Stanley asked:

I'm not very much sure whether I agree with Rene Descartes ontological argument on the existence
of God that "Everything I know of comes, ultimately, from outside of myself. I know of the existence of
a being greater than which nothing can be conceived, namely God. There is nothing in my experience
which ought to make me know this, so it must have come from elsewhere, namely from God Himself."
(Rene Descartes)

Surely, if God wanted us to know that he was our creator, he would have given us that cognitive
ability (instinctively, or otherwise) to know that. That knowledge would have been part and parcel of
the formative teleology of being human. We would not have to run around, trying to find out who
actually created us, and why.

Does this argument make sense?

Also, is it true that the principle of creation is such that only the creator knows the purpose of what he
creates? This, by implication means that only God knows the reasons for creating mankind. We will
never know what our purpose of our existence is until it will be revealed by God.

Is that So?

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No doubt the creator knows the purpose of creation. That does not mean that we can never know it
by using our intelligence.

If God wanted us to know that he was our creator he could have let us know. But would he want to?
Could he have a good reason for making it difficult to work out?

Theologians generally agree that the only motive God has for acting is to produce an entity that is
similar to God and appropriate for God to love. The catch is that even God cannot create an entity
that is similar to God. God is self-existent. Anything created is other than self-existent. What can God
do?

The only possibility is for God to institute a process that involves self-organisation and self-creation so
that an entity could self-create in attributes that are similar to God's, such as creativity, goodness and
love.

So we have the Big Bang that produces matter. Matter self-organises to produce a planet that can
support life. Life begins in a simple form and gradually evolves to produce an animal that has the
mental ability to self-create, to be whatever it wants to be — as humans do.

This is my argument in The Process of the Cosmos.

Dr A.B. Kelly

Descartes postulates that God has given us knowledge of God. The questioner makes a reasonable
point in doubting that we have this knowledge. What is interesting to me is not that 17th Century Man
Descartes believes we have a knowledge of God and 21st Century Man , Stanley believes we don't,
but that Descartes cannot imagine that the knowledge he has of God came to him from the very
human institution of the Catholic Church. For Descartes the Church is invisible. It is very much like
people today who repeat things from T.V. News as definite facts, forgetting that they have been told
these things by certain human beings with prestige and power. Instead, they believe they have
somehow discerned these things by their own innate abilities. Descartes was unable to bracket his
knowledge and investigate where it actually came from, as opposed to accepting the knowledge's
claims about its origin.

We should remember that there was little separation between the Catholic Church and its members
at this time, so in a sense, the Church we in Descartes' blind spot. He could not see it as his human
source of information about the supernatural world. Stanley can see it and thus can reject Descartes'
claim of direct knowledge of the supernatural, as Locke went on to do.

Dr Jay Raskin