Descartes' proof of the existence of God and its importanceSay no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay In Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes describes his philosophical quest to find absolute and certain knowledge. His method for finding this knowledge is to start with the most basic truths, work through them systematically, and try to establish some sort of doubt about them. If it is able to create doubts about something, everything that follows from it will also contain doubts and therefore will be eliminated. To create as much doubt as possible, he elaborates the "evil genius hypothesis", in which there is a superior being who deceives all of Descartes' sensory perceptions. In going through this process, the only thing Descartes is able to determine as true is that he is a thinking thing that exists; it cannot prove the existence of anything else. At this point, he also establishes a general rule for truth, which states: “everything that I [Descartes] perceive very clearly and distinctly is true” (line 35). To prove something other than the fact that it is a thinking thing, it must disprove the idea of ​​the evil genius, and it does so with proof of the existence of God. For Descartes, proving the existence of God is absolutely crucial; without this proof, he would not have been able to go any further in his quest to obtain unconditional knowledge. In the third meditation Descartes presents the proof of the existence of God. Before discussing God, Descartes declares that an effect cannot have more reality than its cause: everything that comes into being must be created from something that has an equal amount of reality or greater. The initial cause of an idea must contain at least as much formal reality as the idea has objective reality. Here, Descartes assumes that if he can conceive of an idea that has more objective reality than it could formally possess, it follows that there is something else in the world that is the cause of this idea. It is on this that he bases his argument for the existence of God. His proof for the existence of God contains a number of different arguments. From the name "God" Descartes says that he understands a certain substance "which is infinite, independent, supremely intelligent, and supremely powerful, and which created me together with everything else that exists, if anything else exists" (line 45). Examining the idea of ​​an infinite substance, he says that the fact that it is also a substance is not sufficient to explain having the idea of ​​an infinite substance, because it is finite. Therefore the idea must come from an infinite substance. He then says that while he can doubt the existence of other things, he cannot doubt the existence of God, because it is an “absolutely clear and distinct” idea (line 46), a reference to his criterion of truth mentioned above. Later, he then proposes that he himself may be supremely perfect, that he possesses all of God's perfections as potentialities and that he is constantly improving, which means that the idea of ​​God could come from himself. However, he rejects this idea with three reasons: God is entirely real and not at all potential; since it is constantly improving, its knowledge will never be infinite; and a potential being is nothing, the idea of ​​God must come from an actual infinite being. Finally, Descartes argues that if his parents or some other imperfect being created him, this creator must also have possessed this idea of ​​God. Whoever created them, therefore, must also have had this idea. Tracing the chain backwards, one must finally conclude that the idea of ​​God can only come from God. Knowing that the cause of his idea of ​​a perfect and infinite God is actually God allows Descartes to demonstrate that God is not the “ evil genius” which in.