Xeno

I got the impression Ojuice5001 was concerned with Descartes' written arguments not being as strong because he was sensoring what he really thought due to fear from Christian backlash.

I tend to agree, as in the Meditations lining up his God with the Christian concept seems forced at times.

ex-xian

I've never noticed that...where exactly do you see this happening?

I was taught that, basically, Descartres wanted to do science and physics, but didn't want to inspire the church to come after him; after all, D very much enjoyed his comfort. It seems that he wrote his meditations in such a way as to appease the church officials, but not in a way that compromised his own religious ideals.

In the preface to Meditations he states that the primary subject matter will be god and the human soul, but in the first meditation he says that he is going to establish a firm foundation of science.

Descartes has arguments for god's existence, albeit weak ones, but I agree with Clutch that he seems perfectly Thomistic and, therefore, with xian orthodoxy.

Pyrrho

The problem is, he was using arguments and reasoning regarding the existence of god, when he was supposed to just have faith. This reasoning stuff can get people to question, and that is very much against what the Church wants. Furthermore, the "god" that he "proves"* exists is rather ambiguous, and could be the Catholic god, or some other god. None of this is what the Church wanted. He "should" have been an obedient believer, just going along with whatever the Church told him, and not bothered with doing any reasoning on the matter, as that leads frequently to "heresy". His sucking up in the introduction did not make the Church forget what he was doing.

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*In point of fact, most philosophers these days regard his arguments for the existence of god as fallacious, which only tends to get people to have more doubts about the existence of god, when otherwise people may be more prone to just have "faith" (i.e., believe without evidence).

Clutch

Actually, the Church has almost always accepted natural theology and rationalistic apologetics -- at a minimum, as the vanguard of faith for the unbeliever. Given the stature of Thomism within the Church at the time of Descartes, it is hard to see why one would think that "arguments and reasoning regarding the existence of god" would be deeply contrary to the precepts or attitudes of the Church. The Five Ways and all that.

Much more likely was that Descartes in the Meditations was cagey in part just because he wanted to guard against some influential reader getting twitchy about the wrong preposition here and there; but mostly because he already knew his physics put him out on a limb -- due its anti-Thomistic/anti-Aristotelian character.

Finally, while Descartes' arguments are often textbook fallacies, the picture he ends up with is almost beautiful in its fit with Christian theology. We overcome scepticism because God would not allow us to be systematically deceived; but we are capable of error because, while our rational faculties are perfect, our will is corrupt. So we often assent to propositions that our reasoning would reject if mastered by a perfect will.

It dovetails so precisely with so many different aspects of Christianity that (I conjecture) it must have struck Descartes as a kind of inference to the best explanation -- enabling him to hold his nose and run some really messy arguments up the flagpole. In its own way, it is a generous and optimistic image of humanity's participation in God's perfection through the use of our intellect.

ex-xian

Exactly. Even though I have fundamental disagreements with most of his conclusions, Descartes is one of my favorite philosophers simply because of how structured and thought out his philosophy was. He was truly revolutionary--exalting epistemology and method as the fundamentals of philosophy.

ex-xian

Also, I believe this idea is a fairly recent and minority opinion among theists. Except for Tertullian, who was denoucned as a heretic, Keirkigaard (sp?) is the first that I can think of that wanted people to rely soley on faith to the exclusion of reason. Ironically, his philosophy was the inspiration for the blatantly athesitic philosophies of Sartre and Neitzche.

Pyrrho

I should have worded my original post a bit differently, as reasoning was allowed, within certain parameters. So you are right to criticize my post as it was written. (Certainly, however, reasoning was not required.) But Descartes' reasoning fell outside of those parameters that the Church found acceptable. Reading Descartes is almost like reading something written by an atheist, except that his conclusion isn't atheistic. Essentially, Descartes was setting up an example that the Church did not want others to follow. Beginning with universal doubt is anathema to them.

Ojuice5001

Exactly. Descartes gave a whole new twist to thoughts about when things are certain, and when they are doubtful. Pagan and Christian philosophy both had established answers to that question. (And the two didn't have greatly different answers; the church fathers basically just integrated divine revelation into the Platonic and Aristotelian systems.) Descartes was very explicit about how and why universal doubt was a good idea, and he gave it the best reputation it had had yet. And once universal doubt gets a good enough reputation, the result is predictable--a lot of varying people will be approaching it differently, and others will claim that their beliefs are based on universal doubt when they really aren't. By its very nature universal doubt can justify all kinds of different things. Some people conclude absolute skepticism, but nothing forces us to; deciding that nothing is certain isn't really a better answer than deciding that there is something certain.