Meditations of Descartes, Original Champion of Intelligent Design

By Mark Hoerrner

Nearly five centuries have passed since Rene Descartes began penning his Meditations, a work largely regarded by scholars to be his most important. The philosopher, made famous by his statement of "I think, therefore I am," continues to have his theories dissected and offered to modern students of Aristotelian thought. In Meditations, Descartes outlined not only the core of his beliefs about science, but also how science explained the existence of God.

The six essays that constitute Meditations, though widely read in colleges and universities across the globe today, were unpopular at the time Descartes set pen to paper. Interestingly, these observations came at a time when Descartes was trudging through great personal challenges. As he began writing Meditations in 1639, he was faced with the deaths of his sister and father. More importantly, and what affected him most, historians say, was the death of his five-year-old daughter, Francine.

Though mourning the loss of a significant portion of his immediate family, Descartes went on to address the nature of truth, knowledge, scientific relationships and his belief that science proved the existence of God in great detail, eventually submitting his writings to the learned scholars of The Sorbonne in France.

"But perhaps the being upon whom I am dependent is not God, and I have been produced either by my parents, or by some causes less perfect than Deity," Descartes writes in his third meditation. "This cannot be: for, as I before said, it is perfectly evident that there must at least be as much reality in the cause as in its effect; and accordingly, since I am a thinking thing and possess in myself an idea of God, whatever in the end be the cause of my existence, it must of necessity be admitted that it is likewise a thinking being, and that it possesses in itself the idea and all the perfections I attribute to Deity."

Descartes’ musings on the subject of the concept of God stem from a belief that creation has an engine behind it, something powering it in the rational spectrum of understanding. Since Descartes himself did not imagine that he possessed the power of creation, some higher being must indeed exist—especially because he could mentally conceive of such a creator.

However, much in the way that current Intelligent Design theorists have met considerable opposition, Descartes’ concepts were read and discounted by many of the scholars of his time. Unyielding, Descartes replied to his naysayers and actually collected the exchanges in an appended text called Objections and Replies.

Descartes went on to write essential texts on philosophy, including the Principia Philosophiae (Principles of Philosophy), a 504-article collection of essays on philosophy and what Descartes considered the mind-body connection. In addition, Descartes stepped away, to some degree, from his discussion of God and espoused some controversial theories on matter and its interaction within the universe. One of his critics on these theories was Sir Isaac Newton, who challenged Descartes’ on the nature of matter vacuums.

He expanded on this in a later work, called Passions, which discussed the relation of the soul to mind and body. The work on Passions was never finished, however, as Descartes died while serving in the court of Queen Christina of Sweden. Descartes died just short of his 54th birthday in 1650.