Reference no: EM133252809

Descartes gives an argument for the existence of God in the Third Meditation. The excerpt below is part of that overall argument. Explain the excerpt as straightforwardly as you can. What is Descartes claiming? What do you make of this argument? Has Descartes done it, or is there a logical mistake he's made? Remember, if you disagree with his argument, it's no good just saying "I don't like it" or

"I don't understand it." You have to show where exactly he's gone wrong.

Now it is obvious by the natural light that the total cause of something must contain at least as much reality as does the effect. For where could the effect get its reality from if not from the cause? And how could the cause give reality to the effect unless it first had that reality itself? Two things follow from this: that something can't arise from nothing, and that what is more perfect - that is, contains in itself more reality - can't arise from what is less perfect.

And this is plainly true not only for 'actual' or

'intrinsic reality (as philosophers call it) but also for the representative reality of ideas - that is, the reality that a idea represents. A stone, for example, can begin to exist only if it is produced by something that contains - either straightforwardly or in some higher form - everything that is to be found in the stone; similarly, heat can't be produced in a previously cold object except by something of at least the same order of perfection as heat, and so on. (I don't say simply 'except by something that is hot', because that is not necessary. The thing could be caused to be hot by something that doesn't itself straightforwardly contain heat - i.e. that isn't itself hot - but contains heat in a higher form, that is, something of a higher order of perfection than heat. Thus, for example, although God is obviously not himself hot, he can cause something to be hot because he contains heat not straightforwardly but in a higher form.) But it is also true that the idea ofheat or of a stone can be caused in me only by something that contains at least as much reality as I conceive to be in the heat or in the stone. For although this cause does not transfer any of its actual or intrinsic reality to my idea, it still can't be less real. An idea need have no intrinsic reality except what it derives from my thought, of which it is a mode. But any idea that has representative reality must surely come from a cause that contains at least as much intrinsicreality as there is representative reality in the idea. For if we suppose that an idea contains something that was not in its cause, it must have got this from nothing; yet the kind of reality that is involved in something's being represented in the mind by an idea, though it may not be very perfect, certainly isn't nothing, and so it can't come from nothing.