Thread by @Helenreflects

Today in my philosophy of religion course #PORcourse here on Twitter, I'm going to discuss an underappreciated argument for God, known as the argument from desire. To do this properly, you need to be in a nostalgic mood so listen to this Ghibli score 1/

What makes you happy? Like, really happy?
Would it be wealth, fame, honor, glory, health, power, or pleasure? It seems even if you have all those things, you still can't be entirely happy (insert clever subtweet of some political leaders here). 2/

No, says Thomas Aquinas, those things ultimately don't make you happy. See the subtle, nuanced arguments in the Summa here. I'll just focus on one, wealth. Something we *think* we desire, but ultimately, wealth does not make us happy
newadvent.org/summa/2002.htm 3/

You have two kinds of wealth (according to Aquinas)
* natural wealth: stuff that does something for us, e.g., food, lands, cars. But you don't value that wealth for itself because ultimately you want food, satiation etc.
* artificial wealth (money) is also means to end 4/

Interestingly, Aquinas thinks our desire for natural wealth is finite (at some point you have enough), but our desire for artificial wealth just goes on and on, without us ever being happy or satisfied with it. There's always someone richer etc. So wealth is not our final end 5/

(as an aside, anyone who says medieval theology is just the stuff about angels dancing on pins clearly hasn't read it. This is more relevant than ever. Cf Marie Kondo, Peterson etc. - we desperately seek to be happy and it seems so hard to attain 6/)

Happiness, according to Aquinas is the perfect good, our goal, is what we ultimately strive for when we do anything (in that of course he reiterates Aristotle)--think of anything you do e.g., I work out bc I want to be healthy, I want to be healthy bc I want to be happy...7/

According to Aquinas, seeing God is our perfect happiness and who we ultimately long for. We can't really attain it in this life. Now at this point Aquinas already presented 5 ways (to establish God's existence) so he does not use this longing for God as some proof for God 8/

I want to take a step back and frame argument from desire more broadly in natural theological arguments. There are several strategies to argue for God's existence e.g.,
ontological: God's existence flows from definition/concepts 9/

cosmological: universe exists, God explains it/caused it
design: universe has certain properties, explained by G's existence
pragmatic: belief in God is useful or a good bet
moral: you feel the moral law within, there is morality, and God explains it better than alternatives 10/

CS Lewis' argument from desire can be found in the chapter on hope (of the afterlife) in his Mere Christianity (1955). The argument is structured as an argument to the best explanation, and Lewis' starting point is this feeling of nostalgia we sometimes have 11/

Which Lewis calls "northernness", and which has words in other languages, e.g., Portuguese "saudade", a kind of deep longing for something (e.g., one's home country) See here: 12/

Argument can be summarized as follows:
1. We have a kind of longing in us that cannot be satisfied
2.Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists
3.I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy... 13

4. The Christian way (Hope in Heaven) is the best explanation for my desire
5. Conclusion: Heaven exists. 14/

Let's pick apart this argument. Premise (1) is an empirical hypothesis I think it is plausible. Aquinas provides a good take-down of the alternative contenders of what we long for (wealth etc) and why they don't work. His arguments are philosophical, not theological per se 15/

So no matter whether you're an atheist, you'll still look for/long for something, and it seems nothing in this world can satisfy it. What conclusion should one draw? CS Lewis looks at two possible alternative attitudes to the religious life 16/

(1) I seek something in this world but I haven’t found it (the fool)
(2) there’s nothing that can satisfy me. So I'm just going to become cynical and sensible (the cynic/"the sensible man") /17

CS Lewis ultimately lands on (3) hope for Heaven. In Heaven we will have the beatific vision and finally experience God face to face & doing this will make us happy. It's hard to envisage this now, and we use imperfect imagery such as playing musical instruments to convey it /18

As CS Lewis says, this may sound silly but perhaps we use musical imagery because many of us enjoy playing/listening to music as a distinctly autotelic activity, an activity that is good for itself, so the imagery is still apt /19

"I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same." /20

Premise 2 says every natural desire has a corresponding real object (CS Lewis: you desire food, there's food, you desire sex, there's such a thing). But what if I desire, say to play a computer game that doesn't exist? /21

One possible response: those desires might be artificially induced. You'd need to limit this to natural desires, not prompted by clever marketers/commercials etc 22/

Is the satisfaction of our desire something not found in this world? CS Lewis draws on an intriguing Platonist conception of the good, which you also see in e.g., The Silver Chair. 23/

Though I am sympathetic to Lewis' conclusion, I am skeptical of reaching it as argument through best explanation that Christian hope provides a way to explain where our longing/desire originates from and how it can be satisfied (through beatific vision) 24/

But this brings us to interesting other questions, namely the value of theism. Very often philosophers of religion treat this purely as a metaphysical puzzle without much impact in our lives. But if Aquinas and CS Lewis are right, obviously, the impact is potentially huge /end

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