If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
—Rene Descartes
Doubt All Things
September 4, 2009 By 50 Comments
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[...] to thoroughly doubt at least once in one’s lifetime. In the ensuing discussion, Clergy Guy writes: Just wanted to chime in to say that I think one can have faith and doubts at the same time. In [...]
But since doubt is such a sin, I guess the “as far as possible” qualifier applies to chirstians and their superstitions. ;) :P
This quote, which I learned in European History in high-school, has always stuck with me. Even when I was a christian. That might explain why I eventually “fell-away.” I assumed the truth of my faith could stand up to doubt and reason. It didn’t.
This test posed to us by Descartes is probably the single most important step I took in discovering that I could not rationally believe in the existence of God.
Up until then (15-16yrs old) I just took God for granted. Just as the sky is blue. What is amusing about Descartes in his Discourse on Method is that he uses this same technique to validate his preexisting Christian notions by using a typically weak ‘the world functions with such perfect beauty only achievable by God’ argument. Obviously having been exposed to more modern theories of evolution and adaption had left me very unsatisfied with his “proof”. As much as my emotions wanted to believe his argument, I realized that even great philosophers make mistakes.
Thank goodness for this guy though. Genius that he was.
It is kind of funny that Descartes found a way to use his extreme skepticism to validate his belief in God, but I agree that the sort of skeptical leap that he introduced in the Meditations is so incredibly important for a healthy life.
Descartes: Genius. Crackpot. Both?
Genius for sure
If he had the knowledge of science and history that we do know, he might have reason to reconsider his conclusions.
Heh, yes he was definitely a genius (I was in no way trying to retract from that fact; only pointing out a funny, yet predictible caveat in his argument).
Nowadays we expect extreme skepticism (or even just plain scientism) to accompany a disbelief in the supernatural. It’s so interesting how a few hundred years ago, the existence of a diety is basically assumed in virtually every belief system and worldview. Doubt was rarely (if ever) extended to God. So very interesting.
Pfft, we know most geniuses are crackpots ;p it’s part of what makes ‘em special, yessir.
No, Descartes doubted the existence of God explicitly. He did not assume it. At one point in his argument every single thing, God included, is doubted except the one thing that simply cannot be doubted—Descartes’ own existence.
Only later does he give an argument for the existence of God. You may not like the argument he gives but he gives an argument. God is in no way just assumed by Descartes.
You may be right, Camels, but there’s a difference between not making that assumption on paper and not beginning with that assumption in his own mind. I scarcely doubt he would have allowed himself to follow a track of reasoning that he suspected might ultimately lead away from the existence of God.
Uh, English is my first language but…. I meant to say “I doubt he would have allowed…,” not “I scarcely doubt he would have allowed….” But you probably had that figured out.
If we’re going to be pedantic, then it’s not Descartes’ own existence that escapes doubt, but rather his present conscious experience that is, for lack of a better (or real) word, undoubtable. It turns out that skepticism can be extended even to that (see Hegel), but that brings on a whole new set of issues.
Of course I didn’t mean that Descartes began with “doubt all things, except God.” I was merely pointing out that it was virtually an inevitability that even in an extreme skeptic like Descartes, the existence of God would poke through eventually.
Maybe there’s also the simpler explanation that had he concluded that God doesn’t exist, he would have probably been burned along with his books.
What is amusing about Descartes in his Discourse on Method is that he uses this same technique to validate his preexisting Christian notions by using a typically weak ‘the world functions with such perfect beauty only achievable by God’ argument. Obviously having been exposed to more modern theories of evolution and adaption had left me very unsatisfied with his “proof”. As much as my emotions wanted to believe his argument, I realized that even great philosophers make mistakes.
Fortunately for Descartes, you misunderstood him nearly entirely. Descartes was a milestone on the route to conceiving of the world as containing no inherent purposes. Before Descartes, knowledge, even the scientific was thought to be about the four causes—the “material cause” (how something’s type of matter makes it the type of thing it is), the “formal cause” (how something’s form, or “essence” makes it the type of thing it is), the “efficient cause” (how something came to be through physical causes), and the “final cause” (what something’s purpose was).
One of Descartes’ innovations was to argue that all we could have knowledge of was material and efficient causes. We could only understand the material world in terms of it being composed of material substances extended in space and so subject to mathematical quantification and we could only understand how they came to be in terms of physical causation. So, in other words, to understand how natural things behaved we would not ask what “goal” or “purpose” they were seeking but instead what physical efficient causes acted upon the material bodies. Descartes believed in final causes but he thought they were too inscrutable for us to know. Descartes’ metaphysics provides a grounding for a view of science that is quantitative and materialist as our current science is.
Secondly, Descartes categorically does not argue from the natural world to the existence of God. He offers his proof for the existence of God before even establishing the world exists. His considerations that lead him to posit a God are ontological. A perfect being must have all perfections by definition. Just as a triangle conceptually entails three-sidedness, the concept of a perfect being entails existence. Just as much as it makes no sense to say there is a triangle without three sides, it makes no sense to say that a perfect being lacks existence so, therefore, as long as we understand the idea of what a perfect being entails we must recognize that that being must be an existent one. So, the perfect being must exist. “God” for Descartes is purely the word for a perfect being. There’s nothing particularly Christian about this derivation. And being a derivation of the necessary existence of God from the conceptual entailments of the idea of a perfect being, it makes no reference to the world. He doesn’t claim to discover God by analyzing nature like the ID crowd does. He claims the opposite, that it is because there must be a God, based on these considerations of the idea of a perfect being and its logical entailments, then there must be a world. The reason he gives for this inference is that a perfect being would by definition have to be morally perfect and not a deceiver (otherwise it would have a flaw) and so since Descartes trusts his senses and his reason so innately, they must be generally reliable. They are machinery that might go wrong, but God cannot be a deceiver so God cannot have given him systematically misleading machinery.
Our senses and our reason must be trustworthy when in proper condition and used properly. Our errors of reasoning are due to our errors in our will. Our will to assent to a proposition is more powerful than our reason’s ability to know a proposition is true. This means that we can decide to believe more than we can actually know. Descartes considers us culpable when we affirm propositions for which we do not have adequate certainty. We must restrain our wills to only affirm those propositions which we genuinely know. (And this formal principle is precisely my own reason to categorically reject all faith statements, since by definition faith involves assenting beyond knowability).
It’s questionable whether Descartes genuinely believed in God or was in reality an actual skeptic who threw in weak ontological arguments for God’s existence as a way to keep his work from getting banned.
And, in reply to Brian D., Descartes was all genius and no crackpot. And he certainly was not a supernaturalist, not of the kind that we meet in the modern day. Descartes’ God was not a supernaturalistic one but entirely a rationalist’s God. Beginning with Augustine and culminating with the Medieval nominalist tradition, Christianity had tried to assert God’s ultimate supremacy even over reason itself. Christians have long argued in numerous ways that God can supersede reason and even overturn it. God is not subject to laws of reason or even morality but creates them, can change them at will, and does not give our minds the capability to know him or reality beyond certain limitations of our reason.
In the nominalist tradition this idea culminated with the idea that things have no natural essences but God creates them uniquely in every instance and can change them at will. With no belief in rational, consistent, binding essences in nature, science is impossible. If the world is God’s random light show, then there is no causal order which can be known with certainty. The nominalists, as many Christians before them, in this way put up impediments to reason. Descartes and the other Enlightenment thinkers insisted on a rational God who provides a rational nature knowable by reason. This was a decisive break with Christian philosophy and a huge blow for secularism and science. Only the belief that nature was consistent, rational, and investigable opened the door for the modern era.
So Descartes was using the word “God” but what he was doing was entirely subversive to the Christian use of the term. In the Christian’s mind then (and I would argue still today) God means the possibility of a power that answers to know reasons morally or naturally. For the Christians, God is the ability to posit the irrational as higher than the rational, the arbitrary commands of “God” (or, more accurately, his earthly representatives) as overruling moral reasoning wherever they conflict, and the ability to posit irrational “supernatural” realms that contradict or contravene in the natural, rational one. Descartes is one of the heroes of secularism leading the charge that insists only on rationally justified belief in a rationally knowable nature and a logically and morally bound God.
Finally, Daniel Dennett gave a wonderful interview wherein he talks about how Darwin’s greatest innovation was to bring back purpose back as a category of knowledge by showing how it could arise from within the material realm and its efficient causes. Descartes was right to ditch it but today biology has found a way to think in terms of purposes in nature that is consistent with material causal processes. That way to think of efficient causes as generating de facto purposes is evolution and natural selection.
Great post, and I apologize already for my short (and off-topic) response, but I have to say that Daniel Dennett is quite the character. I don’t know how much of him you’ve read, but he has some incredibly interesting and somewhat insane ideas. Can’t say that I sign on to much of what he says, but he sure is a fascinating dude.
Yeah, not being a philosopher or mind by training myself, I have only read a little bit of Dennett, but recently encountering him frequently as a culturally prominent proponent of atheism, I have increasingly grown to like him. I have found him to always put his own curious spin even on the most familiar ideas. He really is, above all things, interesting and thought-provoking.
I don’t see much of a point in debating your first point as I largely agree with you. So as for the second:
Secondly, Descartes categorically does not argue from the natural world to the existence of God.
Agreed. However, as you’ve shown, he does make the argument that there are some things that function with such perfection that God must exist. After using the argument you provided above, he goes on to use the apparent beauty of the world as supporting evidence for his claims, though you are correct in asserting he does not start there. This is what was meant. Perhaps you misunderstood.
Also, while you don’t find anything particularly Christian about this notion of God I suspect that the words chosen by Descartes to describe God resonated with a lot of Christians looking for a concrete way of describing what they already assumed/hoped to be true. Not to say that Descartes was purposefully trying to deceive anyone, but he was human.
In summary, I recognize the man’s genius but I think that even at 16, I was able to recognize the err in his ways. Doubly the result of an equally powerful intellect, this perhaps shows that I am the product of an era that often sees the very concept of ‘perfection’ is a human abstraction brought about by an evolutionary need to break down problems into simpler parts.
I wonder if Descartes ever pondered this. Thoughts?
correction:
Doubtfully the result of an equally powerful intellect
;-)
“However, as you’ve shown, he does make the argument that there are some things that function with such perfection that God must exist.”
I’m not sure where you’re getting this from. All I was referring to was the idea that we think our senses give us truth reliably. It is not because they are reliable or perfect that God exists but it’s because God exists that we can trust our natural inclination to believe them reliable. I don’t see how that’s an argument from design to God. It IS an argument from design to the trustworthiness of the senses however (i.e., because God created our senses to fit the world and because God must be good, our senses give us truth). That argument is indeed outdated. There is an evolutionary explanation about the reliability of our senses now (they were naturally selected for superior fitness in discrimination) and an evolutionary account of their limitations (having been evolved through a purposeless process, they do not function ideally in every respect or necessarily exhaust all that could be grasped about the world through other possibly evolved organs of perception).
As to Descartes’ choice of phrases and metaphors to appeal to Christians that is most certainly true. Descartes rips off Augustine all over the place (for example, the Cogito was already in Augustine, and on some readings already in Plato, and Descartes uses the Augustinian metaphor of illumination of the mind liberally, which again is also an obvious carry over from Platonism, and Descartes assumes Augustine’s notion of evil as a lack of perfection without argument).
“Beware! The mind of the believer stagnates. It fails to grow outward into an unlimited, infinite universe.” Frank Herbert via Heretics of Dune
The world would do well with a heavy dose of skepticism.
I saw the Frank Herbert quote and had to add one:
“If you need something to worship, then worship life — all life, every last crawling bit of it! We’re all in this beauty together!”
-Paul Muad’Dib, “Dune Messiah.”
Also:
“Ubi dubium ibi libertas:
Where there is doubt, there is freedom.”
- Latin Proverb
I doubt he really meant that….
;)
Since I didn’t give an interpretation, does that mean you doubt your own interpretation? But perhaps you should doubt that you doubt he really meant that? :)
[Continue recursion process...]
What would one call doubting doubt? I doubt we’ll agree on an answer, though …
a redundancy
An infinite loop, of course. ;p
Not to get uber-philosophical, but that reminds me of the “Agrippan trilemma” which says that no belief is justified, since any justification process relies on
a) an arbitrary assumption,
b) an infinite regress, or
c) a viscious circle.
Oh how I love the ancient skeptics.
You guys are really clever.
Just wanted to chime in to say that I think one can have faith and doubts at the same time. In fact, how could we not have both since faith is such a subjective thing? The church as hurt a lot of folks in their fear of legitimate questions.
Didn’t phrase that last sentence well. The church has hurt many people who simply had legitimate questions.
Of course the faithful doubt, Clergy Guy—doubt is a precondition of faith. Were religious believers to be certain and doubtless (even if wrong), then they wouldn’t be exercising a will to believe worth calling faith. They would just be believing with certainty that they had facts just like those they get from perception or reliable testimony about which they feel no conflict to believe.
The issue is not whether or not one passively experiences doubts. That happens to any thinking person who has either not been presented with sufficient evidence or who has encountered significant counter reasons or counter-evidence for their beliefs. The issue is rather one’s attitude towards doubt. Because the person of faith makes a volitional commitment to a tradition and its beliefs both in advance of possible new evidence or arguments and also often to the PRECLUSION of genuinely honest, open-ended skeptical investigation, the person of faith, by definition is opposed to rigorous doubt.
The person of faith, by definition, cannot be a skeptic, cannot be a freethinker with respect to religious matters, cannot take the attitude that future evidence or reasons will change his or her mind about religious matters. A person who genuinely does have those attitudes and priorities of an open-ended investigator is already not sufficiently a person of faith, she is already willing to put commitment to truth over commitment to religious tradition. From there it’s only a matter of time if she seriously inquires that she will abandon religious tradition as insufficiently founded.
In my own case, as devout a Christian as I once was, in retrospect I was always a rationalist at heart and in methods. My Christianity was desperately rationalized so that I could think it was actually rational. When 7 high school and college years of relentless rationalizing (and especially the last 3 spent studying theology and philosophy full time) just couldn’t make it rationally acceptable, the rationalist in me had to reject those religious beliefs. Ultimately I was not really a person of faith. I was a young kid trying to find the rational justification for the religious theories and tradition to which I had been deeply emotionally, intellectually, and socially attached.
By contrast, a genuine faith is a genuine willingness to believe precisely where there are good reasons to doubt. Genuine faith believes not only where there is just insufficient evidence but where there is a preponderance of positive countervailing reasons not to believe. In that context doubt is embraced not as a route to a more honest truth but as a challenge to believe all the harder and all the more faithfully in the unlikely. The moment of doubt is embraced in a comparable way to the one in which we embrace the irritation of sexual desire. It’s a set up for the consummation and satisfaction. Doubt for the believer is a way of creating an opening for reaffirmation of faith and the experience of a strong act of faith, just the way that sexual desire sets us up for the satisfaction of orgasm. For the faithful, doubt is not desired for its own sake or as a means to truth but as an occasion for an intensification of faith (or minimally, for its possibility) and for the faithful doubt ultimately cannot be decisive. The very character trait of faithfulness (seen as a virtue by the faithful and even some non-believers but as a vice by me and many here) is a disposition against ever concluding on the side of doubt, even where there is preponderance of evidence in that direction.
Let me personalize this (and ask your forgiveness for the rudeness of personalizing an abstract debate): Can you, as a member of the Christian clergy, conceive of the possible conditions wherein you would be inclined to leave the faith? Are there possible conclusions that if you were led to them rationally you can acknowledge in advance you would be forced to abandon not only your faith but your life’s work and existential vocation? Do you resolve that you are willing to inquire with open endedness, to immerse yourself in contrary ways of thinking to your faith’s and give them the full chance to prove themselves to you? Do you set up tests which your beliefs must pass or you will choose to abandon it?
If you don’t do these things, if you don’t have a clear sense of how you would judge your faith and what the possible conditions under which you would reject it are, then you are not DOUBTING. You are not leaving open the possibility of abandonment of the position. You may think about the reasons against your position and even indulge your pangs of uncertainty, but you’re not putting those beliefs into reason’s furnaces fully prepared to see them burn rather than survive.
Maybe you are, maybe that’s why you’re here hanging with the atheists and on your blog expressing your disillusionment with Christianity. Maybe deep down are a free thinker who would rather be honest than faithful. But it’s one or the other—-honesty or faithfulness, doubt or faith. You can’t have it both ways.
Wow, really articulate stuff. I especially appreciate your sharing some of your own story.
I don’t have the time (and perhaps this is not the place) to consider a full reply to your challenge, but’s fair and deserves an answer. I promise to address this, probably in my own blog, so that I won’t take the room here.
However, I will counter your last statement that I cannot have both honesty and faithfulness, that I cannot have it both ways. Yes I can. I do not believe they are mutually exclusive.
And I like hanging with you atheists for two reasons. First, I like a challenging discussion. Second, I like some of you guys and gals.
Thanks Clergy Guy. I look forward to your reply. (I enjoyed your blog the several times during the summer that I stopped by, btw) When you reply, if it’s on your blog that you do so, please link to this (slightly filled out and modified) version of the above comment http://camelswithhammers.com/2009/09/05/disambiguating-faith-faith-is-preconditioned-by-doubt-but-precludes-serious-doubting/
I’ve published an expanded response to Camels with Hammer on my blog at http://clergyguy.blogspot.com/2009/09/faith-vs-doubt-smackdown.html. Thanks.
and for those interested, here is my reply to Clergy Guy’s reply to me.
http://camelswithhammers.com/2009/09/07/disambiguating-faith-by-soul-searching-with-clergy-guy/
Thanks again, Clergy Guy!
For an interesting “modern” (end of the 19th century / beginning of the 20th century) take on the tenability of doubt and of belief formation, check out William James’ The Will to Believe and William Clifford’s The Ethics of Belief.
I guess looking back, the debate between Clifford and James is less about doubt and more about how we do (and should) form our belief-systems (which I guess is related to doubt), but the underlying theme is whether ‘religious’ belief is at all reasonable (James famously argues that it is; Clifford argues that it most certainly is not), so I think it’s appropriate for this blog and its readers. Anyway, I think you should all check it out, as it’s quite a breath of fresh air compared to the sort of ‘arguments’ we hear from religious apologetics/fundamentalists these days.
Clifford (via James) was a huge influence on me in college and in my process of leaving Christianity. I wrote a post last month summarizing their positions and exploring why I think Clifford is correct and James is wrong. For anyone interested http://camelswithhammers.com/2009/07/29/psychotic-reasoning-the-will-to-believe-and-religious-interpretations-of-the-mentally-ill/
Fascinating post. Personally I have come to the opposite conclusion (Clifford was basically wrong and James basically right), though James’ criteria is still too permissible. I think that the key point is that there is a difference between holding a belief (an epistemic concern) and acting on a belief (which is *also* an ethical concern). Beliefs may and often do conflict, and so the actions that proceed from them are often the outcome of one or more beliefs being compromised, rather than fully expressed. Clifford’s problem is in eliding the distinction, arguing that the mere epistemic predilections of a person have ethical consequences. It is this that I don’t think is warranted, given the actual practical distinctions between holding a belief and acting upon it.
Hmmmm. I interesting, Elemenope and worth thinking over in another post I don’t have the time to write just now but hopefully will soon. In the meantime, I do in this post http://camelswithhammers.com/2009/08/19/rational-beliefs-rational-actions-and-when-it-is-rational-to-act-on-what-you-dont-think-is-true/ try to draw some distinctions between what we should believe and what we should do in cases where a less probably true belief is one worth acting upon over a more probable belief given certain calculations of risks and benefits. That consideration is not exactly what you’re arguing but it’s along the way there.
And there is Clifford’s case that the wrongness of believing badly is that you transmit the bad habits of belief to others. It seems that the very practice of forming a belief in a rationally unjustified way encourages others to do the same insofar as you are a role model to anyone. And so it’s not just the possible unethical things I actually take away from my beliefs but the encouragement of my children and my neighbor in their bad belief formation, (which I discussed here http://camelswithhammers.com/2009/06/24/objections-to-religious-moderates-and-intellectuals/) combined with the recognition that it’s quite possible that even if I am not acting in the ethically dangerous or irresponsible ways logically entailed or even simply made possible by the content of my beliefs, I am still transmitting beliefs to others who very well may perform the dangerous or irresponsible actions they imply.
But I think what’s worth developing most of all in more detail is the notion that assenting to a belief unjustifiably is an action that can be considered wrong in itself (not just rationally but ethically) even if specific bad consequences to do not follow from it because you do not act upon it. I think it’s worth it to bracket social consequences of infecting others with the bad belief and simply ask whether it is ethically condemnable in itself to simply assent to an unjustified belief which leads to know specifically reckless actions in your specific case. I hope to get the chance to chew that over and get back to you!
Camels With Hammers,
That’s an interesting perspective you have on the Clifford/James ‘debate’. I studied the two extensively in a philosophy senior seminar, and ended up giving a presentation to the faculty called “Faith and Reason” that dealt mainly with those two (with some Plantinga sprinkled in for good measure). I can’t say that I ‘fell down’ on either side of the argument, persay, but as an atheist I suppose if I was forced to ‘choose sides’ I would probably tentatively step over toward Clifford.
I think it’s cool that you used Clifford’s arguments to help guide yourself away from your religious beliefs. I’d love to chat more about this topic, as it’s one of great interest to me. I’ll have to dig through my presentation notes to refamiliarize myself with both arguments :)
Best,
Brian
Sure thing, Brian. Particularly if you want to volley a challenge or alternative reading of the debate (or of one of the thinkers) my way, it might help me come up with another blog post where I can define my Clifford-esque views some more. :)
In my dissertation I briefly raise Clifford to distinguish my own sense of epistemic duties a bit from his. But outside of technical contexts, I would defend him when speaking broadly. If you’re up for offering suggestions about the issues he addresses, I’d love the provocation to work out more careful distinctions.
This reminds me of all the times I’ve heard “oh, it’s really good to doubt” from believers. Except they don’t really mean it — they mean something more like “it’s great to think about the tough questions now and then, so long as you don’t let go of your faith.” If you’re going to place great value on doubt, then you must place value on the result of an honest exploration of that doubt.
Well said; it comes down to personal honesty.
Shopping is perfect analogy for atheists to understand how believers arrive at conclusions they already desire. I rationalize the most incredibly unnecessary purchases when I walk into an Apple Store. Do I need this? Can I afford this? How is this iPhone case better than the other two I own? Depending on how badly I want it, and how effectively I am willing to ignore my own critical analysis, I’ll find the justification for the purchase.
Believers need their beliefs to be true even more so because their world view, their relationships, the way they raise their children, are all tied to their faith. Thus, they are highly susceptible to the credulity virus.
Except that Des Cartes then backpedals and tries to prove there’s a god.
That’s not “backpedaling” at all. He doubts the existence of God and sees if he has any reasons to think there is a God which can be founded only on “clear and distinct ideas.” He thinks he finds that clearly and distinctly understanding the idea of a perfect being entails having to infer necessarily that such a being must exist. You may not like the argument but it’s not that he didn’t bother to doubt the existence of God or (at least seemingly) offer an argument based on what he took to be clear and distinct ideas.
“He thinks he finds that clearly and distinctly understanding the idea of a perfect being entails having to infer necessarily that such a being must exist.”
I won’t disagree with you about DesCartes, but I must say that I hate this particular argument with an almost irrational passion.
Heh, I agree completely. I think Descartes (warning, this is completely my own interpretation and am NOT trying to ‘put words’ in anyone’s mouth), like many believers, go through the process of “doubting” God and then “proving” his existence using reason (or “clear and distinct ideas”) only because it was their aim (whether conscious or subconscious) from the start.
In other words, Descartes does go through the motions of doubting God and then proving his existence from his developed foundationalism, but I always get the feeling that God would have popped in to the picture no matter what epistemic system Descartes was running.
Maybe I’m just mean though…
When you believe in God, it’s a mighty big term to attempt to bracket out.
Well of course Descartes doesn’t really just doubt everything and see what he’ll come up with. He knows where his argument is going and the format of the Meditations wherein he systematically doubts is just the presentation of the ideas. It’s very much the magic act that sells the system in a way which captures the imagination. It may have never crossed Descartes’ mind that he would not eventually defend the existence of God as part of his system.
But, that said, it is important to distinguish several things. 1. It’s not trivial that he differs from contemporary presuppositionalists who do rather audaciously think you can assume God without arguments. And it’s not trivial that he does not simply admit God in by faith (at least not explicitly) but rather demands reasons and only proves a rationalist’s God.
2. It’s quite possible that he was a skeptic (as some philosophers seriously think) who did not believe in God at all. In his day, it really wasn’t going to be an option. So, while God was inevitably going to show up in his system, that does not necessarily bespeak Descartes’ own inability to think beyond God but a world in which one was unable to publish philosophical treatises that did not involve God showing up.
And it’s not trivial that he does not simply admit God in by faith (at least not explicitly) but rather demands reasons and only proves a rationalist’s God.
It’s not exactly trivial, but it is pretty standard for all rationalists since at least Thomas Aquinas, who placed God *last* in the order of knowledge (i.e. not to be pre-supposed).