Descartes vs. Pascal

After Descartes realizes that everybody has different interpretations of the knowledge, he rejects this knowledge which he gained from his education and travelling. So he decides to make internal search for reaching the true knowledge. He doubts and re-evaluates everything with his reasoning. To achieve this, he needs to find basis which he can built all knowledge on it. Thus he reaches conclusions that he should be there to doubt so he asserted that “I am thinking, therefore I am”, then he doubts so he is not perfect and finally reaches the conclusion that there should be something perfect he can depend on. In that way he proofs that there should be god. To him these all mean that existence of god makes his reasoning dependable means to reach true knowledge. He can rely on the fact that god is perfect and does not lead us to have wrong perceptions when we use our reason, not when just rely on our senses.  

Since his whole claim relies on existence of god in a way Pascal is right, Descartes uses god to support his idea. However, I do not agree that Descartes’ whole ideas are useless and uncertain. In that time, they only had god as an explanation but nowadays we have other explanations which can be support the fact that we can rely on our reasoning to find true knowledge. Most salient one is evolutionary theory. Since our brains have certain mechanisms that produces solutions to the problems that our ancestors recurrently faced with, we all naturally have spices typical reasoning that help us to solve problems and we can rely on it. Our reasoning which only thing we can rely on according to Descartes may not be god’s favor but may result of the evolutionary process. So, even using god to build a theory is not the best idea this does not mean that his ideas are useless and uncertain.