I’ve started reading Rene Descartes and I’m intrigued by his idea of “god”.
Descartes is famous for his " I think there for I am." He doubted everything in life to such a degree that he believed the only thing he knew for sure was that when he was thinking then he existed. However, the second thing he deduced is that he knew this world he existed in, real or demonic deception, was imperfect by virtue of the fact that he can doubt it exists. So he knows he exists while thinking and has a conception of imperfections therefore perfection exists and the idea was given to him.
This perfection is god.
God is perfect in all ways. They are beyond deception because a perfect being wouldn’t need to lie, their reason alone for you needing to believe something is enough.
And to me that’s an interesting conception of god. Its a lot more sterile than the normal Christian stance that god is Love which has a emotionally textured connotation. It positions god as having feelings with which we can relate as opposed to Descartes perfection that is simply beyond our reasoning but also (conveniently) not malicious.
As an atheist, god as love makes more sense. God is the feeling of communal love that comes with a religion. People who care for each other for no reason other than because they’re in the same community has always been beautiful to me. God as mislabeled inclusion and comradely behavior males perfect sense.
What is your god or gods like?
The poster who called me out for misconceptualizing the “I think, therefore, I am” quote might be right but their option may also be wrong. A good place to start as an atheist is probably the Alex O’Connnor video with a proper Descartes scholar Here. It’s a good listen and the Methods and Meditations writings are genuinely very interesting.
His Methods starts with the idea that anyone can train their “good sense” or reasoning but the biggest hurdle is recognizing that you can be more rational as most people simply assume they have peak reasoning abilities.
It’s really interesting and you can get really nice copies for cheap.
A not uncommon take I’ve seen. I once had a friend in college who was very mad at me because I was learning about the Council of Nicaea where the Christian Bible was formalized in about 300. He was convinced that the Bible is self defining and that humans weren’t involved in the initial canonization of the divine scripture. He refused to consider the implications of his bible being fallible.
So this idea that some higher being is the definer of goodness and god while simply forgetting that it was humans who did the initial defining fascinates me because it’s probably the easiest way to spiral a true believer.
I think it’s rude to do that to people, but sometimes it’s handy when someone is being a dickhead.