What Is Descartes Three Arguments For God's Existence

In Meditations on First Philosophy, Rene Descartes introduces three principal arguments for God’s existence. His first argument will be examined in the most detail, and the last two will be briefly outlined and compared to the first in the following analysis. Descartes introduces his first proof in Meditation III, where he uses the ideas of formal and objective reality to make his argument. To arrive at his conclusion that God exists, he begins with the notion of ideas, and whether they correspond to anything outside of him. From this he posits the self-evident idea that “there must be at least as much [reality] in the efficient and total cause as there is in the effect of that same cause” (28). In other words, he claims that ideas must have