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First Steps - Undeniable Truth
Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
- Genesis 1:26 - 27
Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.
- Genesis 2:7
Then Moses said to God, "Behold, I am going to the sons of Israel, and I will say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you.' Now they may say to me, 'What is his name?' What shall I say to them?" God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM;" and he said, "Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, 'I AM has sent me to you.'"
- Exodus 3:13 - 14
"I think, therefore I am."
- Rene Descartes
On a certain day in the first half of the 17th century, the Frenchman Rene Descartes undertook to doubt all that could possibly be doubted. Descartes observed that his senses could be untrustworthy. For the sake of doubt he suggested an extreme - that nothing he believed to be true was actually true; he proposed instead that the testimony of his senses might be the invention of a demonic trickster.
However, Descartes found himself unable to doubt his own existence. As the object of the trickster's machinations, he must exist in order to be misled by its fabricated experiences. The culmination of this experiment in excessive skepticism was his famous proclamation:
"Cogito, ergo sum." - I think, therefore I am.
This claim is an example of a self-evident truth. It must be accepted on its own terms without any auxiliary reasoning. It is unprovable - no matter what sequence of arguments are offered, they could be a part of the trickster's elaborate ruse. On the other hand, it is undeniable - one cannot doubt one's own existence without affirming to one's self that one exists to do the doubting.
Interestingly, Descartes' proposition allows one to be certain of one's own existence, but not of the existence of anyone else. You and I may independently rest on the assurance of our own existence, while each still allowing that the other might be an illusion supplied by a demonic trickster!
Descartes' contemporaries pointed out that "Cogito, ergo sum" has the appearance of a classic logical syllogism; and as a syllogism, it is invalid. (In order for the syllogism to work, one would have to assume true that which had previously been doubted - namely that existence is a property of thinking things.) Descartes agreed with this criticism, affirmed that the cogito was not a syllogism, and rephrased appropriately: "I am, I exist," which he called "the first certainty."
The first certainty is a thundering assertion of self-awareness. One exists as a processor of sensory inputs, not as a mere aggregate collection of them. Even if the testimony of the senses is utterly false, one still exists to be fooled by them. As the senses are lost, one loses contact with the surrounding universe (or with the fabrications of the trickster!), but one does not lose one's identity as an "I am."