Summary

After three days of meditation, Descartes claims that he has grown accustomed to disregarding the material world and only thinking about intellectual matters. He summarizes his past arguments, and how he has established with certainty that he exists, thinks, and most importantly, was created by God. From this he is ready to reclaim “all the treasures of science and wisdom” (65).

Since God is perfect, God could not be a deceiver. Any deceit arises from some imperfection or malice, but God is both perfect and perfectly good and so would not deceive Descartes. At the same time, however, Descartes is confused, because it seems that he does sometimes make mistakes. God could have created him so that he always had perfect knowledge, so why, if God is perfect, did God give Descartes a flawed faculty of judgement that sometimes leads to error?

In order...