Blog #3 - Alissa Carlson

Before I really even started to write this blog post, I found myself google-ing, "How to understand Renee Descartes" and "What does Steven Pinker mean when he says ___." Thankfully, I found some helpful resources that pointed my brain in the right direction. So, here it goes.
When I was younger, I used to attend my local Catholic Church for Saturday night or Sunday morning mass with my mother and my younger brother. My mother was very religious and my father did not necessarily consider himself religious, although he would attend holiday masses with us. I also attended Wednesday night faith group with my peers and we would discuss bible readings and talk about how they pertained to our everyday life. I enjoyed attending these classes, and I didn't have a distinct love or hate for attending mass, I just did. Fast forward 6-7 more years, and here I am in my college apartment, writing about Descartes and Pinker and how they relate to each other on a Saturday night and I have to work Sunday morning. I don't attend church more than holidays anymore frankly because I find myself not having enough time. Do I still believe in God? Yes. Does Descartes? Yes. It took him a while to conclude this though.
Through the Meditations, Descartes is trying to prove to himself that God does exist, and he does this through two different ways. One is that God exists because of his very nature, and that God must exist based on his belief that any idea had to have been caused by something with an "equal or greater degree of reality." When he proves that God's existence is of that of a "perfect being," Descartes can then determine that he wasn't being deceived by an evil demon or something, and that the world did exist, in fact. But what really throws me for a loop in Descartes writings is that he believes that knowledge can only come from something that is "clearly and distinctly" true. But is this the only way that knowledge persists? Does this not include trial and error? Anyway, Descartes described God through these meditations in order to get skeptics/atheists to believe in God. Descartes is a believer in God and he also believed that it is important for others to do so as well, so they wouldn't commit "bad deeds."
But lets talk about Pinker; the man who states that there is no scientific evidence for God, and who talks about people that believe in both evolution and God. Pinker gave an evolutionary view of religion at Harvard in 2004 and really put down what he believed and how others should believe him too. As I was reading this article, Pinker states, "The Bible is a manual for rape, genocide, and the destruction of families...Religion has given us stonings, witch burnings, crusades, Inquisitions, jhads, fatwas, suicide bombers, and mothers who drown their children in the river." Kind of aggressive, but alright then.
How do I tie these together? I'm not entirely sure but I'm going to try. Many use "reason" to believe in a faith or a God or a higher power, and others do not. The science behind God is more-so within the mind than it is physically. Many scientists argue the existence of a God because of the lack of scientific data, which would include numbers and physical evidence and things that are tangible. Pinker argued the lack of a God based off a lack of evidence, and Descartes promoted a God based off of the mindset that there is a God because he believes in one too. Does scientific evidence ≠ not equal a mindset or thoughts within one's brain? Probably not.