Paper Summary:

This paper introduces and analyzes Rene Descartes' thoughts that countered the atheism held up by many educated Europeans of his day. According to the paper, these outlooks were held by many of these thinker in order to promote rationalism or empiricism. Descartes explained several defects in atheism. The paper concludes by stating that one cannot be a rationalist and objective thinker and claim flatly that God does not exist, since there would seem more evidence for theism and certainly for the need for the educated person/philosopher to keep a tentative approach.

From the Paper:

"A good deal of Rene Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy involves explanation of the poverty of pure atheism. (In Ariew & Watkins 1998) Writing in a day when rationalism and science had become very important, to sometimes rigid faith in empiricism, Descartes pointed out much that could not be proven by this approach, the existence of God, for instance, something he saw to be more readily known that any other state of affairs. Part of his contribution to Western thought lay in explaining how empiricism did not mean that the divine could not also be true. Important..."

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