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One of the classical demonstrations of God’s existence is the so-called argument from desire.
It can be stated in a very succinct manner as follows. Every innate or natural desire corresponds to some objective state of affairs that fulfills it.
We all have an innate or natural desire for ultimate fulfillment, ultimate joy, which nothing in this world can possibly satisfy. Therefore there must exist objectively a supernatural condition that grounds perfect fulfillment and happiness, which people generally refer to as “God.”
Dismissed by skeptics
I have found in my work as an apologist and evangelist that this demonstration — even more than the cosmological arguments — tends to be dismissed out of hand by skeptics.
They observe that wishing something doesn’t make it so. For example, I may want to have a billion dollars, but the wish doesn’t make the money appear.
This cavalier rejection of a venerable demonstration is a consequence, I believe, of the influence of Ludwig Feuerbach and Sigmund Freud, who said that religion amounts to a pathetic project of wish-fulfillment.
They felt that it was high time the human race shake off these infantile illusions. In Feuerbach’s famous phrase: “The no to God is the yes to man.” The same idea is contained in the aphorism of Feuerbach’s best-known disciple, Karl Marx: “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”
Probing the argument
In the wake of this criticism, can the argument from desire still stand? I think it can, but we have to probe behind its deceptively simple surface to grasp its cogency.
The first premise of the demonstration hinges on a distinction between natural or innate desires and desires of a more artificial or contrived variety.
Examples of the first type include the desire for food, sex, companionship, beauty, and knowledge; examples of second type include the longing for a fashionable suit of clothes, a fast car, or Shangri-La.
Because desires of the second category are externally motivated or psychologically contrived, they don’t prove anything regarding the objective existence of their objects.
But desires of the first type do indeed correspond to, and infallibly indicate, the existence of the states of affairs that will fulfill them: hunger points to the objective existence of food, thirst to the objective existence of drink, sexual longing to the objective existence of the sexual act, etc.
The correlation is born of the real participation of the desire in its object. For example, hunger is unthinkable apart from food, since the stomach is “built” for food.
Desire for perfect fulfillment
So what kind of desire is the desire for perfect fulfillment? Since it cannot be met by any value within the world, it must be a longing for truth, goodness, beauty, and being in their properly unconditioned form.
But the unconditioned, by definition, must transcend any limit that we might set. It cannot, therefore, be merely subjective, for such a characterization would render it not truly unconditioned. This gives the lie to any attempt to write off the object of this desire as a wish-fulfilling fantasy, as a projection of subjectivity.
The longing for God participates in God, much as hunger participates in food. And thus, precisely in the measure that the desire under consideration is an innate and natural desire, it does indeed prove the existence of its proper object.
Cornerstone of C.S. Lewis
One of the best proponents of this argument in the last century was C.S. Lewis. He made it the cornerstone of his religious philosophy and the still-point around which much of his fiction turned.
What particularly intrigued Lewis was the sweetly awful quality of this desire for something that can never find its fulfillment in any worldly reality, a desire that, at the same time, frustrates and fascinates us. This unique ache of the soul he called “joy.”
In the Narnia stories, Aslan the lion stands for the object of this desire for the unconditioned. When the good mare Hwin confronts the lion for the first time, she says, “Please, you are so beautiful. You may eat me if you like. I would sooner be eaten by you than fed by anyone else.”
To understand the meaning of that utterance is to grasp the point of the argument from desire.
Fr. Robert Barron is the founder of the global ministry, Word on Fire, and is the rector/president of Mundelein Seminary near Chicago. Learn more at www.WordOnFire.org