René Descartes set out to prove the existence of God through
science (or more specifically, philosophy) in his seminal work, Meditations on First Philosophy. Though
not his goal, Meditations achieves
something far more important: a reliance on doubt and the scientific method
instead of faith and religion. Descartes strips reality of everything that can
be doubted, leaving only what we can know without a doubt. Since both the mind
and the body deceive, this method of “universal doubt” leaves nothing, save for
thought. You know you exist because you are Res
Cogitans – a thinking thing – and this makes you a finite, real being. From
this starting point, one can separate what is true from what is false,
distinguish essential properties from accidental properties, and trust one’s
own intellect. Descartes then uses position to argue his “Cosmological Proof,”
that God, an infinite being, must exist because a finite being, such as ourselves,
could not come up with the concept of the infinite. Meditations puts forth a logical, expertly-crafted argument for the
existence of God, as well as showing the importance of doubt and the scientific
process.
Whether one accepts Descartes’ conclusions or not is
irrelevant as that is a matter of faith, but universal doubt and Descartes’ scientific
mindset are Meditations’ greatest
contributions to philosophy. With them, Descartes helped spark the Scientific
Revolution. The scientific community suddenly began to question the world
around them and doubt what had been assumed known. Religion and God, including
the Church’s views, were questioned or opposed on a far larger scale than ever
before, and science offered a new way to view and explain reality. Beyond this,
human knowledge was pushed forward faster than it had been for centuries
before. The sun no longer revolved around the Earth, lightning wasn’t the wrath
of a spiteful God, and an apple can only fall towards the ground from a tree.
Economics became a science instead of a magic and the first steam engine laid
the way for the Industrial Revolution that followed, and Robert Boyle’s atomic
theory better explained the nature of matter. René Descartes’ establishment of
the scientific method was essential to the Scientific Revolution and without it
we could not be anywhere near where we are today. Despite its original
theological purpose, the scientific method’s emphasis on doubt hurt faith for
the same reason it elevated science.
Did Descartes undoubtedly affirm faith and
the infinite? Is his impact on the Scientific Revolution less important? Or did
I completely miss the point?
I'd completely agree with your assessment of Descartes' impact on the Scientific Revolution, and in fact I had never even realized it until reading this post. However, in your question regarding faith and the infinite, I think Descartes, while not necessarily affirming faith in an all-loving, all-powerful being, certainly affirmed that the infinite must exist, at least in my opinion. I don't, though, think that this idea is opposed to scientific thought. On the contrary, it was, as you said, scientific thought that led Descartes to propose his idea of the infinite.
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