Rene Descartes Meditation 5 ｜ An Ontological Argument for God's Existence ｜ Philosophy Core Concepts

Hi, this is Dr. Gregory Sadler. I'm a professor of philosophy and the president and founder of an educational consulting company called Reason.io, where we put philosophy into practice. I've studied and taught philosophy for over 20 years, and I find that many people run into difficulties reading classic philosophical texts. Sometimes it's the way things are said or how the text is structured, but the concepts themselves are not always that complicated, and that's where I come in. To help students and lifelong learners, I've been producing longer lecture videos and posting them to YouTube. Many viewers say they find them useful. What you're currently watching is part of a new series of shorter videos, each of them focused on one core concept from an important philosophical text. I hope you find it useful as well. In his fifth meditation, Rene Descartes is going to provide another argument for God's existence. You'll remember that he provides his first main argument in the course of the third meditation. Some people want to say that there's an argument in the first meditation, but there's some controversy about that. And if there is, it's a much weaker argument than the ones that are provided in the third and then again in the fifth meditation. And this arises out of Descartes' consideration of what he calls true and immutable ideas. So we'll talk about that in a moment, but first we should talk about what kind of argument is this. The argument in meditation five is very, very clearly an ontological argument. And I should point out that the term ontological argument was not around at the time that Descartes was writing or the other even more famous originator of something generally taken to be an ontological argument and some of Canterbury. It comes later on with Kant and all of his successors. But this notion of an argument that would work from the idea of God or this technique, you could say, was already long established by the time that Descartes himself is considering it. So what are ontological arguments? Essentially, what makes an argument for the existence of God an ontological argument is that you start from the idea of God. So you have to say what this idea consists in. And then there's something unique about that idea as you unpack it, that says that the idea of God has to be different than other ideas in that the object of that idea, namely God, must necessarily exist. Not possibly exists, not provides good inductive grounds. You're saying, listen, we've got this idea. There's something unique about this idea. When we look at it, that the thing that the idea is of must necessarily have being or existence. And in this case, Descartes is, in fact, at least in the French translation, using the term existence. So it's very clear that this is an ontological argument. It doesn't work by looking at the world or causality or anything like that. It doesn't work by looking for any sort of design in nature. It doesn't say that it would be better to have a God than not to have a God or that virtue must be rewarded or anything along those lines. It says there's something peculiar about this idea that when we look at it carefully, we realize that the thing of which we have the idea must necessarily exist. So how does it work for Descartes? He talks about there being an infinity of ideas, perhaps having no existence outside of his thought. And he calls these true and immutable natures. Right. They're the natures of things. And so, you know, example of this is the triangle. Could be that there's no triangles in existence. However, as soon as we start thinking about a triangle, we realize that its angles must add up to one hundred and eighty degrees or to use the old parlance for this, that its angles must be equal to two right angles. Right. Doesn't assert it doesn't assure us or assert that there actually are existing triangles. But we've got them as true and immutable natures of which we have ideas within our mind. He says that considering this, this leads us to a new possibility, says a demonstrative proof of the existence of God. And how does this work? So it's a very interesting proof. And this is another little bit of a digression here. Quite often, ontological arguments are not so simple as saying, hey, you got this idea. Look at the idea. Well, there's existence in the idea there. We're done. They work by way of saying, OK, we've got this idea. The idea does include existence. But somebody else might say, that's just nonsense. There's all sorts of things that we can think of. And we might even think of them existing. It doesn't make that actually be the case. And so Descartes considers that as a possibility. That's part of the argument. And you don't want to just strip it aside and say, oh, we're only going to focus on the negative or the positive part of the argument. You do want to take the negative into consideration. There's a reason why it's built in there, both in Descartes and in his, in this case, predecessor Anselm. So the argument says we have this idea of a supremely perfect being. Now, Descartes talked about this earlier. What is it to be a supremely perfect being? A being that actually has all perfections. So these would include things like omniscience or complete goodness, omnibenevolence, or whatever else it is that you want to put in there. Whatever it is that it's best to be or better to be than not to be, to use Anselm's formulation from the monologian. And also in the prosologian, chapter five, for example. You'll put that into that idea and say that that's part of it. So he says that I have this idea of a being who's sovereignly or supremely perfect. And I know this, that I know no less clearly and distinctly that, now here's where it gets quite interesting. In the French, that an actual and eternal existence belongs to that nature. I know this no more, no less clearly and distinctly, he says, than that I know anything that I can demonstrate about any figure or number actually truly belongs to the nature of that figure or that number. So I know just as clearly as I do about mathematics or geometry, which is really, you know, for Descartes, sort of the high point, the hallmark of clear and distinct ideas. I know that actual and eternal existence must belong to God, to the idea of God. I know it belongs in there. Now, I said this is really interesting because when we look at the Latin, it doesn't actually say actual and eternal existence. Remember, Descartes wrote the meditations originally in Latin, and then they were translated by somebody else into French. He looked over the translation, says, looks good to me. And so sometimes there's going to be some interesting differences here. So he says, um, here we go. Um, neck, Minos, Claudia, distinct day and Teddy go odd. A is not for him. Peter to nary. Okay. So up to that point, it's the same. Would send their exist dot that it always exists. So, you know, is this a bad translation? It's not a bad translation. Um, but there is a divergence there from the Latin. He's just saying what's in the idea is that this being always exists. Semper exist dot. And notice that he doesn't say Semper asked, right? Or asset. Um, it always has being. He's saying it always exists. It always has real being. We might say it exists in in the world or outside of us, you could say. So that's part of that nature. Then he points out, he says, um, well, that means that God has to exist because it's part of God's nature to exist. Now, at that point, somebody could say, whoa, Descartes, that seems like a bit of a stretch. You're building into this idea exactly what you're looking for. That sounds like a circular argument to me or the way that he's going to call it a sophism. This seems to be a sophism. Why? Because he says, when it comes to things, we are accustomed to make a distinction between existence and essence. So I easily persuade myself that the existence can be separated from the essence of God and that we can conceive of God is not actually being. Um, so wouldn't this mean that there's a fatal flaw with the argument? Then Descartes says, let's go further with this. Consider some of the examples that you've got, like the triangle, right? A triangle. If the triangle exists, it has to have these properties. That's in the idea of the triangle that you have in your mind. That doesn't actually mean that a triangle exists. Or even if you want to say that doesn't mean that a thing with the properties that you're talking about exists. Let's consider another example. He says you can have a mountain, and if you have a mountain, you got to have a valley, right? You can't have the one without the other. But there's nothing that says that you have to have a mountain in the first place. So even though being adjacent to a valley, I guess that would be the property there, would be something that is necessarily a property of the mountain. You know, there's no reason why you have to have an existing mountain. Can't you imagine a world that's completely flat? No mountains, no valleys. So if we put it that way, it seems like we've actually made some sort of mistake, right? So he says there's no less repugnance in conceiving of a god, that is, a being who's supremely perfect, to which existence is lacking. That is to say, to which there's some sort of perfection lacking. Then there would be conceiving a mountain without any valley. And now that kind of gave it away, though, didn't it? Right? In saying that, because if that being is lacking existence, then it is lacking a perfection. And it's no longer a being possessing all the perfections that we're considering here, is it? So it's not exactly like the triangle or the mountain-valley combination. And Descartes will say that, you know, there's actually a sophism contained in this objection that we're making. So, you know, what is it? He says that from the fact that I cannot conceive of a mountain without a valley, it doesn't follow that there is in the world any mountain nor any valley, but only that the mountain and the valley, if there were any, whether there aren't any, cannot in any fashion be separated one from the other. In place of that, he says, from the mere fact that I cannot conceive of God lacking existence, sans existence, right? He says it follows that existence is inseparable from God and that he truly, veritablement in French, exists. Not that my thought makes it be of this sort, as if it imposed on things any sort of necessity, but to the contrary, because of the necessity of the thing itself, that is to say, the existence of God, determines my thought to conceive of it in that manner. So he says, it is not in my freedom of conceiving a God without existence, that is a being who sovereignly perfect without a sovereign perfection, as it is for me to imagine, for example, a horse without wings or with wings or anything like that. There's something distinctive again about this idea. So existence winds up being inseparable for God, for the idea of God. And this leads us to the point of seeing that God therefore must exist. There's one other thing that he does point out that's kind of interesting about this. He tells us that not only must God necessarily exist, but that the idea of God turns out to be, as he calls it, the image of a true and immutable nature. He says, first off, because I cannot conceive of anything other than God itself for whom the essence of this existence belongs, the essence of which existence belongs with necessity. And this also leads him to another interesting corollary. He says, because of this, God must be unique. There can't be two or more gods. Only this idea can be the idea of God, a being supremely or sovereignly perfect that is possessing every single perfection, which necessarily includes existence. And you might even say inseparable existence. So there may be some problems with this, but you've now seen what Descartes' argument is, this ontological argument for the existence of God that he is presenting to us in Meditation 5.