Episode #030 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

One of the most frequently recurring emails that comes my way is people asking me to help them respond to people that are trying to convert them. We’ve all been through this before. You know, there used to be a door-to-door vacuum salesman; well, in today’s world, there are door-to-door spokespeople of God. It is their duty when living on this planet to kind of spread the word. When they see somebody walking along the street that obviously hasn’t heard about how easy it is to get into heaven—you know, all you have to do is believe—they want to tell them about it. These people are not bad people. Most of them have great intentions; they’re some of the greatest people I’ve ever met. They genuinely care about people.

But I think the reason why so many people ask me for responses to their typical questions is because they put people in a really weird spot. It’s kind of their job to put people in a weird spot. When somebody comes to your door and asks you about what you think happens when you die, the situation gets awkward pretty fast. But why? Really, why are things so awkward when these people come to your door? You know, I think situations are awkward when there is some level of dishonesty present. There’s something that one person knows that the other person doesn’t know, and that feeling of awkwardness is one person trying to find a politically correct way to break the news to them or to just avoid having the conversation altogether.

For example, when some super nerdy guy comes up to you at work and he has some obnoxious catchphrase that he keeps saying, you feel awkward in that situation because now you have to think of a non-brazen way of breaking it to him that you don’t think his little catchphrase is funny and to leave you alone. Well, the same thing applies with the aggressive conversion experts that come to your door. This person comes into your house. You pour them a glass of lemonade like they’re on To Catch a Predator, and they just start. They just lead with the conversation, “So, how do you think all of this got here? How do you think the whole universe got here?” Well, that’s a little bit like walking into somebody’s house and saying, “So, why did you break up with that ex-girlfriend that you were with for ten years?” I mean, the answer is always the same: it’s complicated. Just like you have a decade of history in a long-term relationship and to try to sum it up in a single sentence is an impossible task, you have decades of contemplations about the nature of existence. And they’re basically asking you to do the same thing. This is a very difficult task.

Now, I absolutely love being tested, personally. I seek out these sorts of conversations with random people. I love it. Some of my friends tell me that when they hear a knock on the door and they look through the peep hole and they see a guy wearing, like, a bicycle helmet and a suit, that they just instantly drop down on the floor. They close all their blinds and pretend that they’re not home. Well, I always answer the door. And one thing I’ve learned about the way that they ask questions over the years is that there are two main avenues this conversation can go down, typically. And the onus is on them to breech one of them. They usually ask the question, “Do you believe in God?” outright. Or they’ll ask you how you think the universe was created in the first place—one of those two, some variation of that. And the point of this question is so that they know where their efforts need to be focused on.

So, if you answer yes to this question that you believe in God, then their task becomes to try to move you from one book of behavioral restrictions to another. So, if you say something like, “Well, I was raised a Muslim,” then their task becomes to try to convince you into accepting their rule book as opposed to your old one. If you say something like, “Yeah, I was raised a Catholic, but I stopped going to church because I felt like it started not to be aligned with what I believe. And I just haven’t found a new church. We moved…”—when you say that you believe in God, these are the sorts of conversations that they have with you.

But what if you say no? What if you say that you aren’t sure whether God exists? Well, this is the other avenue that these conversations typically go down. And if I were one of these people, this would definitely be the conversation that I was least excited to have. And the reason why is something that we’ve touched on in the past. And it’s something that’s very relevant to understanding Descartes and his argument for the existence of God. Let’s imagine that René Descartes was one of these door-to-door salvation salesmen as we’re talking about. Let’s imagine what René Descartes would say to you if you told him that you just aren’t sure whether God existed. You’re agnostic. Make no mistake, René Descartes would be the most annoying Jehovah’s Witness that ever knocked on your door. He would be brilliant. But he would also be arguing for the existence of something just a little bit different than your typical Jehovah’s witness.

As we talked about before, there’s a huge logical leap from believing that God exists and believing that the Christian or Muslim God exists. There are dozens of different takes on it. God is simply a master craftsman; he just built all of this, and that’s it. God is a collective mind stream. God is the universe itself. There’s tons of examples. And there’s a big difference between believing that some thing, some being brought this universe into existence and believing that that thing also exalts humans as a species above all the other ones and cares about whether you get that job that you just applied for. There are 50 shades of God, so to speak.

To convince somebody that God exists is not to convince them that Jesus died for their sins. So, when Descartes set out to prove the existence of God, his task was not to convert people into Christians. He was referencing some infinite first cause from which all things initially sprang. Descartes was a Christian, but the reason he was proving the concept of God was to have a basis for his rationalist, philosophical system, not to get more money thrown into the collection plate on Sunday.

You know, there are several instances in his work where he echoes a sentiment that Montaigne talks about a lot. He says that if you live in a society or a culture where something very important to the culture is widely accepted as true, that even if you could destroy it with argument, maybe it’s best for you to just go along with it if you want to be productive in other areas. I mean, if you walk around all day long looking for things that you don’t agree with and, whenever you see one of them, you assign yourself the burden of correcting that person or correcting that group of people, can you really ever get anything substantive done aside from that in your life? I mean, I could spend every second of every day supposedly correcting people around me; and what has changed at the end of the day? There needs to be a line drawn somewhere if we want to get anything real done.

And Descartes isn’t saying you should just blindly trumpet the status quo, but with Descartes living in a world where people are being prosecuted and brutally punished for going against the previous teachings of the church, as listeners of this show, we can be empathetic. We can put ourselves in Descartes’ shoes and understand why he might adopt certain appearances in the interest of keeping the powers that be happy. And this is not conjecture. I mean, we see it in his work very clearly. He wrote a treatise, and he actually never finished it. But for years of his life, he was researching and constructing a treatise arguing for the validity of Copernicus and several other scientific findings that directly challenge what the church had been teaching for so long. And then right when he was wrapping things up, right in the middle of righting it, the whole Galileo thing happens. And Descartes says, alright, well, onward and upward! Those were some productive years I just spent of my life. He never finished the work. It’s not too big of a loss. It really wasn’t that crucial in the grand scheme of things anyway.

So, when Descartes knocks on your door and you tell him that you’re not sure whether God exists or not, this is a big roadblock for him, at least in that personal engagement. Well, this is an equally big roadblock for him back in his time. But why does Descartes need for a God to exist? Why does he need this infinite being that gave rise to the universe as we know it? Well, to understand that, we need to reference what we talked about a couple episodes ago—cogito, ergo sum: I think, therefore I am; or I think, therefore I exist. Remember, Descartes started by subjecting everything in the world to the most rigorous doubt imaginable. He did this in order to find some irrefutable truth about it, some mathematical axiom for the world, if you will. The reason I say mathematical axiom is because he needed a foundation that he could use as a basis for making all future claims that he could absolutely rely on.

Now, he talks about how he doesn’t know for certain that anything around him truly exists because, after all, an evil demon could be constantly deceiving him, constantly tricking him into believing that these things actually exist. But there’s one thing, if that is true, that he can’t deceive him about, and that is that he is thinking. Because even if he’s having a deceptive thought, he’s still having a thought. So he can be sure that he is a thinking thing that exists. The mathematical axiom—the basis from which Descartes is trying to build a full philosophical system—is that he exists. So, from here, he asks, okay, well, if I know that I exist, then because something cannot come from nothing, something must have caused my existence. So, what was it?

Well, for me personally, it was my parents when they were about 20 years old and they had too much to drink one night. My parents caused my existence. And this begs the question, what caused their existence? Well, it was their parents. And when you look at every single thing that exists—every rock, every tree, every planet, every moose frolicking around in the woods—they eventually come back to the same point. What caused that point? Now, Descartes isn’t even necessarily talking about the beginning of this universe. If there is a creator of this universe, what caused that creator to come into existence? What caused the creator of that creator to come into existence, and so on? This infinite thing that he’s referencing, this infinite being, perhaps, is what Descartes called God.

Now, this is a mainstay of philosophy at the time of Descartes. We’ve talked about it before with Aquinas and a couple of Persian and Islamic philosophers. It’s what’s known as the cosmological argument. And Descartes needs this God as part of his picture for many reasons. One, Descartes wasn’t satisfied to stop with the evil demon. I mean, although we can never stop doubting what’s around us and just say that an evil demon is constantly deceiving us, Descartes obviously doesn’t want to stop the discussion there. I mean, let’s be real, we can be pretty certain that all of this stuff actually exists even if we can’t prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt. And by saying that this infinitely great God is responsible for our perceptions of the world—it takes out that possibility of the evil demon. Descartes says that as an infinite, perfect being, God would never deceive us. So, therefore, we can be certain that what we see about the world is the way that it actually is. Now, if you’re scoffing at that logic, please reserve your objections to this for later on. The point of me saying this is to explain why God is so important in Descartes’ worldview.

Now, another big reason God is important is because Descartes is a rationalist and a mathematician. He’s setting out on a pretty daunting task, I mean, to prove that the universe and everything in it is connected to each other: causal relationships, logical relationships—there are lines connecting everything and everyone. Now, the problem with that is that, if that is a possibility, then there must be an end point. It can’t go on into infinity. There has to be a bookend from which everything is derived from, or else all these connections might be invalid. These connections can’t go on into infinity. This is a problem that not just Descartes will run into, but we’ll see it in the other continental rationalists: Spinoza and Leibniz. The bookend that Descartes uses as a starting point is this infinite, perfect being known as God.

So, famously, Descartes uses two main arguments to prove the existence of God. One we’ve already heard about before; it’s called the ontological argument. Saint Anselm talked a lot about this. If we define God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived and we can conceive of an infinite, perfect being, then because something existing in reality is at least marginally greater than something that exists only in thought, that infinite, perfect being must exist in reality. Therefore, God exists. We’ve talked about that one. And it really isn’t worth talking about how Descartes uses it because he uses it later on in his Meditations, and it seems like more of a supplementary argument. It’s like it’s compensating for his first argument which gets a little sketchy. You know, he would be saying, this is the—if you didn’t buy my first argument, here’s the one that seems to be rock solid in the annuls of history.

But his first argument, the one we’re going to go into detail right now, is notoriously confusing. I think philosophy professors around the world are forced to teach this argument, and all of them struggle to find a way to convey it in some sort of memorable way. It’s kind of difficult. It’s also notoriously oversimplified, for the record. A long time ago, I took a Philosophy 101 class where I needed to write a paper on this argument. And in the book, it explained the argument. And I thought that I understood it. I wrote my paper. I got a good grade, and then six months later I actually read Descartes’ Meditations. And I went back to the book, and I realized that it was completely wrong. Now, this was in a textbook. So, you can imagine how many different interpretations of this argument there are. And as a podcaster, I’m going to do my best to give you a well-rounded, unbiased account of it.

So, Descartes would be sitting in your house, sipping your lemonade. And he would begin his proof of God’s existence by talking about an important distinction when it comes to existence. He would look around your house, probably, and find something. Let’s say a table. That table has two forms of reality, to Descartes: formal reality and objective reality. And he even breaks it down more than this, but let’s not go there. Each thing has a different level of formal reality. If God existed, he would have an infinite level of formal reality—that’s what Descartes says. That table sitting there that he’s pointing at, that has a finite level of formal reality. And a few other obscure things, like the qualities of things and ideas of things, has what Descartes’s calls modal formal reality—modal being an even lesser form of formal reality than finite. So, we have infinite, finite, and modal.

Now, the point of this is that everything has varying degrees of this thing called formal reality. But what about things that exist as thoughts? I mean, if I have an idea of something in my head, does that idea exist? Well, yeah, it does in some way. But the idea of a table in my head does not exist as much as that table actually existing in physical form. For example, I can imagine the idea of an absolutely perfect triangle, but that perfect triangle doesn’t exist anywhere in the physical world. I mean, why would it? That’d be kind of random, just a triangle floating around somewhere. Well, Descartes talks about things that exist as ideas or objects of thought. And he gives them something he calls objective reality, ideas.

Now, just like everything that exists has varying levels of formal reality, all ideas have varying levels of objective reality. And what determines their level of objective reality is the thing that they’re representing. If you have an idea of God, that idea has an infinite level of objective reality. If you have an idea of that table, it has a degree of finite objective reality. And if you’re thinking of qualities of things like blueness or sharpness or tree-y-ness—to reference something terrible I said a long time ago—then they have a modal objective reality.

Now, Descartes says that all humans have an innate idea of this thing we call God as being infinite. I mean, to create everything in the universe, this thing called God needed to be uncaused in itself: so, therefore, necessarily existing always—uncaused. This thing needed to be outside the boundaries of time: so, therefore, eternal and timeless. To give rise to everything physical, it itself cannot be a physical thing, or else physical things existed before that. So, therefore, it must be incorporeal, or spiritual.

So, Descartes says that we all have an innate understanding of God being an infinite being. And because of that, the idea of God in our head has an infinite objective reality. He says that every idea that we have, everything with objective reality, was created by something with a higher level of formal reality. For example, we have ideas of tables. We have ideas of rocks, chairs, mooses frolicking around. We are able to create those ideas because we have a higher level of formal reality than these things. Yes, as humans, we have a finite level of formal reality, but we have more formal reality than the rock. So, therefore, we can create ideas about that rock.

If this logic seems confusing, it’s because he’s deriving it from the laws of cause and effect that he studied endlessly in his life that there must be as much reality in the cause of something as in the effect it generates. So, if we as flawed humans are not infinite beings, where did we get this idea of an infinite being from? Why is it inside of us at birth? What caused that infinite idea to come into existence in the first place? Well, based on the laws of cause and effect, it needed to be something infinite. A finite being cannot bring into existence an infinite idea. The infinite being that brought that idea into existence is what we call God. Therefore, God exists.

Ah, so, at this point, I’d like to thank God that we’re done explaining that. I mean, really, just imagine Descartes sitting on your couch, and he just got done explaining that to you. How would you be looking at this guy? I mean, what do you even say? Do you just point to the door and say, “Leave this house right now?”

There’s this video that went viral a couple months ago where this couple has this dancing Halloween toy that’s malfunctioning. And they’re convinced that it’s possessed by a demon as it’s malfunctioning. And they’re just going crazy. They’re saying, like, “I rebuke thee in the name of Jesus Christ! Leave this house!” I mean, I was absolutely rolling on the floor laughing when I was watching that. And that’s how I would treat Descartes if he came into my house talking about his formal and objective reality stuff. But let’s talk about how you should respond to Descartes. Let’s talk about how people typically criticize the argument.

By far, the most common rebuttal to Descartes’ system is what seems like a logical inconsistency that’s become known as the Cartesian circle. What it points to is his circular reasoning when it comes to proving that a non-deceptive God exists in the first place. The thing is, he uses God as the being that ensures that there is not an evil demon constantly deceiving him, but he relies on his thoughts being non-deceptive to arrive at the conclusion that God exists. A lot of people say this is really contradictory. But it’s really not as much of a contradiction as it would initially seem. Descartes argues back that he doesn’t rely on God to feed him non-deceptive thoughts all the time. While we’re attending to what he calls clear and distinct perceptions, where it’s so clear and distinct that we can’t doubt the validity of it, we don’t need God in that case. The insurance that God provides to Descartes is to prevent us from doubting these things while we’re not looking at them anymore.

I mean, I guess, as a very crude example, let’s say that you’re a UPS delivery guy. And you deliver a box to the same front porch every day: same time, everything’s the same. At one point in the very beginning of that, you determined that there are two stairs leading up to the front door of the house. And then, each day after that, the box that you’re carrying obstructs your view of the stairs. You are no longer attending to the stairs in that case. The insurance that God provides is that those stairs have not changed since the last time you did your analysis. Now, imagine this example as it would apply to a series of logical connections throughout the universe to a mathematician like Descartes or any of the other rationalists.

One other place that Descartes is heavily criticized is his creation of the idea of objective versus formal reality. Many people wonder why there even needs to be a distinction and what basis he has for making this distinction in the first place. I mean, on one end, he relegates the existence of ideas, and he makes them lesser than things that have finite formal reality. But on the other end, he makes their existence greater than things with finite formal reality. On that same note, another common objection is that it’s a huge logical leap to arbitrarily say that beings with finite formal reality cannot possibly conceive of something with infinite objective reality. I mean, why is that necessarily an impossibility?

But the largest disagreement is probably when he says that we have an innate idea that God is an infinite being. Why is that necessarily the case? Many cultures throughout history have vehemently believed in a creator that in itself was not infinite. If this idea of an infinite entity is truly innate in humans—which is what Descartes needs to prove to validate his entire argument—why do these people not have it? Well, the common explanation is that they don’t. The only people that do are people that were born into a society or culture that regularly plants the seeds in the heads of their young that an infinite creator exists. That constant reinforcement shades the direction of their thoughts. So, although everybody around Descartes may have had this conception from a very young age, it might not be inherent.

And this may be the chickens coming home to roost, really. I mean, this may be a manifestation of what we talked about earlier, where when the bulk of society believes something, that we should pick our battles, and we should sometimes just go along with it. Maybe Descartes should have fought that battle a little bit harder. One thing is for certain—which, as we continue our journey through philosophy, we will all realize—is that if he had fought this battle, if he had questioned whether the idea of an infinite God truly was innate, it would have been a lonely, depressing road ahead.

Talk to you guys next time.