Doubt and certainty are complementary concepts: by definition, nothing that can be doubted is certain, and something is certain if there is no doubt about it being true. Thus, none of these sciences can be truly reliable unless their philosophical foundation is certain. The Meditator wants to start with a certain first principle because he knows that all of science is connected: the basic principles of philosophy are the foundation of physics, which is the foundation for sciences like astronomy, chemistry, and biology, which can in turn explain the basic rules of human psychology and social life. This proposal revolutionized Western science and philosophy forever. In other words, he proposed that humans should use the scientific method to understand the world. He also wanted to show that people could achieve absolutely certain knowledge about the natural world around them by analyzing it scientifically. But Descartes thought that science was a better alternative, in part because he thought science would definitively prove the basic truths of religion. In the 17th century, religious faith was generally accepted as the best source of knowledge about the world. The First Meditation is arguably the most influential passage in all of Descartes’s writing because it lays out a clear solution to the fundamental question at the heart of his life’s work: how can people be certain about anything? Descartes cares about this problem because it speaks to the fundamental relationship between science and knowledge. Descartes’s Meditator points out that most of what people believe is based on received wisdom, not rigorous rational analysis, and he proposes “start right again from the foundations” of knowledge as an alternative.
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