Immanuel Kant's Justification For The Existence Of God

Philosophers have for long debated on the existence of a Supreme all powerful and all perfect God, Kant, and Anselm being among them. Where Anselm has supported the presence of God and all the attributes that regard to the Him, Kant has risen up with a counter argument. The interaction between the two, the philosophical objection raised by Kant, and what this means to the rest of mankind will be analyzed in this paper.

In order to weigh up these arguments, it is important to understand Descartes’ reasons for formulating them: Descartes’ believes that it is important to be certain of the things that one believes to be true which, in turn, causes him to question the things that he has been certain of thus far. Because of this, he forms these arguments to further consider his theories about doubt and what it is to be truly certain of anything.

The one thing Descartes cannot doubt is that he exists, because he thinks and question the world around him. Descartes felt that our senses and perception of can skew every aspect of our understanding of reality, so only the fact that he exists is without doubt. This reasoning is known as solipsism (1). Basically, everything seen, felt, heard, or experienced are misrepresented by perception. With perception skewing everything, the only certainty is mind and the thoughts it holds, not necessarily that the thoughts are correct.

Descartes’ method of radical doubt focuses upon finding the truth about certain things from a philosophical perspective in order to truly lay down a foundation for ideas that have the slightest notion of doubt attached to them. He believed that there was “no greater task to perform in philosophy, than assiduously to seek out, once and for all, the best of all these arguments and to lay them out so precisely and plainly that henceforth all will take them to be true demonstrations” (Meditations, 36). The two key concepts that Descartes proves using the method of doubt are that the “human soul does not die with the body, and that God exists” as mentioned in his Letter of Dedication, since there are many that don’t believe the mentioned concepts because of the fact that they have not been proven or demonstrated. (Meditations, 35). In order to prove the above, he lays out six Meditations, each focusing on a different theme that leads us “to the knowledge of our mind and of God, so that of all things that can be known by the human mind, these latter are the most certain and the most evident” (Meditations, 40).

John Locke, Berkeley and Hume are all empiricist philosophers. They all have many different believes, but agree on the three anchor points; The only source of genuine knowledge is sense experience, reason is an unreliable and inadequate route to knowledge unless it is grounded in the solid bedrock of sense experience and there is no evidence of innate ideas within the mind that are known from experience. Each of these philosophers developed some of the most fascinating conceptions of the relationships between our thoughts and the world around us. I will argue that Locke, Berkeley and Hume are three empiricists that have different beliefs.

An approached by Rene Descartes Methodological doubt is skepticism in an approached that question the possibility of certain knowledge. Humans can only believe that they are awake, there is no way to distinguish if we are experiencing a dream or that we are awake. For example, if I see my friend playing basketball there is a lot of evidence that exist to indicate it is reality but there is also evidence to conclude that we are in a dream as well. We can use our senses which are; sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch to determine what is real. Descartes believes that knowledge comes from our senses, so I can use my senses to determine that my friend is indeed playing basketball. My senses can also be fooled and have me think that my friend is not in fact playing basketball and it’s just a projection of my subconscious mind.

In the first meditation, "Concerning those things that can be called into doubt", Descartes main goal is to distinguish what it is he can take to be true, and what supposed truths hold even the smallest degree of doubt. When he reviews all of his opinions he concludes "eventually [he] is forced to admit that there is nothing among the things [he]believed to be true which it is not permissable to doubt--and not out of frivolity or lack of forethought, but for valid and considered reasons. Thus [he] must be no less careful to withhold assent henceforth even from these beliefs then [he] would from those that are patently false, if [he wishes] to find anything certain."(Pg62) At the beginning of Descartes' meditations, he finds that there is really no concrete pillars of knowledge to base the foundations of his supposed

The basic strategy of Descartes method of doubt is to defeat skepticism on its own ground. Descartes begins by doubting the truth of everything. If there is any particular truth about the world and it can survive this extreme skeptical challenge, then it must be truly be impossible to doubt and therefore a perfectly certain foundation for

Empiricist philosophers such as John Locke believe that knowledge must come from experience. Others philosophers such as Descartes believe that knowledge is innate; this way of thinking is used by rationalist. In this paper I will discuss the difference between Descartes rationalism in his essays "The Meditations" and Locke's empiricism in his essays "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding". I will then lend my understanding as to what I believe as the ultimate source of knowledge.

     Locke instead is an empiricist, and therefore he directly critiques Descartes epistemic system and tries to establish his own foundation of knowledge. Locke believes that our knowledge of the world comes from what our senses tell us. Locke’s theory state that we are all born with a blank slate, tabula rasa, before we

Descartes’ first meditation, his main objective is to present three skeptical arguments to bring doubt upon what he considers his basic beliefs. Descartes believes this to be an intricate part of his complete epistemological argument. Descartes skeptical arguments are not intended to be a denial of his basic beliefs. On the contrary, he uses these arguments to help prove one of his main theses, which is the existence of God. One of the main premises that Descartes uses in his proof for the existence of God comes from the evil demon argument, which he proposed, in the first meditation. It is this evil demon argument, which will be the topic of the following discussion.

     Through his philosophical search Descartes was able to find one indubitable certainty, that we are thinking beings. We always think, even when we have doubts that we are thinking we are still thinking because a doubt is a thought. Although Descartes found this one universal truth, he was still not able to believe in anything but the fact that he was a thinking being. Therefore he still doubted everything around him. He used this one certainty to try to find a system of knowledge about everything in the world. Descartes idea was to propose a hypothesis about something. For example he might say that a perfect being was in existence. He would go around this thought in a methodical way, doubting it, all the while trying to identify it as a certainty. Doubting everything was at first dangerous because in doubting everything he was also admitting that he doubted the existence of God, and thus opposing the church. However he made it a point to tell us at the beginning of his Discourse on Methods that what he was writing was only for himself and that he expected no one but himself to follow it (Descartes 14, 15). Descartes eventually managed to prove the existence of a higher being. He said that since he had the idea of a perfect being, then that perfect being must exist. His

John Locke (1632-1704) was the first of the classical British empiricists. (Empiricists believed that all knowledge derives from experience. These philosophers were hostile to rationalistic metaphysics, particularly to its unbridled use of speculation, its grandiose claims, and its epistemology grounded in innate ideas) If Locke could account of all human knowledge without making reference to innate ideas, then his theory would be simpler, hence better, than that of Descartes. He wrote, “Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: How comes it to be furnished? To his I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE.” (Donald Palmer, p.165)

To begin with the question of rationalism versus empiricism, it is important to understand, first, what it is that rationalists argue. This school of thought infers that all knowledge comes from within, an innate source that

Descartes’ method of arriving at the conclusion is by starting from scratch and considering whether there could be any ground of doubt for his beliefs. He was a rational philosopher who gave reason the utmost importance and led him to realise that many of his current beliefs were in fact based on uncertainty and thus false conclusions. Therefore, in order to avoid this problem and find secure knowledge of on what he can be certain of, he uses the method of doubting everything that he finds reason to doubt and consequently, being justified in rejecting the whole. He will: ‘withhold my assent from matters which are not entirely certain and indubitable than from those which appear to me manifestly to be false’ (Descartes 1641: 6)