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Descartes Third Meditation Analysis

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Descartes Third Meditation Analysis
The next stage in the meditations is to establish the existence of God. In the third meditation, Descartes first introduces two forms of reality: formal and objective as his foundation for his rationale. The formal reality of anything is the actual existence and the degree of its perfection as a mode of mind whether the idea is of a finite or infinite substance whereas the objective reality of an idea is its inherent degree of perfection, considered now with regard to its content. With this connection, Descartes explains that the idea of God is the idea of a perfect or Supreme Being, which lies on the highest degree of reality because God’s formal and objective reality is infinite. Descartes emphasizes that an object cannot create something with more reality than the creator. Due to his idea of God is someone …show more content…
To build on this, Descartes describes people as having a finite level of reality because of our imperfect knowledge (Descartes, 2007, p.15). Although Descartes has a finite degree of formal reality, he could not have gotten the idea from himself. Consequently, having an idea of infinite would have to be a cause that is more perfect in reality than the idea (Descartes, 2007, p.13). This provides a bridge that endorses Descartes to infer the existence of causes from the nature of the distinct ideas in the mind, and thus are effects of some causes or another. So, Descartes states, “I couldn’t exist with the nature that I have, containing within the me the idea of god- if God didn’t really exist” (Descartes, 2007, p.17) arguing that God exists because he has an idea of God. And since Descartes knows that he himself is an imperfect being, he could not have invented the idea of God himself because he has less reality than God. God is the only one who is competent to create the idea of God because God has infinite reality, there must exist a perfect being out there. Descartes also reveals that God is not a deceiver. Descartes knows that a perfect being has no
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