And what of the Evil Demon? On this story, the true moral of Descartes’s struggles is that if we raise the question whether our experience and reasoning (en bloc) accords with the way the world is (en bloc), it will take an act of faith to settle it. ‘God’ simply labels whatever it is that ensures this harmony between belief and the world. But, as Hume says in the passage just quoted, we do not find a need to raise this question in normal life. The hyperbolic doubt, and the answer to it, is in this sense unreal.
