In “Meditation Four” of Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes is primarily concerned with God, His creations, and the faculties assigned to His creations.
Descartes begins by restating the conclusion he came to in “Meditation Three”—that he is a thinking thing. He is a thinking thing that doubts, or is uncertain of things, so he is incomplete and dependent. And because he is incomplete and dependent, he comes to the conclusion that there must exist something that is the opposite: a complete and independent being—God (36).
According to Descartes, there is a supreme being (God), the non-being (nothingness), and the being in the middle of these two (himself). The supreme being is perfect, meaning that His judgment is undoubtedly correct and therefore He never makes a mistake. The non-being, or nothingness, is as far away from perfection as possible, meaning that it has traits that are uncertain. And the being in the middle shares both these traits to lesser degrees (36).
Descartes says that God is the supreme perfect being, so nothing else that exists can be perfect because He is supremely perfect. This means that God is unable to create other perfect beings because he is the perfect being. Therefore, he can only create less than perfect beings. Because he can only create imperfect beings (for example, Descartes), those beings’s judgments are not always correct, and those beings are prone to making mistakes. But because these imperfect beings are a creation of God, these imperfect beings and God must share a similar trait, which must be flawed judgment and proneness to make mistakes. Thus, we can’t be certain that God is a perfect being if he creates things that are imperfect, because creating things that are imperfect reflects a flaw in judgment. And if we can't be certain that God is a perfect being, we can't be certain that he exists.
But Descartes says that God is a positive, perfect being and so, He can never make a mistake. “… it is impossible for God to ever to deceive me, for trickery or deception is always indicative of some imperfection” (36). Here, Descartes says that God would never deceive him on purpose because that would indicate an imperfection, and God cannot be imperfect by definition that he the perfect being. However, God may not be deceiving Descartes on purpose. Perhaps Descartes is deceiving himself because God gave him a faculty that is supposed to work that way. But why would God give him this faculty with which he can both avoid and make mistakes and cause uncertainty? Descartes says that God created him and gave him no faculty for making mistakes so he cannot make them. But if God is perfect, why would he create an imperfect being? If God Himself never intended to create an imperfect thing, and created Descartes, an imperfect being, that would mean God unintentionally made a mistake. God may have an ulterior motive, but of that, we cannot be certain. Because we cannot be certain of whether or not God has ulterior motives, we can't be certain if God really is perfect, and if we can't be certain if He really is perfect, he may not even exist because He would not have the attributes contrary to Descartes’s incompleteness and dependence that are required of Him to exist.
In closing, here are wise, wise words from a Disney star:
“Everybody makes mistakes, everybody has those days…. Nobody’s perfect.”
—Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus
