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Meditation IV&VI: Divine Benevolence and Human Error
Some of my judgements are mistaken. I hold false beliefs. If there is a benevolent
God then one would think that He would have created me in such a way that I do not
err in the judgements I form. Now, Descartes maintains that he has established the
existence of a benevolent God and that it is clear that God cannot deceive.
I recognise that it is impossible that God should ever deceive me. For in every case of
trickery or deception some imperfection is to be found…The will to deceive is
evidence of malice or weakness and so cannot apply to God. (Med IV AT VII 54;
CSM II 37)
A worry that is parallel to the traditional problem of evil looms. If there is an
omnipotent, benevolent God who created me with a mind and capacity to make
judgements, then it is puzzling that I should be prone to make errors as I (inevitably)
do. It would seem to contradict God’s goodness to deliberately create us with minds
which are not as good (truth-detecting) as they could be. It would undermine the
notion of divine omnipotence if God were unable to create us with the best possible
cognitive faculties; and it would be a denial of divine omniscience were God not to
know what such mindedness would entail on the part of His creation.
The Cartesian response also runs parallel to one of the ways in which the problem of
evil is addressed – an appeal to free will. Our errors are not due to a fault in the
intellect, but they arise because of the way in which we exercise our will. While our
intellect or understanding is finite (as opposed to the infinitude of the divine intellect)
our will is unrestricted in the freedom we possess in exercising it. It is this
unrestricted freedom which leads us into error. For there will be occasions when we
decide to endorse a belief even though our intellect has not yet a clear understanding
of it. My will drags my judgement ahead of where it is really entitled to go and so I
come to believe that something is the case before my understanding has a clear and
distinct grasp of it. Of course, it may frequently be the case that my belief is true, but
on those occasions when it is not the fault is down to the will outstripping the
understanding.
The source of my mistakes is that the scope of the will is wider than that of the
intellect; but instead of restricting it within the same limits, I extend its use to matters
which I do not understand. (Med IV AT VII 58; CSM II 40)
Error is then not a flaw in divine creation or indicative of a problem in the conception
of the God. Rather, it is a phenomenon emerging from the way in which we can
exercise our will – and because that is freely exercised there is nothing a benevolent
God can do to (pre)determine the manner in which we exercise it.
The analysis of error in Meditation IV does provide us with a rule for being able to
arrive at true beliefs.
If whenever I make a judgement, I restrain my will so that it extends to what the
intellect clearly and distinctly reveals, and no further, then it is quite impossible for me
to go wrong. (Med IV AT VII 62; CSM II 43)
In Meditation VI Descartes raises the issue of how we are to explain the fact that we
err when making judgements concerning our sensory states. While one cannot be
mistaken that right now I am, say, feeling thirsty, one can go wrong in one’s
judgement about the source of the sensory experience or the good or harm of acting
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in light of it. The function of the senses is ‘to inform the mind of what is beneficial or
harmful for the composite of which the mind is a part’ (Med VI, AT VII 83; CSM II 57).
Now, if there is a benevolent, omnipotent God, then surely we should expect our
sensory states to lead us to make true rather than false judgements relating to them.
Yet, as is plain from our experience this is not always the case. A couple of examples
should help to make plain the worry.
A person suffering from dropsy (a disease with watery fluid collecting in the body)
feels thirsty and wants to drink. Yet the belief that I ought to drink is an erroneous
one for drinking water should be minimised when one has dropsy. I am led to do
something harmful by my sensory state – feeling thirsty and the desire to drink. Or,
think of our favourite example of making the wrong judgement on the basis of one’s
sensory state, the case of the person enduring phantom limb pain. The amputee has
no arm, but nonetheless experiences a pain just as if damage had been suffered by
that arm.
Descartes rejects one way of addressing the problem. This way sees the diseased or
otherwise faulty human body as being like a malfunctioning machine – his own
example is a clock. Both the human body and the poorly made clock obey the laws of
nature just as perfectly functioning machines do. However, in the case of the
diseased body and the poorly made clock, each is departing from its true nature. This
is not a promising way of explaining away the problem since, as Descartes observes,
a sick man is no less one of God’s creatures than a healthy one. This approach
should also be rejected because it seems to rely on locating the problem as one that
is entirely within the workings of the body. This will not do for Descartes because the
error is not just that something has gone awry in the functioning of a biological
machine, the body. Rather, the sensation (of thirst, pain) is experienced by one’s
mind, which is intermingled with the body. A solution must recognise that sensations
are experienced by us and our judgements made as embodied entities, as mind qua
distinct substance inextricably interwoven (in some way) with body qua distinct
substance.
Descartes develops his answer by drawing attention to the fact (so he says) that our
sensations depend on the effect the body has on the mind and that the interaction
between brain and mind takes place
at a single point, the pineal gland.
Our sensations arise when we
receive particular signals from the
body. These are for the most part
reliable – our feelings of pain arise in
response to the signals coming from
damaged parts of the body.
However, the same signal can be
sent or activated by mistake. The
stabbing pain in the foot I experience
when the opposing forward stamps
on it results from the signal sent
along a network of nerves. The
same kind of signal can be
transmitted to the pineal gland by
activating an intermediate point – for
example, by stimulating a nerve in
my leg (see Descartes’ example of
the cord) In the case of the dropsical man the disease means that nerves are
activated so that the signal is one inducing the feeling of thirst.
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Imagine a nerve stretching from the pineal gland to the tip of one’s toe, and that
nerve has four points on it ABCD (D being the point nearest the gland, A the
furthest). [As in Fig. 1 below] Now, once a person has had an amputation at the knee
their nerve still has points B-D. If point B is stimulated in such a way that it would
have been stimulated were point A still in existence then the information transmitted
up the nerve could be presented to the mind as if it arose from A.
Now there is nothing chaotic about this arrangement. We would expect nothing else
of the behaviour of wires and nerves. It is a good thing that our nerves behave in
such an ordered and systematic fashion – after all if our actual foot is in the fire, then
it’s a good thing that our mind is alerted to the fact, and that we don’t instead get a
misleading tickling sensation in our ears. Since, our body tells us things more often
than not that are true and the so-called deceptions arise in a systematic and
explicable fashion then we do not really have anything to worry about here.
The problem of error can also be countered by the fact that we have at our disposal
certain God-given faculties for avoiding deception. If I use all of my senses in
combination, as well as my memory and intellect, then I wouldn’t be deceived in the
first place. Take the phantom limb case. If I get an itching feeling in my finger I need
only look at the space below my elbow where my hand used to be, or perhaps try to
touch it with my other hand, or maybe tap the non-existent finger on the table to see
if it makes a sound, and so on, to tell me that I have no finger, and therefore, a
fortiori, 1 no itch in my finger. Further, I can call upon my memory. I recall, very
vividly, the operation to have my arm amputated. And finally, deploying my intellect, if
the above observations have been made, it doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to
deduce that there is no finger, and so no itch (we can run the same sort of story with
the dropsy case, mutatis mutandis)2. Of course, if we have everything we need to
avoid deception, but we rashly judge things to be the way they are on first
appearance, then God is hardly to be blamed.
The error in our sensory judgement thus comes about because there has been some
faulty signalling in the body, thereby producing a sensation which would normally
play a beneficial role. While this explains why the error arises one may still not be
satisfied that it explains why such mistakes are consistent with divine benevolence.
After all, surely God could have designed the way in which mind and body are
intermingled so that this kind of mistake would not occur. Well, that is just what God
could not do and why our mistaken sensory judgements are consistent with His
benevolence. The physical system we possess and the way in which it relates to the
mind is the best that it is possible to create. It may go wrong sometimes, but ours is
the best system because it produces in the mind just the one and appropriate kind of
sensation for any given physical state. That ensures that for the most part our
sensory judgements do lead us to take the appropriate course of action.
My final observation is that any given movement occurring in the part of the brain that
immediately affects the mind produces just one corresponding sensation; and hence
the best system that could be devised is that it should produce the one sensation
which, of all possible sensations, is most especially and most frequently conducive to
the preservation of the healthy man. And experience shows that the sensations which
nature has given us are all of this kind; and so there is absolutely nothing to be found
in them that does not bear witness to the power and goodness of God. (Med VI AT
VII 87; CSM II 60)
1
2
‘By the stronger argument’
‘Making the necessary alterations’