Rene Descartes' Ontological proof regarding the existance of God.
                            By: Andy Montgomery
                        E-Mail: Exec-PC (414)-789-4210



     I can remember looking up into the night sky and wondering at the 
countless stars, pondering infinity and the existence of God.  I can remember 
because it was just last week.  Since man climbed down from the trees, he's 
done this.  I'm no different.  I do it all of the time.  I lost a lot of sleep 
as a child thinking about God, etc.  As a CHILD.  Well, I'm a grown-up now, 
but to say that I still don't lose sleep over it would be a lie.  Rene 
Descartes woke up all of that existential phenomenological dread in me again.  
Gee... thank's Rene'!
     Descartes gives it the old college try on this one, I must admit.  He got 
me all pumped up and thinking that finally someone was going to give me the 
proof to ease my soul.  Many in the class were truly hopeful, and a few of us 
often talked for hours after class of Descartes' ideas.  But you can normally 
punch a hole or two in any argument.  I may have done that.  Bummer!  Just 
when you think you've finally gotten to the truth. . .
     After thoughtfully proving that he exists, (Cogito Ergo Sum: "I think, 
therefore I exist")  Descartes set off to prove the existence of God.  He did.  
But there's a problem.  But I'll get to that later.  Descartes starts off by 
reasoning that he's not perfect.  This is true.  He's not omnipotent, eternal, 
immutable, and all of that other good Godlike stuff.  "Well," Descartes 
wonders, "if I know that I'm not perfect, then where did I get the idea of 
perfection from?"  Good question.  He reasons that he must have gotten the 
idea from something that's more perfect than himself.  But where do you find 
this perfection?
     He looks for perfection in nature, but it's not there.  He realizes that 
he's more perfect than anything else in nature, so he couldn't get the idea of 
perfection from something less perfect than himself.
     He then checks to see if he may have just made it up in his own mind.  
Nope.  It wouldn't be perfect if it came from a dream, from nothing.  It 
wouldn't be eternal, etc.  Then where?
     The last stop arrives after he gets down to the simplest answer, and 
holds it up to be measured by his truth yardstick.  It measured up alright:


       Thus the only hypothesis left was that this idea was put in 
     my mind by a nature that was really more perfect than I was, 
     which had all the perfections that I could imagine and which 
     was, in a word, God.  To this I added that since I knew some 
     perfections which I did not posses, I was not the only being in 
     existence, and that it followed out of necessity that there was 
     someone else more perfect upon whom I depended and from whom I 
     had acquired all that I  possessed.


     TA-DA!  God exists!  Cool...  God exists because he's perfect.  If he 
weren't perfect, he wouldn't be God.  Simple enough.  Also, Descartes points 
out that God has to exist outside of the corporeal universe.  God cannot be 
physical.  To be physical would be an imperfection, because all corporeal 
things can change, they can all change and disintegrate over time.  God must 
exist outside the bounds of time and space.
     Descartes argues that people never could get the answers that he did 
about God because they couldn't think about something without picturing it.  
But because God is perfect, thereby lacking any corporeal nature, God cannot 
be pictured.  Philosophy to that day had as its main maxim, "the first thing 
in understanding something is to observe it with your senses."  You can't 
observe God, just as you can't truly observe a geometric object.  God is 
outside of the observable.  As he puts it:


         What makes people feel that it is difficult to know of the 
       existence of God, or even the nature of their own souls, is 
       that they never consider things higher than corporeal objects.  
       They are so accustomed never to think of anything without 
       picturing it--a method of thinking suitable only for material 
       objects--that everything which is not picturable seems to them 
       unintelligible.


     Descartes sums up God by saying that because perfection--God--is so clear 
and distinct, God can't be false.  All that we have--all that we are--is 
derived from God, and even though we cannot see everything clearly and 
distinctly all of the time, that does not mean that nothing can be true, it 
only means that we are imperfect beings who cannot see the simplicity of all 
things by virtue of our imperfection.  That's not God's fault, Descartes says, 
that's our fault.
     Okay, God exists.  God has to because God is perfection.  Here's where 
the Cartesian argument falls down for me.  God is perfect and exists outside 
the bounds of time and space.  Why?  Because if God were corporeal, he would 
be subject to manipulation, observation, and change over time.  Once again;
God can't be subject to change over time.  You see where this is headed?  
     To use Descartes' own methodology, I'm looking for the clearest answer.  
If something is in a state of perfection, it can never change.  There can be 
no change in it at all.  Ever.  Why?  If it were perfect, it would have no 
need to change--it's perfect as is.  God, being perfect, couldn't affect 
anything because to do so would require action, and action by definition 
requires a change in state to act upon something else.  God couldn't, for 
example, create a cute bunny-rabbit because to do so would require a change of
state; to change would imply that the state it was in prior to the creation of 
the cute bunny-rabbit was other than perfect.  That can't be because God is 
perfect, and can never be in a state other than perfect or else God wouldn't 
be God.  Therefore, God--eo ipso--his perfection, exists in a state of stasis.
     What are the ramifications of this little philosophical mental cramp of 
mine?  God can never be of--nor ever affect--this material world.  God has no 
active part in this creation.  Could he even have created this reality?  All 
God is, it seems, is perfection: a state which man uses to measure and 
indicate his imperfection.  God, by virtue of perfection, is a static, 
never-changing entity.  We are dependant on God, as Descartes rightly states, 
because we are not perfect and in order for there to be imperfection (man)
there must somewhere exist perfection (God).
     I guess that I didn't punch a hole in Descartes' existence of God.  At 
best I may have tripped over the ramifications of God's perfection.  
Descartes' math still holds up; God still exists to me.  But if my math is up 
to snuff, God is an ineffectual entity that never changes due to God's 
perfect state.

     Or, I could be full of shit... I failed algebra six times in my life.