atheism for lent, day 4
Bonjour, mes amis! Aujourd’hui, nous étudierons le philosophe français René Descartes. And I didn’t even have to use a dictionary for most of that! Thank you, my 1990s-era French studies.
Good ol’ Renny is one of those writers who makes me wanna take a red pen to all his texts. At least in English. I have no idea if each of his French sentences is packed with 15 clauses and 27 commas, but I suspect that someone in his life should have informed him that sentences are not minivans and you can’t just pack an entire household into one.
But enough of nerding out over writing styles. That’s not why we’re here. We’re here for Descartes’s thoughts on the existence of God, which are all based around what was arguably his most famous statement:
I think, therefore I am.
If I am thinking — which I am — says Descartes, that must mean that I exist. I can’t think if I don’t exist; if I don’t exist, then there’s no mind to think with. Okay, RenRen, I can follow you that far well enough. At least, if I’m thinking and typing this, that means something exists that is generating the thoughts and the energies. Maybe it’s just the Matrix — but either way, even if what is “I” is nothing more than computer code, there still exists something that is doing the processing and outputting of information.
So far, so good.
But now Descartes gets into the nitty gritty about God. His argument for the existence of God is ontological:
ὤν, ὄντος (ṓn, óntos) = “being”
λόγος (lógos) = “word,” “speech,” “discourse”
–> ontology = the study of the essence or nature of things; the study of being as being
So, Descartes is looking at the essence of what we call “God” and developing his “proof” from there. As for me, quite honestly, I find his whole minivan-sentence thing severely off-putting, and I much prefer reading simplified summations of his argument. Which Peter Rollins gives us via Anselm of Canterbury/Aosta/Bec:
- The definition of God is “a being with every perfection.”
- (Necessary) existence is a perfection.
- Therefore, God must exist.
Peter notes that people often have an intuitive suspicion of this argument, but that historically it’s been difficult to refute. I’m probably thinking of it simplistically or morbidly or both, but these are my question upon reading it:
Why should “necessary existence” be a perfection? Why is it better to exist than not to exist?
It’s not like we can ask a non-existent person whether or not they would enjoy existing. It’s not like we can ask someone who existed in the past but no longer exists now which state of being they find preferable. How are we to know empirically which is better?
I know plenty of people suffering from depression and other chronic maladies who would say that existing is not necessarily always desirable.
That’s really all I’ve got for this day’s reflection. I’m not sure I understand the argument fully or the refutation Peter shared with us as supplemental material. Hopefully, tomorrow’s AfL material will shed some light on it all for me.
XOXO