Descartes's Proofs of God and the Crisis of Thomas Aquinas's Five Ways in Early Modern Thomism: Scholastic and Cartesian Debates

Abstract

It is well known that the demonstration of God's existence is a crucial problem in early modern theology and philosophy. In contrast to the medieval period, in the seventeenth century atheism became not only an individual standpoint, but a true philosophical and epistemological position. Accordingly, any attempt to prove the existence of God had to address both atheist and libertine attacks against the classical proofs of his existence. In this sense, it is not possible to understand fully Descartes's metaphysical project, including his proposal of new proofs for the existence of God, without reading it as a reaction to this intellectual context. In spite of the charge of atheism brought against him in theAdmiranda methodus novæ philosophiæ Renati Des Cartes(Utrecht, 1643) by the Utrecht Theologian Gijsbert Voetius (1589–1676) and his follower Maarten Schoock (1614–1669) (who accused Descartes of replacing the traditional arguments for God's existence with new proofs intentionally made susceptible to the criticism of atheists), Descartes consistently claimed that the demonstrations proposed in theMeditationes de prima philosophia(Paris, 1641) aimed to establish the existence of God against the atheists.