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.

  • Tony Smehrik@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    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.