Looking for a counterexample to an argument for God
Looking for a counterexample to an argument for God
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.
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."
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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 (c) 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.
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.
the fallacy of Not Knowing How Reasoning Works
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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)
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We yearn for purpose, not God.
Besides: some people don't yearn for God: like a person with severe mental impairment.
Our appetites are neurological signals that our organism needs something to survive/procreate. God is different because it doesn't fit that pattern.
They are really just defining "curiosity". But day I write the first half a mystery novel. Does your desire for understanding and resolution mean that the second half magically exists? Or writes itself?
Nope.
I want a magenta horse... and I want to fly away with it... into a reddish background... and I want pixies, ohhh I want pixies...
Humans want connection and meaning. Some are told God is what they need.
People also need to not feel shame, but are usually given to opiates instead. Those people yearn for opiates.
It's not easy to take a critical look at oneself and see the damage and pain caused by the decisions guided by emotion and passion.
i'm sorry to say that but some people don't understand logic there is kinda no point in arguing with them at least if i encounter somone like that it's just not worth my time and nerves
Okay, this one is an easy one, but it takes some paragraphs to explain. Your friend is right that there are causal explanations for things biological and social, but is getting the causality all wonky. We don’t hunger because food exists. We hunger because our life processes cause us to expend energy, and not being plants we need to eat. The food doesn’t cause the hunger - we’d be hungry on the moon - but we’ve learned throughout evolutionary history that our life processes need energy and nutrients, and we’ve made the evolutionary decision to get them by eating. The same is true for water and sex. Hunger exists because otherwise we wouldn’t eat, and horniness exists because otherwise we wouldn’t reproduce. Look throughout the animal kingdom - does it make any sense to say that a spider or termite gets “horny” on any way that remotely resembles a human logging onto pornhub? There is indeed causality, but the presented argument is flipping it on its head.
Animals sense and react to their environment. It’s a survival thing. It’s baked into our DNA and has been for untold millions of years. One aspect of this is a feature some people call the hyperactive agency detector. It is our tendency to attribute some event - a thing that goes bump in the night, for example - to a conscious being. An agent. It might just be your door blowing open in a gust of wind or a badly placed book falling to the floor, but chances are that you will have a startle reaction and at the very least listen intently for a couple of minutes with a pounding heart. There’s also a good chance that it might get your dog barking or your cat to sit up and listen. It’s the default assumption that an effect was caused by an agent rather than some impersonal environment action.
You can see how that’s beneficial to survival. If you hear a twig snap while you’re sleeping in the jungle, you’re more likely to survive if you make some preparations than if you just ignore it, because it may actually be a tiger. We can get into how much energy is wasted on a false positive versus the risks incurred by a false negative, but you probably get the idea. If something happens, our brains tend to assume that somebody did it.
So when the human conceptual scope expands such that “something that happens” includes things like weather and earthquakes and crop failures and wars won or lost, we also tend to attribute those things to an agent. We need an agent considerably bigger than a tiger - or even a fellow human - if we’re talking about things on that scale. Our hyperactive agency detector ends up interpreting causality and agency where none exists.
Anyway, that’s god. There are also billions of people who have no “yearning” for god. There are religions that are largely if not entirely atheistic, but which still seek to understand the world through causality. There’s also a drive - this one is unique to humans as far as we know - to create cohesive belief systems that help to unify societies. The third piece is our evolutionary tendency to believe what people we trust tell us, especially as children.