Descartes's BS on the Necessity of God for Morality

This comment goes back to our discussion of the idea that God is required for morality, or meaning in life, or human goodness.

René Descartes, as explained in his Meditations on the First Philosophy (1641), using his method of doubt, knew that he existed as a thinking thing, because he concluded that he must exist to doubt that he exists. He knew that God exists and is real because, as Anslem argued in 1078, he could conceive of God in his mind. From these two bits of knowledge, he knew that substances were real.

In his dedicatory letter of the Meditations to the faculty of theology at the Sorbonne, he went further. He said that the God’s existence is necessary.

“[I]n the case of unbelivers, it seems there is no religion, and practically no moral virtue, that they can be persuaded to adopt until these two truths (the existence of God and the immortality of the soul) are proved to them by natural reason. And since in this life the rewards offered to vice are often greater than the rewards of virtue, few people would prefer what is right to what is expedient if they did not fear God or have the expectation of an after-life.”

This just bothered me. I was all set up to read the rational argument of why God is necessary for morality, and right up front he asserts a premise which is just, forgive me, bullshit*.

To say that humans prefer vice to virtue not an argument, it’s just an assertion, with no support. In fact, it may be just flat out wrong. The ancient Greet philosophers taught that humanity’s ultimate good was happiness. Aristotle taught that man achieved Eudaimonia (happiness) through the exercise of virtues. He gave us virtue ethics, moral philosophy based on character. Epicurus found happiness in pleasure, but in intellectual pleasure, not vice.

It has been suggested to me that Descartes's assertions may have been colored by to whom he was writing; i.e., the faculty of the theology department. If that is the case, calling bullshit on his premise is just being descriptive of his intent to persuade.

*Bullshit involves language intended to persuade by impressing and overwhelming a reader or listener, with a blatant disregard for truth and logical coherence; statements produced without particular concern of truth, as distinguished from a deliberate, manipulative lie intended to subvert the truth. It is this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that is the essence of bullshit. Quiz question: give an example of a prominent American president who is a bullshit artist.