Descartes Fifth Meditation

Descartes' Firth Meditiation addresses the existence of God for a second time for the purpose of revealing additional information as to his attributes. Being an ontological argument, it sheds light upon aspects of God's being, and in doing so, we may gain a better idea of not only the fact that he exists, but also how he exists. What may become evident to the reader of Fifth Meditation, although ironically not being explicitly defined as such by Descartes, is that his ontological argument for the existence of God is largely a causal one. That is to say, the meditator's idea of God (as being infinite, creatively potent, etc.) unavoidably depends upon the meditator's own origination, or, in Aristotelian terms, his efficient cause. Descartes describes something much like the causal principle in the Third Meditation as being, "obvious by the natural light that the total cause of something must contain at least as much reality as does the effect."
(Descartes, Fifth Meditation) From this assertion, one can trace this representative causality back to at least an idea of God-and though there is not uet any guarantee that this representative reality of God corresponds to an intrinsic reality of God, it isn't nothing, and so it can't come from