At some point, I ran across an argument along the lines of: “We hunger, and food exists. We thirst, and water exists. We feel horny, and sex is real. We yearn for God, and so I conclude that God exists.”
Now, I can easily pick this apart a bunch of different ways, the easiest one being that just because you want some to exist doesn’t mean that it really exists. But what I’m really hoping for is a couple of counterexamples: something like “Yes, well, we all want a unicorn, too, but unicorns don’t exist.”
This particular one doesn’t work because wanting a unicorn isn’t a universal desire the way food or sex are (even counting asexual people, we can still say that the vast majority of people want sex). But maybe some of you can think of something.
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The reason some desires are universal is that they are achievable, thus it makes sense that an entity that looks for them exists. And we don’t yearn for God, we yearn for happiness, empathy and staying alive, and some of us have created a conceptual entity that gives us an infinite supply of those.
Wow. This is a uniquely horrible argument with very little thought put into it.
We hunger, and food exists. We thirst, and water exists.
Tell that to anyone dying of thirst or hunger.
We feel horny, and sex is real.
Ok, so who is responsible for the guinea worm? Who willed that into existence?
This isn’t a logical argument as much as it’s a vapid bit of poetry, akin to “look at the trees.” Thus it’s not easy to debunk it with a logical argument, because any rational plea you could make can be hand-waived away with as little thought as went into the initial statement. Everyone is providing absurd counterexamples, which I think is a good way of showing how absurd the original statement is, but I think you’d do better if you pushed the speaker to form their argument into something more structured, to move away from wishy-washy nonsense and towards something that can be broken down and discussed. Otherwise your conversation will forever be stuck in the realm of “it just feels that way.”
I think just about everyone would agree that an end or cure to all types of cancer, disease, illness, injury, and ailments would be beneficial and desirable, but there just isn’t an answer to some of those things and there never will be.
There will probably never be world peace.
There will probably never be an end to poverty.
We may never find signs of life outside our planet.
The first three are essential to live, the fourth isn’t. It’s possible to stay alive and propagate without yearning for a god. Therefore the statements are not equivalent, and therefore the argument fails.
This can easily be refuted with the Problem of Evil argument. We all yearn for justice in the face of injustice, and yet it doesn’t always work out that way. If God is real, he is mysteriously apathetic to human suffering. God is, therefore, either (a) not entirely good, (b) not able to vanquish all evil, or © nonexistent.
This reminds me of the mud puddle that believed in God because his hole was perfectly shaped for him.
No, I think the unicorn idea might be good, combined with a gentle reminder that not everyone yearns for a god.
“YOU yearn for a god. I yearn for wings.”
This could work for wings, unicorns, the possession of magic powers, the end of earthquakes, the desire to see an old pet, or even Marxism:
“You yearn for a god, Karl Marx yearned for an abundant, post-scarcity utopia.”
“You yearn for a god, Karl Marx yearned for an abundant, post-scarcity utopia.”
this argument has the advantage of freaking them out so they don’t come back.
Oh yeah. They will be doing little evangelical exorcisms on themselves for weeks trying to get your Marxist demons off of themselves.
All those “We, thus” are exactly backwards. We fuel our bodies with food since food exists. We desire sex because sexual reproduction exists…
Plus you are asking the wrong question. Does it matter if God exists if for those People who are comforted by their faith, their burden is lessened? The rest of it is irrelevant. And to follow up, how would those People’s lives improve were their faith taken from them?
Plus you are asking the wrong question. Does it matter if God exists if for those People who are comforted by their faith, their burden is lessened? The rest of it is irrelevant.
That’s a separate category of apologetic (or a separate category of error): a lot of arguments for the existence of God are actually arguments for the utility of faith. Something like “Jesus gives me comfort” isn’t a good reason to think that Jesus exists, but it is an argument for why it’s useful to believe in him, whether he exists or not.
Personally, I think that I’m better able to reach my goals (including finding comfort) if I base my beliefs on what’s actually true, not on whether they directly provide me comfort. But that’s me.
Again, doesn’t matter. Where as you can’t prove a negative, you are on the same footing whether you claim God exists or does not. Thus any such debate is pointless and therefor the question again returns to the same point.
Also thusly, no, you are not basing anything upon truth, but simply your belief as well.
Much like Bigfoot, you can’t prove it does not exist. It is simply your faith based upon nothing else.
You don’t yearn for opiates until you’ve had them. I’ve never had it, and don’t desire to. However, if a doctor, who I trust, gave me Vicodin, I might have taken it assuming he was right. I would eventually become addicted and crave it. Even feeling pain that doesn’t exist, convinced that my body needs the drugs to survive.
Similarly, we are exposed to religion by our parents who we trust. And over the years are indoctrinated to need religion. We are convinced of phantom transgressions that we need salvation from.
Both needs are created, and not intrinsic to us.
Maybe it’s not God they yearn for, but meaning.
counterargument for that could be “well god gives me meaning.”
Sure, but how do they know that? Saying “God gives me x of anything” can be countered with, “how do you know that?”
different things give different people meaning. Religion is a big one, obviously. For some people it’s maybe their job, or nature, or a zillion other things. it’s different for every person.
A problem with finding a counterexample might be that any widespread desire for something that doesn’t exist could make people think it exists, so any possible example seems likely to be disputed. There’s a reason people are far more likely to believe in heaven than hell. People believe in what they want to believe in, and that desire isn’t proof of anything but a construct in their brain that they think represents something real.
That said, I hope someone comes up with an example, because I’ve seen this type of rhetoric before (C.S. Lewis had a version of it), and while the logical problems with it are obvious, picking it apart would take a verbose argument that the kinds of people who like these kinds of fortune-cookie apologetics would have no problem tuning out. A quick example would be very convenient.
It warrants little more than dismissiveness. “I yearn for quiet, yet here you are.”
I admire the quippiness, but in this case, I heard the argument from Justin Brierley, explaining why, after ten years of hosting a podcast where believers (usually Christians) and unbelievers regularly engage in debate, he’s still a Christian. I actually enjoyed his show, and he seems like a nice guy, so I wouldn’t want to want to tell him to piss off.
But I did roll my eyes when I heard this particular argument. It’s just evidence that smart people can believe very silly things, especially when it comes to religion.
That’s good then. Don’t be snide to anyone who doesn’t have it coming.
I might be smart, and I definitely have dealt with a few stupid beliefs in my time. We’re none of us perfect
the fallacy of Not Knowing How Reasoning Works
Do they yearn for some divine? Or do they yearn for what they think that divine will do for them?
(Justice, retribution, financial stability, social influence, peace and love.)
They have a need for something besides god that they can’t get on their own- or are unwilling to take the measures that would get it (and why should they? god is there, he’ll give them everything. Religion is the opiate of the masses)
You don’t need a counter example. Reality serves that purpose just fine. Look at how amazing everything is without once in our lives ever hearing, seeing, or witnessing the divine presence of an imaginary omnipotent being.
Sure the world is a terrible place. There is a ton of suffering. A lot of people are unhappy and miserable, but the fact alone that we do exist, that we are capable of observing, learning, growing and interacting with the universe around us is simply no short of remarkable in and of itself.
Why submit yourself to an outdated, antiquated and unproven doctrine of beliefs when there is so much more to know and see in the universe around us? Despite every bad moment in my life, I’d live it all again just for another opportunity to grow and learn with all of you.
We may be powerless, small, insignificant creatures in the large scale of the universe but we are made from the stuff of this universe and our place within it is just as important as everything else that exists alongside us.
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