C.S. Lewis and the Argument from Desire
Wednesday July 23, 2008
One of the earliest arguments offered by C.S. Lewis for believing in the existence of God can be labeled the 'Argument from Desire.' According to Lewis and other apologists, every desire is necessarily a desire for something, and every natural desire must have some object that will satisfy it. Since humans desire the joy and experience of God, therefore there must be a God that will satisfy our desires.
Read Article: C.S. Lewis and the Argument from Desire
Comments
Like most of Lewis’ arguments, I’m underwhelmed by this one.
I have no problem in the practical sense with is concept about hunger = food. But that comes from knowing/understanding what hunger is and how it relates to food. We can observe this association. We understand it quite well.
However, as you point out, and as any child should recognize, we do desire many impossible things. There are times I wish very much that I could be eight years old again–but I’m pretty certain that doesn’t mean I can go back in time and be eight years old again.
Likewise, I sometimes feel dissatisfied, and have no idea “why.” The major question here is WHY, however. We know WHY we get hungry–because we need food, and that’s our biological trigger to drive us to eat. I don’t know WHY I wish I could be a kid again sometimes. And I absolutely have no idea why I sometimes get “the blues” or “in a funk” for no reason (as do most other people).
So, Lewis hedges this with “natural” desires. But he fails miserably to associate why we feel hunger–and our biological knowledge of how that relates to food–to why some people (generally those who have been exposed to religion previously in their youth) feel a need to “find” god.
Is the search for “god” similar to the mystery search to be eight again? Or is it similar to the hungry man’s search for food?
He doesn’t really answer that. And that’s really the question. Since we have no knowledge of gods or of whether or not gods inspire desire…we have no god to examine (unlike brains and digestive tracts–which we can examine and get to understand).
I also have no way to examine my desire to be eight (short of therapy–but it’s simply not THAT big of an impediment to living my life).
It seems that if we can’t examine the nature of god and we cannot observe the connection between the desire and the object (god), then it’s not something that should qualify as a “natural” desire. It seems mental–like my childhood nostalgia–not at all like the physical pangs that can be directly observed to trigger hunger.
I think the most underwhelming aspect of this argument is that I have never had a desire for an experience of god. From what I have read of the bible, I have concluded that the christian god (if existant) is a wicked being. But, from what I have read from Lewis, he seemed more to be attempting to justify belief for believers than to persuade non-believers. He may even have been trying to convince himself.
Adrian:
I agree completely with your assessment of Lewis’ potential motivations. To me, he just consistently disregards observable reality again and again. He makes arguments that ignore those parts of reality that we all see and experience. When I hear a Lewis argument, I inevitably find myself thinking…”but what about scenario X?”–and it’s always a scenario we’d all recognize in our lives–that he just seems to not address. He acts like (1) the scenario doesn’t exist, and (2) nobody will think to bring this up. But the “what about” scenarios are so common that I can’t imagine him thinking _nobody’s_ going to ask about it and how it conflicts with his argument. And it’s not any one particular argument–it’s nearly all his claims.
Adrian:
You write: “We can’t prove the existence of food by the fact that we are hungry; instead, we prove it by finding edible things.” That’s it in a nutshell. Of course, believers will tend to say that they have found their “edible things,” that is, that they have “found God.” What they won’t admit is that it’s all something going on in their own minds; to them, “experiencing God” is as real as eating bread. (Perhaps this is a source of the ritual of the Eucharist.)
Of course, they don’t want to acknowledge that everyone eats food but only believers “eat” their “spiritual food.” They are really quite egocentric, it seems to me. It’s all about what they think they are experiencing.
(Perhaps this is a source of the ritual of the Eucharist.)
My reading of the eucharist is that it is ritual cannibalism where you eat the flesh, and drink the blood of a person you admire, hoping to take on the attributes of the person you are eating. In this case they are substituting bread and wine, pretending that is is flesh and blood.
My issue with Lewis is that he argues too much from analogy. Useful as an aid to understanding a complicated point… but too often it is central to what he is trying to say and can become a real weakness.
The interesting thing about the argument from desire is that it really does seem to be specific and fairly pervasive.
Austin’s points on desiring impossible things like flying and reading minds are good ones.
But I’m not sure they get to the heart of invalidating Lewis’ point completely. Yes, flight is impossible for us in the direct way being talked about, but we see birds fly and it is easy to imagine how much fun that would be.
We understand mind reading because we read our own minds (in some sense) and I can understand how it would be interesting to know someone else like we know ourselves.
And the desire for flight led to airplanes, that’s pretty cool. Maybe the desire to read minds led to language and philosophy and rhetoric, also good things in my mind.
What I don’t see is someone desiring something that is truly and completely beyond our experience. We don’t desire truly non-existant squibblenips in much the same way that a person blind from birth doesn’t desire one color red over another.
Maybe the desire for God or heaven is just an extension of our view of parent figures or a place where we felt truly safe, etc…
On the other hand it seems clear that Lewis is really Begging the Question here… but that makes me wonder if that isn’t his point. That there is in fact, a Question to be Begged and maybe the conclusion baked into the questions we tend to ask is itself a piece of evidence for us to consider.
humble says:What I don’t see is someone desiring something that is truly and completely beyond our experience.
You have got to read some science fiction or fantasy!
And I desire to fly like a bird (a desire humankind has had since seeing birds), but that doesn’t mean I ever will.