vil genius there is one way that this theory came about. The possibility is that our inherent mathematical abilities are the gift of a benign creator, a gift of God. As a supremely good being, he would not allow us to be deceived, and mathematical processes would be a point of certain and undeniable truth. If this were the case, the idea of mathematics would meet Descartes' objectives as a point of certainty. He asks the reader to imagine that instead of a benign God, there is an "evil genius”. In this case, all things in the physical world would have to be thought of as deceptions, because all our sensory information, including ideas of sizes, shapes and colors would be fed to us by the evil genius. Descartes ideas sometimes seem radical or extreme and his argument has been challenged many times. One of the people that challenged Descartes was O.K. Bouwsma when he wrote, "Descartes' Evil Genius”. Bouwsma's criticism focuses on Descartes' idea of an evil genius creating an "illusory" world. His intent was to prove that Descartes' ideas of illusion and deception were misleading. First, Bouwsma set out to define "illusions" and to show how they are detected. In order to accomplish this goal, he gave the example of the evil genius turning the world and everything in it into paper. In the passage we watches "Tom" as he is exposed to and realizes the difference between the real world and the geniuses paper one. Although the evil genius attempted to create a realistic world out of paper, Tom saw through the illusion when he realized the difference between the paper flowers and real flowers. Tom was not really deceived by the paper illusion since he saw through it rather quickly, but he did "experience" the illusion. He experienced it and he detected it. Bouwsma, with this example, is trying to point out the importance of how people detect illusions. For instance, Tom detects the illusion because he knows the...
