![]() ![]() ![]() But the Sorbonne’s approval would have protected Descartes from such a fate. ![]() ![]() Even though he lived in the Netherlands, where the church’s power was very limited, he was seriously worried about ending up like Galileo (who was imprisoned for daring to argue that the Earth revolved around the Sun). Moreover, it was incredibly dangerous to challenge the church’s official beliefs in the 17th century-but this is exactly what Descartes’s work did. As he points out in this letter, atheists refuse to believe in God on faith, so rational arguments for God’s existence are the only way to win them over. The First Meditation is arguably the most influential passage in all of Descartes’s writing because it lays out a. Yet he actually viewed rationality as a way to prove God’s existence with certainty and ultimately reinforce religious faith. SEVERAL years have now elapsed since I first became aware that I had accepted, even from my youth, many false opinions for true, and that consequently what I afterward based on such principles was highly doubtful and from that time I was convinced of the necessity of undertaking once in. Descartes’s Meditator points out that most of what people believe is based on received wisdom, not rigorous rational analysis, and he proposes start ing right again from the foundations of knowledge as an alternative. After all, he is famous for his belief that rationality is humankind’s best tool for understanding the world, an argument that helped spur the Enlightenment and significantly curb the church’s power in Europe. Readers may be surprised to learn that Descartes begins Meditations by asking for approval from theologians who were basically representatives of the Catholic Church. ![]()
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