The idea of ​​God

While the existence of God and the material world cannot defend itself against the arguments of methodical skepticism, it can be justified with the help of the premise of the existence of the self. And so, according to Descartes, the existence of God results from the fact of the existence of the self. As the perfect self cannot exist by itself, but you must have some perfect cause, which is nothing but God. In addition, the existence of God results from the very idea that we have about God, or a perfect being. The idea of God is a perfect idea, so the self as less perfect cannot be the cause of this idea. The effect cannot be better than the cause. Since we have the idea of God then there must be a God who instilled in us the mind. The main property of God was his infinity for Descartes. He added that God is above all a will, for the will, the only of the spiritual authorities, is unlimited. One of the difficulties of the above argument is that it comes from the content of the mind of a specific subject. However, not everyone will find or construct in their thoughts the idea of an absolutely perfect being – not everyone agrees with the above, and the contents of our concepts (even the exceptional ones) do not have to correspond to reality.

Hume went on. Radical criticism of religion stemmed from him from his epistemology. Hume drew the final conclusions from Descartes’ postulate that valid cognition is only one which is clear and explicit. And because only sensual cognition seems to meet these two criteria, he considered them the only reliable and basic source of cognition. For this reason, he considered concepts such as substance and causal influence to be unscientific. According to Hume, it is impossible to prove the existence of a substance either a priori or a posteriori and therefore he calls it an ‘incomprehensible chimera’. Similarly, he approached the concept of efficient cause. According to his empiricist view, the causative cause is a phenomenon that causes the living idea of another phenomenon in the mind. The necessity of a causal relationship arises in connection with the psychological habit of combining two perceptions of causation. This habit is a compulsion, which at the appearance of one impression immediately draws our attention to the idea of another phenomenon. The need is something that exists in the mind, not in things. In this concept, there is no room for metaphysical claims about the necessary relationships taking place in reality, or the use of such relations for the argumentation about the existence of God. According to Hume, the world can be understood as one large organism, animated by the soul. It can also be described as a self-organizing system triggered by the forces of matter alone, for example due to the force of gravity. Therefore, Hume wonders about the following question: if God is perfectly gracious, and at the same time almighty or almighty, why is there any evil in the world? Why does he allow it? One of the answers would be to show the reason why God allows evil or for which he created a world containing evil.

Descartes’ argument about the existence of God greatly contributed to the recognition of the reality of the outside world as Primary Qualities. Through his ontological argument, Descartes was able to know the connection between our ideas of God and God Himself. Thanks to this reasoning he was able to come to the principle of the causal reality of the external world – as a result must be more realistic in a cause as in an effect. In the light of Hume’s criticism, Descartes’s argument was successful. This is because most Hume’s criticism is based on his r own revolutionary theories and empirical theories that lack basic foundations and evidence.