Can anyone explain Descarte's method of doubt?

Question

What do you think Descarte's concluded from this method? and do you agree or disagree?

Answer 1

Pretty much, how can you ever be 100% sure about anything? There will always be some doubt. So the only way that you know you exist is because you think you do. All other ways have some doubt.

"In his Meditations on First Philosophy he attempts to arrive at a fundamental set of principles that one can know as true without any doubt. To achieve this, he employs a method called methodological skepticism: he doubts any idea that can be doubted.

He gives the example of dreaming: in a dream, one's senses perceive stimuli that seem real, but do not actually exist. Thus, one cannot rely on the data of the senses as necessarily true. Or, perhaps an "evil demon" exists: a supremely powerful and cunning being who sets out to try to deceive Descartes from knowing the true nature of reality. Given these possibilities, what can one know for certain?

Initially, Descartes arrives at only a single principle: if I am being deceived, then surely "I" must exist. Most famously, this is known as cogito ergo sum, ("I think, therefore I am"). (These words do not appear in the Meditations, although he had written them in his earlier work Discourse on Method)."

Answer 2

If human reason, intelligence, and rationality are the guiding lights of atheistic living and what is needed to make humanity better, and history shows that humans who believed they were reasonable, intelligent, and rational have done some of the most idiotic(building New Orleans on a swamp), irrational (creating and promoting cigarettes as healthy and cool), and immoral to humanity(slavery, Japanese prison camps) acts in Earth's history. Isn't the believe in the reason and rationale of humans dispite the piles of evidence to suggestion how poor these things are in humans an act of faith. Isn't faith and act of religion? Isn't religion a quality of a non-atheist? So how can there be a true atheist?
Yes, because acts of faith aren't by definition religious. Ephistomology teaches us that the only thing that can be truely KNOWN without doubt is Renee Descarte's "I think therefor I am" Everythng else, our perceptions, math, the world around us, the existance of others, the past and future existance of ourselves, etc... are believed based on what we can and have perceived, but cannot be PROVEN. Thus belief in ANYTHING other than your own existance is an act of faith. However, we don't have religious faith for all of them. That's a specific KIND of faith. So, unless you're prepared to claim that you have religious faith in a ham sandwitch, you can't deny non-religious faith to atheists.

P.S. for all the people who's saying he's not making any sense, he's making perfect sense. He's just wrong. In short, his question is:

Mankind has proven unreliable. Since Atheists rely on man's reasoning to claim there is not God, don't they have to place their faith that in THAT proof, man was not wrong? If they have faith, do they not have a God?

Answer 3

http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/philosophers/method-of-doubt.html