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The Errors of Descartes

Descartes was wrong. Now this may sound a little strong and unfounded coming from a college level student, but there is plenty of support to back up this statement. Though Descartes had a good method and his attempt to follow through with it was admirable, he made several mistakes. His idea of the evil genius was flawed to begin with and the same can be said of his innate ideas. His innate ideas being wrong led to his assumption of God’s existence which was the only way to escape solipsism.

Let us begin with the idea of the evil genius. This is a reason for Descartes to doubt everything beyond for the sake of doubt itself. It is a powerful, malicious, and to some omnipotent entity that has devoted the whole of its existence to deceiving Descartes. Now one problem with the evil genius is that Descartes never specified whether it was omnipotent or not. However we can use logical reasoning to determine that it is not. If this genius existed, was omnipotent, and fully intended to deceive the thinker as to everything, then the simplest course of action would be to simply prevent the thinker from ever doubting. Or given that it wanted to the thinker to still doubt, it would prevent the thinker from ever knowing that the evil genius itself existed. One could theorize that perhaps the evil genius knowing this, allows the thinker to assume its existence knowing that if the thinker knows the evil genius exists it would follow the same logic as Descartes to prove that it did not exist, but Occam’s Razor refutes that argument as needlessly complex. Now that we have proven if the evil genius does exist, it is not omnipotent and can move on. Despite not being omnipotent the evil genius has the power to deceive all of our senses at the very least. Because of this Descartes doubted everything, left with only his ultimatum, “I think, therefore I am.” His starting point here is sound and practically impossible to refute.

Descartes moved from this point with his innate ideas.  He states “…I know by experience that these ideas do not depend on my will, and hence that they do not depend simply on me. Frequently I notice them even when I do not want to: now, for example, I feel the heat whether I want to or not, and this is why I think that this sensation or idea of heat comes to me from something other than myself, namely the heat of the fire by which I am sitting” (AT VII 38; CSM II 26). plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-i..
However he has already stated that the evil genius makes all this sense data invalid, indicating that the heat he feel’s may simply be an illusion. His argument is that the idea or feeling is there, even when one does not will them to be there and they don’t depend on the thinker. However this argument has no meaning if we assume that the evil genius exists and all of our sense data means nothing. This innate ideas can not possibly exist at the same time we assume the evil genius exists. And if innate ideas can not exist, than either can Descartes’s idea of God. Because if God exists as an innate idea, then like his other innate ideas, it can be fooled into being created by the evil genius. It would make sense as well, for the evil genius to create the illusion that he does not exist as best he can within the limits of his power and what better way than this? A deceiver is at his most powerful when the deceived does not think itself capable of being deceived.

Descartes gives at least two arguments for God's existence. The first one, found in I.14, is a version of the ontological argument for God's existence. Descartes' ontological argument goes as follows: (1) Our idea of God is of a perfect being, (2) it is more perfect to exist than not to exist, (3) therefore, God must exist. sparknotes.com/philosophy/principles/s..
Of course the ontological argument is incapable of actually proving anything and is certainly not in it of itself sufficent for proving the exsistence of anything. existence-of-god.com/ontological-argum..
 The next arguement however, is far more complex and deals with the varying levels of reality. For our term, “objective reality”, we can say that when considered in their relation to the objects they represent, ideas can be said to have objective reality. Moving onwards we reach the heart of this arguement. “Descartes begins the argument by making the controversial claim that we all have an idea of God as an infinite being. (He believes that we cannot fail to have this idea because he thinks it is innate.) Because our idea of God is of an infinite being, it must have infinite objective reality. Next, Descartes appeals to an innate logical principle: something cannot come from nothing. Reasoning from this principle he arrives at two other causal principles: (1) There must be as much reality in a cause as in an effect, and so, (2) there must be as much formal reality in a cause of an idea as there is objective reality in an idea. Since we have an idea with infinite objective reality (namely, the idea of God), Descartes is able to conclude that there is a being with infinite formal reality who caused this idea. In other words, God exists.” sparknotes.com/philosophy/principles/s..  There are a couple of problems with this explaination. Though the principles seem sound there is a jump from logic to God in this argument. Descartes is correct in saying something can not come from nothing he can not say that because you can think of something that is infinite that its formal reality is infinite. This logic means that an idea with infinite objective reality came from a thing of finite objective reality(the mind) which is impossible, making it so that the idea of God must have from from a being with infinite formal reality. However this is merely an extension of the ontological argument with differing terms. Once again the main principle is that thinking of a thing means that it must exist. 

Though it seems we can not progress any further down Descartes's chain of reasoning at this point, we can discuss we he has progressed as he has and discuss his following steps. To briefly recap, at this point we are at the beginning of Descartes’s chain of logic. Only unlike Descartes we do not have the false innate idea of God. Of course this idea of God was the only way that Descartes could move past the problem of the evil genius, so the question arises, what now? Without the innate idea of God we are stuck in our state of solipsism. Well without our assumption of God we can go no further with this chain of reasoning. There is no way to prove anything beyond our own ability to think at this point. Despite this we follow Descartes to his argument following the existence of God versus the evil genius.
“But since God is not a deceiver, it is quite clear that he does not transmit the idea to me either directly from himself, or indirectly, via some creature which contains the objective reality of the ideas not formally but only eminently. For God has given me no faculty at all for recognizing any such source for these ideas; on the contrary, he has given me a great propensity to believe that they are produced by corporeal things. So I do not see how God could be understood to be anything but a deceiver if the idea were transmitted from a source other than corporal things. It follows that corporeal things exist.” (AT VII 79–80; CSM II 55) plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-i..
This is the chain of logic that Descartes uses to prove that corporeal things exist and once once again, it is reasonable given the assumption of God’s existence.
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