses. It is not even an invention of
the self. For Descartes this idea is innate in him, just like the idea of himself is innate in
him. He believes further that because he is created in God’s image and likeness, God
has placed this idea in him. The faculty that allows him to perceive this idea is the same
faculty that makes him perceives himself. Descartes understands that he is an
incomplete thing and that he depends on another. Besides he is a thing that longs
indefinitely for “greater and better things.” And these greater things are actually and
infinitely within God. Descartes admits “that it would be impossible for me to exist with
the kind of nature I have – that is, having within me the idea of God – were it not the case
that God really existed.”20 He defines God as “the very being the idea of whom is within
me, that is, the possessor of all the perfections which I cannot grasp, but can somehow
reach in my thought, who is subject to no defects whatsoever.” 21 Hence God is no
deceiver since to deceive is a sign of defects, Descartes avers. And finally, and here
Descartes’s faith really manifests: the contemplation of God is “the greatest joy of which
we are capable in this life.”22
Now a question arises: does God necessarily exist? In the Fifth Meditation
Descartes answers in the affirmative. A mountain and a valley, he observes, are mutually
inseparable. So does God whose existence is inseparable from him. The necessity of
his existence is not an imposition of thought. One cannot freely think of God’s non-
existence.23 Descartes continues his meditation saying, “Apart from God, there is nothing
else of which I am capable of thinking such that existence belongs to its essence.”24
Undeniably God is not a fiction of the mind, Descartes asserts.
Towards the end of his Fifth Meditation, Descartes remarks, “I have perceived that
God exists, and at the same time I have understood that everything else depends on him,

20
Ibid., 35.
21
Ibid.
22
Ibid., 36.
23
Ibid., 46.
24
Ibid., 47.

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and that he is no deceiver; and I have drawn the conclusion that everything which I clearly
and distinctly perceive is of necessity true.”25 Thus God is the guarantee of the existence
of all other things which Descartes has previously demolished at the start of his
meditations. The knowledge of God gives Descartes the possibility of achieving “full and
certain knowledge of countless matters” and that includes God himself, angels, man and
the whole corporeal world.26 Moreover, God’s existence is as important as that of the
Cogito.27 “Sum” and “Deus est” secure us of the possibility of knowing all other
“propositions” as certain.28
After this reading of Descartes’s third and fifth meditations concerning the
existence of God, we will analyze what has been stated above.

ANALYSIS
Our analysis proceeds in two parts: (1) Descartes on God, and (2) Beyond the
Cartesian Watershed: A Corollary.

1. Descartes on God

As we have seen from our preliminary consideration, the modern man has
attempted to abandon God. In the Medieval times, God has been the center of
philosophizing – thus “theocentric.” But during the Enlightenment, the modern man
emancipates from God or religion. From God, man now becomes the center – thus
“anthropocentric.” This is the difference between Medieval philosophy and Modern
philosophy. It is obvious that among the medieval philosophers, reason is in harmony
with faith. The modern philosophers have undermined faith for the sake of reason.
But is this the case in Descartes? Descartes best represents the modern man
since he is the Father of Modern Philosophy. And yet reading closely his meditations,

25
Ibid., 48.
26
Ibid., 49.
27
S. V. Keeling, Descartes (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1970), 81.
28
Ibid., 109.

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one can say that his treatise on God’s existence - especially recorded in his third and fifth
meditations - is a testament that he is not abandoning God for man. There is nothing in
his arguments that speak of unbelief.
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.29 But still Descartes is a
believer. Since he is a Christian, he cannot easily detach from his God or religion. His
method to doubt once and for all everything he received from childhood is only
methodical. He is not a sceptic.30 He even claims that if something can be doubted, it
does not mean it is false. He only supposes it to be false. Methodical doubt is not to
make conclusions but to follow a path to attain knowledge.31 God can never be false.
Yet Descartes is showing us a path towards achieving this knowledge.
As part of his demolition, he doubts God’s existence. But examining deeply, it is
only a temporary abandonment of God. We have seen from our reading of his third and
fifth meditations that truly God exists. Like that of St. Thomas, Descartes claims that in
God essence and existence are one. God is all perfection. Since the self is limited and

29
Keeling, Descartes, 99.
30
Descartes has lived in an age of sceptics and subjectivists. Sceptics doubt about “whether
something exists, or about whether we can know something, or about whether we are justified in arguing
in certain way” (A. R. Lacey, A Dictionary of Philosophy, 3rd Revised Edition [New York: Barnes and Noble,
1996], 333).
Subjectivists do not believe in objective truths. The work of Descartes is “indeed revolutionary.”
But it is also correct to say that he is “a man of his time.” He lives in an age of sceptics and subjectivists.
We can mention here his old contemporary, Lord Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Erasmus (1466-1537), the
triad of Copernicus (1473-1543), Galileo (1564-1642), Kepler (1571-1630), and Michel de Montaigne (1533-
92). Having lived in this climate, Descartes uses both scepticism and subjectivism. And yet Descartes is
not a subjectivist. He believes that philosophy should begin in one’s subjective viewpoint but it should not
end there. He also thinks that “genuine objective knowledge” can be found. And that makes him no sceptic
(Ibid., 22-24).
Descartes’s scepticism is only a via negativa (a negative way or a way of purgation), as we have
seen in section 1.2 above. The Cogito is already the positive element of his philosophizing. As Chappell
puts it, “It is a method of deflating the philosophical overambition and complacency that Descartes finds,
above all, in the medieval schoolmen” (Timothy Chappell, The Inescapable Self: An Introduction to Western
Philosophy [London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005], 24).
Descartes’s methodological scepticism “is the adoption of sceptical views not to defend them but
as a starting point, departure from which are to be justified” (Lacey, A Dictionary of Philosophy, 305). The
basic aim of his doubt is to defeat scepticism at its core. The indubitable therefore is what is left after an
extreme sceptical challenge (http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/4c.htm#doubt).
31
Keeling, Descartes, 81.

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finite, it cannot produce such an idea of the infinite and most perfect God. A finite thing
cannot be the cause of what is infinite. Descartes concludes that the idea of God is innate.
God places this idea in him. Created in God’s image and likeness, the self has an idea
of this. Also Descartes realizes that God is apart from man. To conceive such an idea
of perfection is to conceive the necessity of his existence. Thus God necessarily exists.
From the above analysis we can maintain that in Descartes God is not a product
of the Cogito. Although in his method lies the problem: God seems to be only after the
Cogito. This can be construed also that God is only an effect of the Cogito. God can be
an artifact if one follows such a method. 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. In full length we note here.
… we have to go back to the period before the Enlightenment, especially to the
revolution brought about by the philosophical thought of Descartes. The cogito,
ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) radically changed the way of doing philosophy.
In the pre-Cartesian period, philosophy, that is to say the cogito, or rather the
cognosco, was subordinate to esse, which was considered prior. To Descartes,
however, the esse seemed secondary, and he judged the cogito to be prior.
This not only changed the direction of philosophizing, but it marked the decisive
abandonment of what philosophy had been hitherto, particularly the philosophy
of Saint Thomas Aquinas, and namely the philosophy of esse. Previously,
everything was interpreted from the perspective of esse and an explanation for
everything was sought from the same standpoint. God as fully Self-sufficient
Being (Ens subsistens) was believed to be the necessary ground of every ens
non subsistens, ens participatum, that is, of all created beings, including man.
The cogito, ergo sum marked a departure from that line of thinking. Now the
ens cogitans enjoyed priority. After Descartes, philosophy became a science
of pure thought: all esse – both the created world and the Creator – remained
within the ambit of the cogito as the content of human consciousness.
Philosophy now concerned itself with beings qua content of consciousness and
not qua existing independently of it.32

The position of our lecture does not totally agree with the above criticism of Pope
John Paul II. Reading the Third and the Fifth Meditations of Descartes, it is clear that the
cogito never creates God. A finite thing cannot create an infinite. This Descartes asserts.
God for Descartes is supremely perfect. And that it necessarily follows that he exists. As
we have said earlier, Descartes’s abandonment of God is only momentary. But here

32
Pope John Paul II, Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium (New York: Rizzoli
International Publications, Inc., 2005), 8-9.

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comes the danger; and we can agree with the Pope’s commentary. If it is momentary,
then there is a time that God is out of the picture. What first exists in Descartes’s
procedure is the cogito. This is the first indubitable. It is an inner man, devoid of
externalities. Now at this stage, where is God? It seems only the cogito exists.
Thus the Cartesian method can bring us to a dangerous predicament. It is good
that Descartes is a believer. He cannot really abandon God. That is why he proceeds to
his second clear and distinct idea: God. And only this way all other things outside of the
cogito come to exist with certainty. But since the cogito is seen prior to God, the idea of
God can become simply a product of thought. Man can always manipulate this thought
according to his desires and circumstances. The solution therefore, as suggested by
Pope John Paul II is to “presuppose the reality of the Absolute Being and also the reality
of being human, that is, being a creature.” The Pope warns that if ever we do not begin
from a “realist” position, “we end up in a vacuum.”33 Hence before the Cogito, there must
be God.
This we turn our attention to the challenge to go beyond Descartes.

2. Beyond the Cartesian Watershed: A Corollary

Gone are the Cartesian days of doubting one’s existence, for such a study can no
longer be relegated solely to the cognitive function. As Karol Wojtyla, in his preface to
The Acting Person, puts it sharply, “Since Descartes, knowledge about man and his world
has been identified with the cognitive function – as if only in cognition, and especially
through knowledge of himself, could man manifest his nature and his prerogative.” 34 Yet
one must not fail to give credit also to modern philosophy. It is from here that philosophy
is able to redirect its focus, from the theocentrism of the medieval to the anthropocentrism
of modernity.

33
Ibid., 12.
34
Karol Wojtyla, The Acting Person, trans. Andrzej Potocki, Dordrecht (Holland: D. Reidel
Publishing Company, 1979), vii.

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Phenomenology, as an extension of the Cartesian doubt, already presupposes

existence. That a human being exists, there is no doubt. Moreover, whether there are
human persons other than one’s self is no longer a question. After the doubt, the self is
found by Descartes to be indubitably existing, yet it cannot be an isolated self. One
cannot speak of a “worldless ego.” The Cartesian self cannot be contained within the
bounds of its own subjectivity, pondering only upon the world out there. 35 The being of
the self is undeniably a being-in-the-world. The only way to break the “solipsistic self” is
to admit outright that there are other selves in existence, wherein the “self” is projected
and “constantly being carried out amidst things,” concerned with a world that is shared.36
Other persons exist. In this case the self cannot be absolutized, which would mean
the exclusion of others. Hence, “the plurality of consciousness,” M. Merleau-Ponty
explains, “is impossible if I have an absolute consciousness of myself.” 37 The human
person lives with others. He projects his self to them. Caputo observes:
For as the other appears within the horizon of my world, so I appear within his.
His life, like mine, reaches out in all directions from the point of origin called “I.”
We are each continually giving birth to a world structured from our point of view.
He projects a horizon, throws out a net which catches us in it. When we meet
him we are disrupted by a heterogeneous presence which bursts into our world.
When he leaves us we feel our world horizon closing up again and the breach
which he introduced is healed. The total human community is a system of
competing and overlapping circles, of horizons of influence, of fields of
presence.38

The self is indeed facing the other selves. He lives with them, interacts with them. “The
life world,” continues Caputo, “is an infinitely complex interweaving of interacting centers,
the field of all fields.”39 Phenomenology acknowledges the realm of intersubjectivity.

35
John D. Caputo, “The Presence of the Other: A Phenomenology of the Human Person,” in The
Human Person: Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, vol. LIII (Washington,
D.C: The Catholic University of America, 1979), 45. Henceforth cited as PACPA.
36
Ibid.
37
M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities
Press, 1962), 373.
38
Caputo, “The Presence of the Other,” in PACPA, 52.
39
Ibid.

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Henceforth the question philosophy should address is what it means to be human

in the midst of the world. What does it mean to be a human person, to be this “embodied
spirit” and not just this “rational animal” by which man has for long been defined; this
human person who feels, thinks, wills, judges, aspires, dreams; this human person who
is capable of loving or hating, of having joy or pain; this human person of “flesh and blood,”
who touches the lives of others and is also touched by them? Indeed, what does it mean
to be human? It is clear that the human person is a being-with and a being-in-the-world.
Therefore, it comes to no surprise “that a man would discover himself not in the inner
recesses of his own subjectivity but rather only in his commerce with others in the midst
of the world.”40 Thus, in refuting Descartes, Merleau-Ponty has this to say, “There is no
inner man; man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.”41
And beyond man and his world there is GOD.

CONCLUSION
Based on the above presentation, we can draw the following conclusions.
1. The modern man has attempted to abandon God. And what replaces God is
science.
2. Descartes has initiated a method to doubt once and for all everything that he
received since childhood. And this includes God.
3. But looking closely, Descartes though considered as the Father of Modern
Philosophy, only momentarily abandons God. He is not a sceptic. He only tries to
find a way to certitude; hence, it is methodical.
4. Reading the Third and the Fifth Meditations of 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

40
Ibid., 56.
41
Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, xi.

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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.
5. Pope John Paul II has criticized Descartes for making God and man remain only
“within the ambit of the cogito.” God becomes now a product of thought. We
however do not totally agree with the Pope’s criticism, since in the reading of the
two meditations above, it is clear that God necessarily exists outside the cogito.
Thus we prove the thesis of this section that God is not the product of the cogito.
6. However, the danger lies in the method itself. It appears that in the Cartesian
method, since everything is doubted once and for all and that includes God, God
is momentarily abandoned. Descartes is still a child of his time – a child of
Modernity.
7. The paper also proposes a challenge to go beyond the “Cartesian watershed.”
Gone are the days of Descartes. There is no inner man, as Merleau–Ponty
asserts. Indeed, God and other men exist outside the Cogito.

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