not trustworthy. Our senses are sometimes wrong and are not reliable, and therefore doubt is necessary. Our imagination has the ability to make up things that do not exist, and for that reason it is not reliable to knowing our essence. The ability to reason and our intellect prove to be much more reliable to knowing than the body and senses are.

The third meditation is titled “ The existence of God.” In his third meditation, Descartes states, “…as far as my parents are concerned, even if everything is true of them that I have ever thought to be so, certainly they do not conserve me in being, nor did they in any way produce me insofar as I am a thinking thing…” (Descartes 36). Here, he explains that he believes God was the one who created him, not his parents. God allowed for him to have the ability to think and reason, which is why he believes in the existence of God. After coming to the conclusion that he does exist, Descartes attempts to discover how he knows this and continues to use a similar reasoning for how other things that surround him exist. In this meditation, he distinguishes between “objective reality” and “formal reality”. Formal reality is the existence of objects that are outside our perception and is independent of it. The objective reality refers to ideas that we already have inside our minds. According to Descartes, all our ideas already possess a certain degree of objective reality. Each of these ideas has to trace its objective reality back to a source which has as much formal reality as it does objective reality. According to Descartes, this is the case, because an effect can only receive its reality from its cause. By this point, Descartes has already doubted and rejected the belief that there is an external world that resembles the ideas that are already in his mind. He did this because he believes that there is a possibility that he created these ideas out of other ideas which he had about himself. This means that ideas can give rise to other ideas. In order for Descartes to prove that there are other things besides himself that exists, he will have to show that he is not the original source of all of his ideas. He concludes that the only idea that must come from an external force is the idea of God. Descartes mind is limited, and he is unable to come up with the ideas of “omnipotence” or “infinity” by himself. In order for these ideas to have an objective reality in his mind, they must come from an outside force which has an equal or greater degree of formal reality. This source is God himself. This leads Descartes to conclude that our ideas of God are him branding himself into all of our minds.