Video Transcript: Lesson 11

I'm going to now cover another argument. It's also by our famous philosopher  Rene Descartes. Descartes was a French philosopher who was born in 1595  and died in 1650 he invented analytic geometry, among other things, a very, all  round brilliant fellow, contribution to mathematics and to philosophy, and he  thought that his main contribution was his defense of the existence of God. And  I'm now going to erase Thomas argument and put Descartes' argument in its  place. So a bit of housekeeping. I spent some time with the principal sufficient  reason, because Descartes' argument is going to assume that as well,  Descartes argument will be shorter, little punchier, and Descartes' argument is  going to prove not only that God exists and is self existent, but Descartes'  argument is going to try to show us God's character. It includes that God is all  good and all just and all merciful things of that nature, okay, Descartes now is  going to start with the principle of sufficient reason for everything, there must be  a cause or explanation. You know what that means by now and why it's  important now? He adds something else, causes are always equal to or greater  than their effects. Descartes is thinking here of the way causal chains exhibit  themselves in reality and the world around us and to the investigation of the  sciences, and it strikes him that in Every case a cause, there's more reality in  the cause than in the effect that it produces. If you, if you had a cause and it  produced more something had more reality than itself, it would violate the  principle of sufficient reason, the more would have no cause or explanation.  That's his reason for thinking that this second premise is true. He thinks this is  true if this is and this is a necessary truth that everybody accepts and everybody can't get away from confronting and using. So that's the reason for premise two,  the cause, and he means the sum total of all causes it takes to produce an effect have more reality in them than the effect. Otherwise you would get effects that  didn't have a cause or explanation. Premise three, there exists in my mind, the  idea of infinity, this is not supposed to be a necessary truth, it's simply a factual  report. I am thinking of something infinite. Now, by this, Descartes does not  mean spatially or numerically infinite. He means infinitely perfect. The term  infinity then means that something has every perfection there is, and only  perfections. A perfection is any characteristic that makes something better or  greater to have it than to lack it. And the perfection is the infinite mode of  anything like that. So goodness and knowledge and wisdom and mercy and  power would all be perfections, and there may be an infinite number of them. He doesn't say the the my idea of infinity includes all the perfections I know about.  No, it's all, all that there are, whether I know about them or not. I'm thinking of  something having all and only perfections. So whatever that is, if such a thing  exists, it would be, it would have all those perfections I just named and more. Of  course, that's just an idea in his mind. It exists in my mind. But he then argues  this idea as it exists in my mind, an idea of something infinite with every  perfection there is could not have been caused by my mind. Why not? Because 

causes are always equal to or greater than their effects. Now, nothing can be  greater than infinity, but it could be equal to it, but Descartes says my mind isn't  infinite. It isn't equal to that idea. Neither is anything that I know. Nothing that we can observe, has all perfections and is infinitely perfect. So what is the cause of  the idea in my mind? It can't be the world around me. That's not the cause of me having that idea, because nothing in the world has any perfection, let alone all of them. And it can't be my mind, because my mind isn't infinite it isn't up to the  task. So therefore there exists something infinite, which is the cause of my idea  of infinity. I have an idea that couldn't be caused by me or anything I experience. The only thing that could have caused it is something infinite. So there is  something infinite, if I have the idea, there must be an infinite thing to have  caused it. That's not he's not saying. That's true of everything. He's not saying, if I have the idea of Pegasus, the winged horse that flies through the sky, therefore there must be such a thing. No, he knows. There are plenty of things that we  imagine and think up that aren't, in fact, real, and the fact that we can think of  something doesn't make it real in most cases. But in this case, it does, because  the what it is I'm thinking of is something infinite, and that idea would require an  infinite cause. So I have an idea of something with all and only perfections. So  there must exist something with all and only perfections to be the cause of that  idea. How do you like that one? I said to you, Descartes proof tries to get in it.  Not only that, God has infinite existence. Is self existent, but other  characteristics, goodness, mercy, love, justice, power, knowledge, wisdom,  whatever is of perfection. God has it, and there now you've got it. So what do  you think of this one? I'd like to hear your feedback, but I can't. But let me tell  you briefly why I think that this does not succeed either. It's not the principle of  sufficient reason. Let's grant him that just for the sake of the argument, some  philosophers would accept this, and some don't. But the real problem here isn't  with the principle sufficient reason. It's with what is called in logic, equivocation.  That means in your argument without meaning to and without noticing it, you  have shifted the meaning of an important term so that it means one thing in the  premise and something else in the conclusion. And that's what's going on here.  There exists, in my mind, the idea of infinity, the idea of it. But the idea of infinity  is not itself infinite, the idea that there may be something having every  perfection, that idea doesn't have every perfection. It's the idea of something  having every perfection. Therefore the idea doesn't require an infinite cause at  all, because it's not infinite. His idea isn't perfectly wise and just and all powerful. It's an idea that there might be something like that. It. So his idea of infinity is not self infinite, and doesn't require an infinite cause. I think this flaw in the  argument, which is fatal to it, was pointed out only after Descartes died, so he  didn't get a chance to reply to this. I think if someone had pointed this out to him, he would have quietly withdrawn it. He had a couple of others that he offered  during his lifetime, and he would have said, Well, I think these work. Let's forget 

about this one, because it's very clearly does not work. This is an example, as I  said earlier, of what most Philosophy of Religion courses are do and do little  else. Most of them examine one proof after another, or one proof that God  doesn't exist after another, and then they try to evaluate them in a logical  manner, and they think that they've done a good job philosophically. And my  criticism is that the proofs do not succeed, none of them. And that's not where  our most intense focus ought to be. It ought to be on religious experience, which is how people really know that there's God, that God exists. Okay, when we  reconvene for our next session, what I will be taking up is one last argument in  favor of God's of belief in God. And this will be a different sort of argument. It will be a probability argument. Instead of concluding with God, it will conclude  something about belief in God. So the argument will shift from God Himself  being proven to the belief in God being shown to be more likely, more probably  true than false. That'll be a treat itself, won't it? Hear that one a lot of people still  are very much in favor of this argument, so we'll take that up when we  reconvene you now need a break to think about all this.