DesCartes intentionally made bad arguments for God?

[thinkandmull]

This is certainly true. But here’s the problem on the other side: if you really think infinite happiness does not exist you are still stuck with an arbitrary belief.

If there is a God and he offers infinite happiness, which belief is it better to be stuck with?

Pascal’s Wager works for some people. Some people feel that God wouldn’t want them to belief in Him because of a dice game scenario

 

[Rohzek]

Can you let us know where Descartes spoke on predestination?

He didn’t use the usual term for it (praedestinatio). Instead he used the term preordination (praeordinatio). He only briefly discusses it, but you can find it in his work Principia philosophiae. Specifically, it is located in Part 1, subjects/paragraphs 39-41.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

I’m surprised by the hostility towards Descartes here. His work on language (to some extent, but really just some of his observations) and philosophy of mind remains fundamental to this day. As for the whole “proof of God” arguments, both Pascal and Descartes were wrong to make them. There is no proof of God since it is a matter of faith. Blaming Descartes for the rise of atheism just sounds like searching for a scapegoat.

It may be too much to lay the whole rise of atheism at Descartes feet, but then it is no coincidence, perhaps, that the whole rise of modern atheism gets a huge boost in Descartes’ 17th century. By the time of Hume it has taken off. And by the time of Voltaire and Diderot it is all the rage in Europe. I’m inclined to agree with Maritain that Descartes is the philosophical fountainhead of modern atheism, not that he meant to be.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Pascal’s Wager works for some people. Some people feel that God wouldn’t want them to belief in Him because of a dice game scenario

This is true. But the argument is designed for atheists, not for believers. Atheists have everything to gain or everything to lose by the Gambit.

Either way they have to bet. They either have to bet there is a God, or there isn’t.

You only get to roll the dice once (when you die) to find out.

 

[Rohzek]

This is certainly true. But here’s the problem on the other side: if you really think infinite happiness does not exist you are still stuck with an arbitrary belief.

This is not a problem. If any notion is problematic it is positivism and any form of verificationism.

If there is a God and he offers infinite happiness, which belief is it better to be stuck with?

Obviously the belief in God. But again, the format already presumes various other beliefs without justifying them, such as infinite happiness, monotheism, Christianity itself, etc.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

By the way, I’m currently reading a book by philosopher James Peters titled The Logic of the Heart: Augustine, Pascal and the Rationality of Faith.

Peters does a running comparative commentary throughout on Augustine, Pascal, and Hume.

Great read!

P.S. I am not James Peters!

 

[utunumsint]

I found his email on NCR and sent him a quick email about this. Hopefully he will respond.

God bless,
Ut

Dr. Wiker responded. He pointed me to Politicizing the Bible, a book he wrote with Scott Hahn.

Although he did not get into details, I suspect that what I will find there is a cumulative case where the negative impacts of Descartes’ philosophy were so pronounced that there is no other explanation other than it being intentionally done by him.

I have ordered the book since I am interested in deepening my knowledge of the 1300 to 1700 time frame to get a better understanding on what happened before, during, and after the enlightenment. I’m also interested in historical criticism, so this book seems to kill many birds with one stone.

God bless,
Ut

 

[utunumsint]

Interesting sneak preview in this 1 hour talk by Scott Hahn.

youtube.com/watch?v=c2jr28tzUY8 It certainly helps me get a handle on where Wiker was going with his comment.

Apologies for any mistakes in my transcription.

21:30

We have become convinced that the deeper we went in our research, that the attempts to politicize the biblical research of texts for quite secular purposes by such figures as Marcilius of Padua, Machiavelli, Hobbs, Spinoza, Locke, and Toland, is a largely untouched dimension of the accepted approach to the development of the historical critical approach to scripture. And yet this insight sheds much needed light on the formation of the historical critical method.

Hobbs and Spinoza are generally regarded fathers of historical criticism.
Machievelli, Spinoza, Hobbs, and Lock are regarded as fathers of political philosophy.
The overlap is not accidental.
Historical criticism is the form of biblical scholarship that conforms with the enlightenment political ideal.

If history is to be scientific, it must exclude the divine and the supernatural, miracles, theophanies. It effectively secularizes scripture, making it simply a manifestation…
relativises, then privatizes belief.
It removes Christianity as a political force. To keep religion from determining or significantly influencing public life.
This aligns with the modern political aims.
But did this happen by accident or by design?

…the motivation is understandable with many years of religious wars in the previous centuries.

We ask the readers to be patient because the argument must be substantiated by a close analysis of seminal texts in modern political thought, philosophy, and theology.

Hahn does not talk much about Descartes, but there is a whole chapter in the book.

God bless,
Ut

 

[thinkandmull]

The Catholic Church has allowed more and more historical criticism as time has gone on. Nowadays most Catholics do not believe the first 11 chapters of Genesis are historical, and people on EWTN say that Job is not historical.

Descartes may not have been interested in religion all that much. He moved over 20 times in his stay in Holland, and each stay was close to a university and a Catholic Church, so he had some religiosity perhaps. Although he did have a child outside of marriage, I don’t think it can be proven that he intended to hurt Catholic thought. I explained his three proofs for God in a previous post on this thread. Aquinas hurt the Catholic arguments for God by submitting to his “teacher” Aristotle and saying there could be an infinity of past motions. This took away all physic arguments for God. Descartes wrote his Meditations because he had earlier met with a Catholic cardinal in Paris who encouraged him to defend the Catholic faith against its critics.

 

[utunumsint]

The Catholic Church has allowed more and more historical criticism as time has gone on. Nowadays most Catholics do not believe the first 11 chapters of Genesis are historical, and people on EWTN say that Job is not historical.

Agreed. Neither Hahn or Wiker are disputing the usefulness of HCM. They are just doing what Pope Benedict mentioned ought to be done. A criticism of HCM itself.

Descartes may not have been interested in religion all that much. He moved over 20 times in his stay in Holland, and each stay was close to a university and a Catholic Church, so he had some religiosity perhaps. Although he did have a child outside of marriage, I don’t think it can be proven that he intended to hurt Catholic thought. I explained his three proofs for God in a previous post on this thread.

This may be. It will be interesting to read through their arguments in the book.

Aquinas hurt the Catholic arguments for God by submitting to his “teacher” Aristotle and saying there could be an infinity of past motions. This took away all physic arguments for God.

I have to admit, I never understood your criticisms of Aquinas on this front. But there have been many thread on this so no need to go back into this.

Descartes wrote his Meditations because he had earlier met with a Catholic cardinal in Paris who encouraged him to defend the Catholic faith against its critics.

Interesting. Perhaps I should read a more positive book on Descartes before getting into Wiker and Hahn’s book, so I can get a more balanced impression.

God bless,
Ut

 

[Rhubarb]

Descartes “theory of space and physics” wouldn’t be from the Meditations, so you must have read it in another writing of his

I didn’t mean to imply it was. I think Principles of Philosophy was his outline of space, motion, and etc.

 

[thinkandmull]

Agreed. Neither Hahn or Wiker are disputing the usefulness of HCM. They are just doing what Pope Benedict mentioned ought to be done. A criticism of HCM itself.

This may be. It will be interesting to read through their arguments in the book.

I have to admit, I never understood your criticisms of Aquinas on this front. But there have been many thread on this so no need to go back into this.

Interesting. Perhaps I should read a more positive book on Descartes before getting into Wiker and Hahn’s book, so I can get a more balanced impression.

God bless,
Ut

I saw a book at the library called Descartes Bones. Its on religion and Descartes. I don’t know if its any good, but I’ll read it sometime I guess

 

[utunumsint]

I saw a book at the library called Descartes Bones. Its on religion and Descartes. I don’t know if its any good, but I’ll read it sometime I guess

Interesting. I found a youtube video from the author:

youtube.com/watch?v=vSlSj5N9UO0

Starting at 19 minutes:

A few leading Descartes philosophers today…submitted to questions like, do you think Descartes was a devout Catholic, and Richard Watson, who is the premier American Descartes philosopher, thinks that Descartes was just paying lip service because you couldn’t get anywhere if you did not. Watson is himself an atheist.
Jean Robert Armogathe, a French Catholic priest, thinks that Descartes was a devout Catholic.

I suppose if Watson, an atheist, thinks that Descartes was an atheist, then maybe Wiker and Hahn are not completely out to lunch…

Here is what Watson says:

britannica.com/biography/Rene-Descartes

Even during Descartes’s lifetime there were questions about whether he was a Catholic apologist, primarily concerned with supporting Christian doctrine, or an atheist, concerned only with protecting himself with pious sentiments while establishing a deterministic, mechanistic, and materialistic physics.

These questions remain difficult to answer, not least because all the papers, letters, and manuscripts available to Clerselier and Baillet are now lost. In 1667 the Roman Catholic church made its own decision by putting Descartes’s works on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Latin: “Index of Prohibited Books”) on the very day his bones were ceremoniously placed in Sainte-Geneviève-du-Mont in Paris. During his lifetime, Protestant ministers in the Netherlands called Descartes a Jesuit and a papist—which is to say an atheist. He retorted that they were intolerant, ignorant bigots. Up to about 1930, a majority of scholars, many of whom were religious, believed that Descartes’s major concerns were metaphysical and religious. By the late 20th century, however, numerous commentators had come to believe that Descartes was a Catholic in the same way he was a Frenchman and a royalist—that is, by birth and by convention.

Descartes himself said that good sense is destroyed when one thinks too much of God. He once told a German protégée, Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–78), who was known as a painter and a poet, that she was wasting her intellect studying Hebrew and theology. He also was perfectly aware of—though he tried to conceal—the atheistic potential of his materialist physics and physiology. Descartes seemed indifferent to the emotional depths of religion. Whereas Pascal trembled when he looked into the infinite universe and perceived the puniness and misery of man, Descartes exulted in the power of human reason to understand the cosmos and to promote happiness, and he rejected the view that human beings are essentially miserable and sinful. He held that it is impertinent to pray to God to change things. Instead, when we cannot change the world, we must change ourselves.

God bless,
Ut

 

[utunumsint]

I can’t imagine any philosopher* intentionally* creating and publishing an argument to fail.
No way.
If he makes a bad argument, then it’s just a bad argument. But that surely doesn’t make someone a bad Catholic or a coward or non-believer or liar, does it?
I haven’t listened to the podcast yet, but I assume he has other reasons to call Descartes a bad Catholic?

Not really. Its in the last 10 minutes of the podcast so he did not say much except for mentioning what he thought of Descartes. It was enough to make Patrick balk. So far I’ve done the following:

• I emailed Wiker, who pointed me to his book Politicizing of the Bible and his chapter on Descartes for more info. He said I should look up the footnotes for more details.
• I found a 1 hour youtube video from Scott Hahn (his co-author) that outlines their main argument in Politicizing the Bible, which includes content on Descartes, but nothing specific about his atheism.
• I found out that a prominent American Descartes researches believes he was an atheist (Richard Watson happens to be an atheist himself).

It is certainly an interesting topic. It sort of sounds like some Davinci Code style enlightenment conspiracy theory though. LOL.

God bless,
Ut

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Aquinas hurt the Catholic arguments for God by submitting to his “teacher” Aristotle and saying there could be an infinity of past motions. This took away all physic arguments for God.

Can you cite the passage where Aquinas says precisely this? My recollection is that Aquinas said there was no way to prove there was not an infinity of past motions, which is not the same as saying there is an infinity of past motions. So I don’t think Aquinas hurt the Catholic arguments for God.

What we know from 20th century astronomy and the Big Bang is that there appears to have been a first moment in time, the universe now reckoned at 14 billions of years old. If anything, modern science has bolstered the Thomistic arguments at least with respect to the Big Bang.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Probably the most vigorous Thomist opponent of Descartes in the 20th Century was Jacques Maritain who took Descartes to task for the critical dividing of man’s soul from his body.

This essay by Matthew Mancini is a brilliant assessment not only of Descartes’ error, but also of how Maritain saw that error impacting the evolution of modern philosophy and modern political democracy, the spirit of man being sundered from his body and materialism’s triumph over the integrity of men.

books.google.co.in/books?id=DLzS7MJE-eQC&pg=PA133&lpg=PA133&dq=jacques+maritain+on+descartes&source=bl&ots=EMOq6Rb8rj&sig=ms6h8odiOGC9_Gfj_SbDp3hH27Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CEUQ6AEwCGoVChMIo–txYPwxwIVz3uSCh2ahABj#v=onepage&q=jacques%20maritain%20on%20descartes&f=false

 

[thinkandmull]

Can you cite the passage where Aquinas says precisely this? My recollection is that Aquinas said there was no way to prove there was not an infinity of past motions, which is not the same as saying there is an infinity of past motions. So I don’t think Aquinas hurt the Catholic arguments for God.

What we know from 20th century astronomy and the Big Bang is that there appears to have been a first moment in time, the universe now reckoned at 14 billions of years old. If anything, modern science has bolstered the Thomistic arguments at least with respect to the Big Bang.

I wrote “saying there **could **be an infinity of past motions.” Surely Aquinas believed that time and motion had a beginning. However, if one assumes that there is an eternal First Mover and yet believes on a physical level there is an eternity of motions like a dominoes effect, the First Mover becomes irrelevant from a physical-physics perspective

 

[thinkandmull]

Probably the most vigorous Thomist opponent of Descartes in the 20th Century was Jacques Maritain who took Descartes to task for the critical dividing of man’s soul from his body.

This essay by Matthew Mancini is a brilliant assessment not only of Descartes’ error, but also of how Maritain saw that error impacting the evolution of modern philosophy and modern political democracy, the spirit of man being sundered from his body and materialism’s triumph over the integrity of men.

books.google.co.in/books?id=DLzS7MJE-eQC&pg=PA133&lpg=PA133&dq=jacques+maritain+on+descartes&source=bl&ots=EMOq6Rb8rj&sig=ms6h8odiOGC9_Gfj_SbDp3hH27Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CEUQ6AEwCGoVChMIo–txYPwxwIVz3uSCh2ahABj#v=onepage&q=jacques%20maritain%20on%20descartes&f=false

The link says “You have either reached a page that is unavailable for view or reach your limit for this book”. Anyways, I have never seen any proof that Descartes departed from Aquinas’s-Aristotle’s view of the soul and body. Its commonplace to think Descartes was Platonic, but I haven’t seen an actual quote, and I’ve read a bit from him. Come to think about it, I haven’t even seen a direct “smoking gun” quote from Plato or his students that is irreconcilable with Aristotle and the Catholic teaching that the soul is the form of the body.

 

[thinkandmull]

The charge of conspiracy against Rene Descartes reminds me of traditionalist who say Paul VI was a homosexual atheist or even a Satanist because he didn’t correct the liberal “experts” at Vatican II from wording statements like the following:

“There is also increasing awareness of the exceptional dignity which belongs to the human person, who is superior to everything and whose rights and duties are universal and inviolable.” Gaudium et Spes # 26:

 

[utunumsint]

The charge of conspiracy against Rene Descartes reminds me of traditionalist who say Paul VI was a homosexual atheist or even a Satanist because he didn’t correct the liberal “experts” at Vatican II from wording statements like the following:

“There is also increasing awareness of the exceptional dignity which belongs to the human person, who is superior to everything and whose rights and duties are universal and inviolable.” Gaudium et Spes # 26:

It seemed like paranoid conspiracy theories to me too until I saw the article from Richard Watson, a supposed top Descartes researcher in America who is an atheist.

At the very least, it makes me more inclined to hear out Wiker and Hahn’s arguments.

God bless,
Ut