Descartes Arguments For God's Existence

In Descartes’ third Meditation, Descartes aims to prove God’s existence. So far, he only knows a couple of things with certainty. He knows that he exists, because he knows that he is a thinking thing, and that he has ideas or sensations in his mind. Because he clearly and distinctly perceives that he is a thinking thing, he is certain of that fact. He wouldn’t be able to be certain unless all clear and distinct perceptions were certain, so it is in the first couple of paragraphs that Descartes concludes that whatever he perceives as clearly and distinctly must be true. Descartes sets aside his senses and his images of bodily things before commencing his argument for the existence of God. The third Meditation can be split up into three main points. Classification of Ideas

In order to prove God’s existence, Descartes concentrates on the thoughts

Because these ideas are all equal, then that means that they have the same amount of formal reality. Formal reality is reality that objects and things have in this world, while objective reality is the reality of objects represented by ideas. Although, ideas may have the same formal reality, they do not have the same objective reality; objective reality differs among different ideas. There are ideas that have more objective reality than others. Descartes uses God as an example. He states that “the idea that gives me my idea of a supreme God, eternal, infinite, omniscient, omnipotent, and the creator of all things that exist apart from him, certainly has in it more objective reality than the ideas that represent finite substances.” (28) This means that the idea of God would have more objective reality than that of a car, and a car would have more objective reality than the color yellow, for example. So, Descartes comes to the understanding that infinite substances, like God, have more reality than finite substances, bodies and