Refuting The Desire Argument For God

Like the design [1] and transcendental [2] arguments for God, the desire argument for God is fallacious and unsound.  Although its popularity benefitted from C.S. Lewis using it in his book Mere Christianity, the argument itself is crap.  It is in its best formulation an appeal to popularity, and in its worst formulation it relies on non sequiturs.

Just because I have a desire for something doesn't mean that there is a way for that desire to be fulfilled.  I might desire to take a ride on a Pegasus, but there still might be no such thing as a Pegasus despite my desire.  I might want to never feel pain, or to have telekinetic powers, or to always have a million dollars in my bank account whenever I check it.  But these things are not possible despite the intensity of my desires for them, given the circumstances of reality (I mean by this that these things are clearly logically possible but they are not the case in actuality).  Someone can also desire an impossible thing, like to be a married bachelor or married bachelorette--something that objectively cannot come about.

It is logically obvious that it does not follow from the fact that a desire for something exists that the thing desired also exists.  One can desire a thing that is illusory, nonexistent, or impossible.  Desire proves only the existence of desire, and different people do not necessarily desire the same things.  In fact, desires can differ immensely between individuals.  I realize that some versions of this argument are less forceful in their conclusions and thus appeal to a supposed sense of probability--there is certainly no way to soundly construct the desire argument into a deductive proof, since either the premises or the conclusion will be flawed.

Someone might argue that since "most" desires can be fulfilled, a desire for eternal life or a relationship with a divine creator is "probably" something that can be fulfilled, but this 1) ignores how a very great number of possible desires cannot be met and 2) implicitly assumes that spiritual desires are like other desires that can be met.  The desire argument, like some of the other arguments for God used by some apologists, is simply not a rational argument.

There is only one argument for God that has both a conclusion that follows from the premises and premises that are all entirely true.  This is the logical proof of an uncaused cause [3], often called the Kalam cosmological argument.  With the existence of an uncaused cause proven in full, one can see that history and other disciplines provide a wealth of evidence for the Christian religion, but Christian apologists need to be careful in their claims and not, in their zeal for Christianity, use stupid arguments in its name.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/11/why-design-argument-fails.html

[2].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/12/refuting-transcendental-argument-for-god.html

[3].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-uncaused-cause.html