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Descartes Argument of God

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God Does Not Necessarily Have to Exist
In Descartes’ Meditations, he makes the strong claim that God must exist. I will first explain what Descartes’s argument for God’s existence is, and then I will attempt to support the argument that God does not need to necessarily exist through objections and replies. Premise 1: “We have an idea of God as an infinite and perfect being.” First, Descartes believes that there are properties that are inherently perfect. For example, being good is a perfection while being bad is an imperfection. A perfect being has all the perfections as properties. We have an idea of such a being as God. Premise 2: “Our minds are not infinite.” To begin this argument, Descartes entertains the idea that he cannot …show more content…

Many depictions of God is a perfect human being, and it is not uncommon for one to imagine what a perfect person would possess. The thought is then transformed in an idea of a being whose properties are perfect in every way. This way, the imperfect human would have something to strive for. So the idea of God is simply a collection of ideas, who does not have an infinite amount of objective reality. Therefore, since the objective reality of God is not infinite, humans could have been the creators of the idea, granted that an effect must have as much reality as its cause.
Here, Descartes might entertain the idea that God could be a creation of humans, and therefore he does not necessarily have to exist. So God does not exist, but we can agree that God is the idea of a perfect being. Existence, however, is a perfection. But God now lacks a perfection by non-existence. The perfect being now lacks a perfection. The perfect being is imperfect. Therefore, the argument is a contradiction and God must exist.
With this indirect argument, I would like to challenge the premise that existence is a perfection. Descartes grants the idea that God does not necessarily need to exist, and he even says that God does not exist. So, my objection here is that a thing cannot possess a property or characteristic if it does not exist. Essentially, to have something, one must need to exist in the first place. In other words, the prerequisite for perfection is to

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