STARTING WITH DESCARTES

Another shortfall in application of methodological doubt is that

the evil-spirit hypothesis is unwarrantedly dismissed. Early in the
third meditation Descartes tells us that he has no reason to believe
that there is a deceiving God. What this amounts to is that the evil
spirit ceases to be conceivable once the idea of a perfect hence allgood and nondeceiving God enters the picture; and of course the
idea of God in the third meditation must be of a perfect God
because only then can it exceed Descartes ability to concoct it out
of his own imagination. The evil spirit is out of the picture the
moment God is thought of as perfect; the evil-spirit hypothesis,
then, is simply dropped once it serves its earlier purpose.
* * *
In describing his idea of God, Descartes provides us with a short
list of Gods major perfections, saying that by God he means an
innite substance, independent, omniscient, omnipotent, and that
by which I myself and all other existent things . . . have been created (Descartes 3, 43 [I, 165]). What is crucial to the argument is
that Gods attributes are so great . . . that the more attentively I
consider them, the less I can persuade myself that I could have
derived them from my own nature, so he must conclude that God
exists (Descartes 3, 43 [I, 165]). Descartes concludes he could not
himself be the source or cause of the idea of a perfect God, conveniently ignoring the possibility that the idea he has falls short of
being of a perfect God and that its elements or components might
be adventitious or factitious ideas as he himself denes them.
This point about the idea of God not quite being one of a perfect
God is pivotal because to accept Descartes argument, we must
accept that we do have the idea of a perfect God. This is not to say
we have to have a perfect idea of God, an idea which exhaustively
captures Gods essence; it is to say that it is at least not clear just
what the idea of a perfect God is or entails. Consider a parallel: we
have the idea that the series of natural numbers is an innite series,
so we have the idea of an innite series. That sounds impressive
until we realize that what we actually have is the idea that whatever
number we come up with, we can always add one; we cannot conceive an innite series in the sense of having a single, complete idea
of one. The idea of an innite series is, as we might put it,
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