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WillowOne's Positions

Argument from Desire

Form

  1. Every innate human desire corresponds to some real object that can satisfy it. (Hunger corresponds to food; thirst to water.)
  2. Humans have an innate desire that nothing in this world can satisfy.
  3. Therefore there must be something beyond this world that can satisfy it, and that something is God.

The argument is most associated with C. S. Lewis (Mere Christianity, 1952): "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

My Positions

  1. The form of this argument is a non-sequitur. Even if I were to grant the innate desire, the nature of which is vague and likely to be a misattribution (see The human need for religion), it does not follow that there is a transcendent source or object of that desire.
  2. Premise 1 is false. Desires do not guarantee their objects. People desire immortality, flight without aircraft, the return of the dead, and a great many things that do not and cannot exist. Desire is a fact about the person, not about the world.
  3. Premise 2 is unsupported. The claim that there is a desire "nothing in this world can satisfy" is unfalsifiable, since any apparent satisfaction can be dismissed as incomplete. More plausibly, the feeling described is a general restlessness that is never permanently resolved by anything, which is exactly what one would expect of a creature evolved to keep striving.
  4. The conclusion does not follow even from the premises. If there is a desire for the transcendent, the argument would at most establish that something transcendent exists, not that it is a personal god, let alone the Christian one. A Buddhist could run the same argument for nirvana.
  5. The argument confuses the need with a proposed remedy. That people want consolation is no evidence that the particular consolation on offer is real.

Also see