Natural Sources of the God Concept
The idea of God is a political metaphor that reflects the structure of the human mind
In his Meditations, Rene Descartes argues that the concept of God as an infinite, perfect creator of the universe must be innate since finite beings like us couldn’t have learned such a concept from our experience.
Here, Descartes established the pattern of the overreaching mathematician or physicist who delves into philosophical or theological reflections, deeming the latter surely easier to manage than the more technical matters of mathematics and science.
Descartes harps on God’s supposed infinity, dragging in that mathematical property as though God were supposed to be a mere formality. In so far as God is rather meant to be an infinite person, a perfectly powerful but also wise and moral creator, there’s no such coherent concept at all. Finitude is built into what anyone could meaningfully say about life, minds, and people.
Moreover, as to how we arrived at the idea of infinity, the answer lies in the arbitrariness of mathematics rather than philosophy (a distinction that would, of course, become clearer only centuries after Descartes lived, when the sciences and humanities grew apart as more mature modern disciplines). Just by trial and error, and by evoking…
