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Descartes Arguments For The Existence Of God

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Anh Nguyen - PHIL 256 Final Descartes’s arguments for the existence of God and its fallacies Descartes (1596 – 1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician and scientist. At an early age, he received his education from the Jesuits and the experience with the Aristotelian ideals there upset him, yet the field of mathematics fascinated him with its precision, uniform certainty and necessity. This dissonance eventually planted a seed into his mind and drove him to question about the nature of knowledge, namely whether it can match mathematics’ indubitableness. Descartes’ attempts in resolving the problem resulted in his Meditations of First Philosophy (1641), which was written in response to queries regarding his new philosophical basis for a novel way to approach the system of knowledge. Upon its publication, Descartes’ Meditations provoked controversy among the Aristotelians – indeed it was an assault on the Aristotelian …show more content…

In this paper I will lay out his arguments in the following order: (1) The purpose of the method of Universal Doubt and its strategic approach towards the foundation for a new system of knowledge, (2) The most basic foundation of the new system – the fact that “I exist” and how it achieved an absolute certainty, (3) The subsequent absolute certainty and ultimate key to all absolute certainty in knowledge, namely the existence of God and (4) An evaluation of Descartes’s argument for God’s existence. As Galileo shook the foundation of Aristotelian ideals on the scientific ground, Descartes attacked them on the philosophical front and paved a concrete step towards the rise of a new science, yet the importance of his

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