Descartes Group
Question:
In Part 3 of Method: The first maxim explains that he will continue to follow his faith. Why doesn't he question faith?
Answers:
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Posted by urthona on Thursday July 24, 2008 at 9:05 AM
Descartes doesn’t question faith because he believes that the tenets of his Catholic religion must be “set apart” from human knowledge.
In contrast, he temporarily accepts the intellectual traditions of his time in order to question them and, in many instances, to reject them.
Later in Part III, he offers a metaphor:
And, just as in pulling down an old house, we usually reserve the ruins to contribute towards the erection, so, in destroying such of my opinions as I judged to be ill-founded, I made a variety of observations and acquired an amount of experience of which I availed myself in the establishment of more certain.
Note that the Roman Catholic Church condemned Galileo in 1633 for writing that the earth revolved around the sun (contrary to Church beliefs). That event may have affected Descartes's writings, including Discourse on the Method (1637). Although Descartes heavily criticized his Jesuit education and hinted at other objections to Church beliefs, his writings never strayed very far from the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church.
