Mohammad Taheri-azar’s letter to the Daily Tar Heel is an attempt at reconstructing Rene Descartes Rationalism of the 17th and 18th centuries. I say attempt because our regional terrorist does a terrible job at reconstructing the arguments, managing only to steal catch phrases and piece together ad hoc arguments from both Descartes and Aquinas.

First, MT calls his letter to DTH a Meditation. Might as well call copy right infringement, sending a nice lawyerly letter notifying Descartes who first pioneered the Rationalist tradition by penning his faux fire-side thoughts on philosophy, Meditations on First Philosophy. In the original version of the Meditations, not MT’s hack, Descartes questions all his senses, concluding that he can trust nothing and must therefore build up his confidence in truth by establishing a first principle from which all knowledge could be based. MT does this too, claiming:

It has come to my mind at a very early hour of the morning to question the truth of clear and distinct ideas and whether reality should be defined as extending beyond my experiences [he later includes science, as he should, as part of experience] or as pertaining to laws governing my experiences [a greater law, or meta-being, i.e. God] . . .

Descartes says similar things in his synopsis of his Meditations:

In the first Meditation I set forth the reasons for which we may, generally speaking, doubt about all things and especially about material things, at least so long as we have no other foundations for the sciences than those which we have hitherto possessed. But although the utility of a Doubt which is so general does not at first appear, it is at the same time very great, inasmuch as it delivers us from every kind of prejudice, and sets out for us a very simple way by which the mind may detach itself from the senses; and finally it makes it impossible for us ever to doubt those things which we have once discovered to be true.

Descartes (and amazingly MT!) concludes that the only thing he can know for sure are those things that are clear and distinctly perceived by his mind. Because there must be a mind to do the perceiving, he must be real, or at least his mind. Further, there is no way that he could bring himself into existence, so therefore something must have done it (besides his parents, because the argument could regress forever). This of course being God.

The DTH only has the first of probably several letters to be penned by MT. This “Meditation” serves as setting up God as the only being who must exist. God, then, becomes the ultimate reality and truth; as a side bar, he also becomes a scapegoat justification of MT’s actions.

As intelligent as the letter and argument seem, mostly because it hijacks Descartes, it also fails in the same way Descartes argument did. Using God to justify your existence and reason for believing in the world around you (beginning first with yourself (cogito ergo sum)), your argument fails by circular reasoning. Clear and distinct ideas ? the rule established to provide certainty for truth ? comes from God, while your assurance of God’s truth comes from a clear and distinct thought.

Ultimately, MT’s reason for causing terror in Chapel Hill (God’s will and revenge for a belief), will fall to the same circular reasoning he’s used to explain his beliefs.