Descartes believed that while awake, what we perceive is equal indistinctness of form as what we perceive while dreaming. This created in him a great doubt over the existence of what he perceived at any time:
At this moment it does indeed seem to me that it is with eyes awake that I am looking at this paper; that this head which I move is not asleep… But in thinking over this I remind myself that on many occasions I have in sleep been deceived by similar illusions, and in dwelling carefully on this reflection I see so manifestly that there are no certain indications by which we may clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep… (Soccio, 258).
It is sense perception that Descartes proves here to have little faith in, as he manages to convince himself that while awake, it is in fact possible he is dreaming.
He only ever gets as far as proving the material may exist. This is a result of his proving to himself through the concept of the innate idea and of the human incapacity for perfection that God does exist. He believes that since every person has an idea of a perfect being, and yet every person is by essence imperfect, that the idea must have originated from outside of the human mind (Soccio, 262). His answer to the question of where, then, this idea originated is the next logical step of a train of thought that now must accommodate the existence of this idea. This is where he manages to convince himself that the only reasonable explanation for “the perfect idea of perfection” is God:
By the name of God I understand a substance that is infinite, independent, all-knowing, all-powerful, and by which I myself and everything else, if anything else does exist, has been created. Now all these characteristics are such that the more diligently I attend to them, the less do they appear capable of proceeding from me alone; hence, from what has been already saying, we must conclude that God necessarily exists (Soccio, 262).
Since God is all-powerful, it is indeed true that it is within his capacity to create existence, but Descartes can never ascribe to his senses enough confidence to believe fully in the material he perceives.
My experience tells me that all abstractions come from what we have perceived over time. My experiences tell me that as we are born, we have no innate ideas in our minds—that we only possess a slate designed by evolution to receive the product of our perceptions in the form of ideas, concepts, beliefs, and abstractions. This is difficult. We perceive the entire world anew as we grow, and the demand on our minds to understand, classify, and create operational abstractions from these perceptions is great.
The concept of God offers a reprieve from the responsibility to draw conclusions based on what is sensed, as expressions like, “Well, God works in mysterious ways,” can be used to cover any sized landscape of the unascertained.
Nathaniel Branden, a present-day philosopher and psychologist, uses the argument of the “infinite regress” to press upon the fallaciousness of explaining existence through God (Branden, ‘First Cause’). This does not, however, appropriately fly in the face of Descartes’ reasoning, as he is able only to justify the existence of God to himself, and never is fully able to use that justification to explain existence, which is baffling. In leaving the existence of everything outside the personal mind in question, how is it possible that any of Descartes’ thoughts about anything at all contain substance? About what is he thinking? In forgetting that sense perception has informed all of his rational arguments, Descartes makes an unforgivable mistake.
This is also how he is able to circumvent reason itself in his proof of God, as any person who believes in his own sense perception will be able to understand “the perfect idea of perfection” is an accumulation of perceptions and desires used to create a sum of the world as it is capable of existing. This is an action committed by human beings to guide their own proactive decisions through life.
Works Cited
Soccio, Douglas J.. Archetypes of Wisdom: Seventh Edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2010. 248-271.
Branden, Nathaniel. “’First Cause’ is Existence, not God.” American Atheists. Web.