Extract

Descartes attitude toward Christianity and revealed religion is a pretty enigmatic issue. On the one hand, we find Descartes making the hyperbolic claim that God creates the eternal truths of mathematics and logic from absolute freedom of indifference:

If anyone attends to the immeasurable greatness of God he will find it manifestly clear that there can be nothing whatsoever [nihil omnino esse posse] which does not depend on him. This applies not just to everything that subsists, but to all order, every law, and every reason for anything's being true or good [nullamve rationem veri & boni]. If this were not so, then … God would not have been completely indifferent with respect to the creation of what he did in fact create. (AT VII 435-6 | CSM II 293-4, emphasis added)

Along the same lines, Descartes counsels Mersenne ‘not to hesitate to assert and proclaim everywhere that it is God who lays these laws in nature just as a king lays down laws in his kingdom’ (AT X 145| CSM III 23, emphasis added). For many of Descartes medieval predecessors, such claims – which make the truths of mathematics and logic depend on God’s arbitrary will – would be nothing more than a form of popular, unintelligible fanaticism with which there is hardly any point engaging in philosophical discourse.

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