foray
Rock n' Roll Doggie
Hi hi. I've been doing lots of wondering this week, so, apologies if you get foray-fatigue. I was reading up on Descartes today and his deductions on the existence of God. The proof for God's existence, according to him, goes briefly like this:
We are imperfect humans therefore it is impossible for us to conceive of a perfect God if a perfect God didn't exist. We can't conceive of anything that we are not a part of or anything that is not a part of this world. For example, if I told you to imagine an animal that doesn't exist, you'd most probably imagine just that, but your animal would have combined attributes of existing animals (a chicken with fish scales and a snout). You couldn't think of an animal that is truly out of this world.
Ok, this is only one (of two) of his deductions, but it's this point that I want to talk about.
I was just wondering, if it is true that humans can't imagine 'a thing out of nothing' without referring to things that already exist,
how did we come up with the square, since squares and straight lines do not exist in Nature? We are the only creatures who build things in squares (btw, many times, squares aren't smart architectural designs).
foray
We are imperfect humans therefore it is impossible for us to conceive of a perfect God if a perfect God didn't exist. We can't conceive of anything that we are not a part of or anything that is not a part of this world. For example, if I told you to imagine an animal that doesn't exist, you'd most probably imagine just that, but your animal would have combined attributes of existing animals (a chicken with fish scales and a snout). You couldn't think of an animal that is truly out of this world.
Ok, this is only one (of two) of his deductions, but it's this point that I want to talk about.
I was just wondering, if it is true that humans can't imagine 'a thing out of nothing' without referring to things that already exist,
how did we come up with the square, since squares and straight lines do not exist in Nature? We are the only creatures who build things in squares (btw, many times, squares aren't smart architectural designs).
foray