Descartes' proof of the existence of God and his importanceSay no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay In Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes describes his philosophical quest to find absolute and certain knowledge. His method of acquiring this knowledge is to start with the most fundamental truths, going through them systematically and trying to establish some sort of doubt about them. If he is able to create doubt about something, whatever comes from it will also contain doubt and therefore will be eliminated. To create as much doubt as possible, he proposes the "evil genius hypothesis", in which there exists a superior being who deceives all of Descartes' sensory perceptions. Going through this process, the only thing that Descartes is able to determine as true is that there is a thinking thing that exists; he is incapable of proving the existence of anything else. At this point, he also establishes a general rule of truth, which states: "everything that I [Descartes] perceive very clearly and distinctly is true" (line 35). In order to prove anything other than the fact that he is a thinking thing, he must disprove the idea of ​​the evil genie and he does so with his proof of the existence of God. For Descartes, proving the existence of God is absolutely crucial; without this proof, he could not have gone further in his quest for unconditional knowledge. In the Third Meditation, Descartes presents his proof of the existence of God. Before talking about God, Descartes states that an effect cannot have more reality than its cause: everything that comes into being must be created by something that has an equal or greater amount of reality. The initial cause of an idea must contain at least as much formal reality as the idea has objective reality. Here Descartes posits that if he can conceive of an idea that has more objective reality than he could formally possess, it follows that there is something else in the world that is the cause of that idea . This is what he bases his argument for the existence of God on. His proof for the existence of God contains a number of different arguments. By the name "God", Descartes says he understands a certain substance "which is infinite, independent, supremely intelligent and supremely powerful, and which created me with everything that exists – if anything exists" (line 45) . In examining the idea of ​​an infinite substance, he says that the fact that it is also a substance is not enough to explain the idea of ​​an infinite substance, because it is finite. The idea must therefore 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 a "completely clear and distinct" idea (line 46), a reference to its criterion of truth mentioned above. Following this, he then proposes that he himself can be supremely perfect, that he possesses all the perfections of God as potentialities and that he is constantly improving, meaning that the idea of ​​God would have could have come by itself. However, he rejects this idea for three reasons: God is all real and not at all potential; because he is always improving, his knowledge will never be infinite; and a potential being is nothing, the idea of ​​God must come from an infinite real being. Finally, Descartes argues that if his parents or another imperfect being created him, that creator must also have possessed this idea of ​​God. Whoever created them must therefore also have had this idea. Moving up the chain, we must ultimately conclude that the idea of ​​God can only come from God. Knowing that the cause of his idea of ​​a perfect God.