Introduction

Descartes publishes his text called the meditations. The meditations is his attempt at logically deducing what we, as humans, can know for certain. How does he do this? In his first meditation, he takes a skeptical approach and says that knowledge derived from the senses is untrustworthy because the senses can be deceived. For example, our judgment of distances can be inaccurate as objects can seem larger or smaller than they are. The things we know about science, astronomy and medicine can also be doubted. Surely, he asks, I cannot doubt that I am in my room sitting by the fire clothed in a winter dressing gown. However, I have had dreams of sitting by the fire that seemed so real! Even if I can tell that I am dreaming or not, it’s still possible that a malevolent demon is deceiving my senses and the world before me is merely an illusion. Is there anything left that I can call certain? Even if I am being deceived, the notion that I can doubt anything means that I am, at the very least, thinking and to think must mean I exist. The one thing I know for certain is I EXIST.

Points to consider

• Even if Descartes premises are shaky i.e. doubting I can be dreaming, doesn't the conclusion still ring true?

• The idea of God is us thinking of a 4d object, we can conceive of the idea but it is beyond our scope because of the nature of God as a perfect and infinite being

• This method of doubt tries to reveal if there is anything we know that cannot be doubted, that we can know of with complete certainty.

• Descartes asks us to indulge in this skeptical thought to reveal what we can know for certain.

• Descartes wasn't a skeptic, uses skeptical doubt as a tool of discovery. To temporarily cast aside assured beliefs if they can be doubted

• Moving forward, to know about the existence of God, other minds and bodies we have to prove it from our own consciousness. It has to be an a priori truth

We have 2 options: You must choose to believe in god or not. But before you make your decision, you must consider what is at stake: if you choose God, the infinite heavenly pleasures are awarded to you in the afterlife. If you don’t, eternal damnation. If you choose to believe in God but it turns out not to be true, you’ve merely lost some earthly pleasures. If it is true that God exists and you believe, you receive the ultimate reward. Pascal is saying that considering the balance of risk/reward, it is better to follow religion and believe in God.

• God is incomprehensible, he has not physical parts and is infinite
• Reason can’t help our decision
• This isn’t a wager for the athiest
• “If you win, you win everything, if you lose, you lose nothing”
• If you’re wrong, you’ve lost some earthly pleasures but it’s worth gambling considering the pay off…low risk, high reward
• If you choose not to believe and God is real, you are eternally damned.
• Asserts Christian doctrine of reward and punishment

Key points:

• Isn’t this true of any other religion?
• Can it convince the atheist?
• Isn’t it better to move towards the more hopeful option?

In a climate where Reason was the prevailing idea and was often underpinned by religious and spiritual doctrine, Rousseau sought to break away from this idea and placed the happiness of the human first.

His conception of the self is all to do with feeling and empathy; the self is distinctly moral and man is naturally good. None of his natural inclinations are bad - they are not harmful, illusory or contradictory. His desires are all proportioned to his needs and his faculties to his desires. And on a still deeper level, he has within himself a fundamental source of contentment and joy in merely existing.

Although man is free and morally good, he becomes corrupted by society. By living as part of a society, he is no longer a free man, he is a citizen, a participant that must adhere to the rules. Man is governed by laws and rules that takes away what it is to be human… “Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains”.

Soren Kierkergaard (1813–1855) was a Lutheran Christian that attempted to show the power of faith over the quest for knowledge and certainty. Through the ages, philosophers have attempted to come to a conclusion if knowledge is attainable and in doing so, moving past the stages of doubt and faith as an insufficient conclusion. However, Kierkegaard believes that we are making a mistake by looking for knowledge because knowledge is beyond the scope of human faculty; humans don’t have the tools to know everything. In terms of God, we cannot decide objectively if they exist but we can decide this matter on subjective grounds.

This is where faith comes in. Faith is a deeply personal subjective experience that involves trust, risk and a leap beyond rational certainty. It’s a passionate commitment to a belief in the absence of conclusive evidence. It’s an independent status, it lies beyond the ethical and cannot be explained in universal or rational terms. It’s not a primitive faculty, it constitutes the highest passion.

This commitment to faith enables us to have a more profound encounter with the truth and the truth is God