Read meditations 1&2, answer the following:
During the past several years, there’s been a lot of talk about so-called “fake” news. This was an idea popularized by the former president of the United States. It is unfortunately used to attack the news media — but it raises an important question: so how can you trust the news you see, watch, or hear? How can you know what is “fake” as opposed to what is “real” or genuine, or trustworthy as the truth? What is the difference between “fake” and “real” and how can you know that!?
Such an issue is made even more troubling and urgent with the recent rise, again during the Trump presidency, of “QAnon (Links to an external site.)”: a group, based largely in social media platforms (originating, apparently on “4chan”), that embraces an assortment of political and religiously-inflected conspiracy theories, and which was implicated in the insurrectionist assault on the U.S. Capitol on the 6th of January 2021, as Congress sought to finally ratify the Electoral College votes for then President-elect Biden’s victory at the polls. The group claims that “the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who are plotting against Mr. Trump while operating a global child sex-trafficking ring” (NY Times 17 Jan 2021 (Links to an external site.)). This theory has now, somehow, entered into public discourse as a viable basis for political action, and now even sees some of its adherents in the U.S. Congress itself (Links to an external site.) — this from a group that would have been, just perhaps 10 years ago, considered completely absurd and totally “fringe”, that is, not worth a second glance. What is going on here? What the hell is going on here?, as we asked at the beginning of this course.
Again, at the bottom of this rests, I think, the most fundamental question of all — perhaps of all human social, political and moral life, which is also a deeply metaphysical question — that of the real vs. the fake, and how to tell the difference between them. Is it even possible to determine that difference, at least in such a way that is secure?
This question is exactly what Descartes wanted to settle once and for all. So, you see, there is a deeper problem here that goes beyond the Trump name-calling against new reporters as being “fake news”; beyond the conspiracy theory spinning of groups like QAnon. The question is, what makes any news, or any theory, “fake” (false) as opposed to “real” (true), and how can you tell the difference between them, and be assured that that knowledge of the difference is secure? Trump seems to have thought that he knew what the difference is — but did he? Do you? Can we know it?
Read meditations 3&4, answer the following:
Descartes seems to need God to get him from the certainty he thinks he’s found for his own personal, individual existence, to the whole wide world beyond his own individual mind. Descartes thinks of God as a Being that has what were call the “perfections” of existence: that is, God is conceived as a Being that is all knowing, all loving, all powerful, ever-present, etc. God is the reason and ultimate explanation for all things, and for existence itself — God is the “ground” upon which all things “move and have their being” (to quote a famous Christian formula that comes from the Bible). In this view, no God = nothing at all. Yet, even after thinking of God in these terms, Descartes refuses to allow God’s existence to be merely a matter of private, personal “faith”. Descartes seeks to prove in some rational way that God exists; God can be known through and by reason, not just by faith!
Do you think that, today, this idea of God as an infinitely “perfect” being is still alive? What does this concept mean to you — even if you personally don’t believe it? Do you think that the concept of “proof” makes sense here? If not, then is it all just “faith”? What’s the difference between “faith” and “reason”? Must faith and reason remain separate?
