Response to Mike

(I posted this to Mike - see last blog post - about a week ago, I'm posting it here because he hasn't ok'd it yet so it's not showing up on his blog, to which I have a link in the last post)

Mike, sorry for the long delay. Let me begin by addressing what I think are some misunderstandings that need clarification.

1.) The approach I take, the angle at which proponents of the AfD see the issue, is not to say, just because I can imagine something and desire it (speaking with deceased loved ones, for example) means that desire can be fulfilled; it is, rather, to note that desires have a cause (loved ones that were once alive). Yes, I can imagine speaking with loved ones again, and though that might be impossible, it is explainable - it has a cause in an object, which caused it. Likewise, with any desire you can name: To see a flying unicorn? Horses, horns and flight exist. To live forever? Life and time exist. To see the Indians win the World Series? The Indians and the World Series exist. In this sense, therefore, all desire is a type of knowledge.

2.) Desires are natural desires if they correspond to the needs of human nature (which everyone has), not according to whether or not everyone has them (as felt desires) - as I pointed out with the fact that human nature needs nourishment; that doesn't mean everyone desires to nourish themselves properly. The implication here is that one doesn't need to be aware of a felt desire in order for a need actually to exist within his nature as a desire in potency - I'm certain that Kreeft would agree with me here.

Now, you and others, basically, argue that the desire for God is a projection of things like wanting to live forever, seeing our loved ones again, and looking to some form of Cosmic Justice. Though I believe this all may point to other arguments, I agree that if this is all it is then the AfD doesn't have the impact its proponents think it does. However, I think the beauty of Lewis' particular illustrations of this argument is that they show there's some "mysterious x" that we cannot account for in our spatio-temporal experience as we can for everlasting life, justice, etc. But before I get to some of his illustrations, I'd like to re-visit one more thing, which actually splits into two related arguments.

A.) Just as we can point out that a person who feels no desire to eat still has a need to eat, and such a person can know that negatively (since he doesn't have a positive desire), so can we have the negative knowledge of the AfD by formulating, as Aristotle did, a fact of our inner, first person experience: We desire something purely as an end in itself, and that something we call happiness, or supreme contentment. We can then go through and examine all the things within our experience and see that, by their very nature they cannot be that thing we desire, which will give us supreme contentment, a.k.a., happiness we need, and which we desire in every desire (we know we desire it in every desire because every other desire, though an end, is also a means). This thing, by its very nature, would have to transcend time, and be worthy of fulfilling us for eternity, otherwise it could not be an end in itself.

B.) Moreover, since this happiness principle is a concrete principle of our conscious existence, a principle which we cannot deny; since, as Ralph Cudworth put it, "this love and desire of good, as good in general, and of happiness, traversing the soul continually, and actuating and provoking it continually, is not a mere passion…but a settled resolved principle, and the very source, and fountain, and center of life", then to deny its root in an eternal reality is to contradict a self-evident principle. In other words, to affirm a position which denies an eternal (transcending time) existence in which this desire is rooted is to say this principle, which we cannot deny, is deniable. Such a position - like atheism - is therefore untenable.

But back to the AfD itself. Here are some observations from Lewis, which I'll follow up with those of other well known men:

"The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject which excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy." -CS Lewis

"Other grand ideas-homecoming, reunion with a beloved-similarly elude our grasp. Suppose there is no disappointment; even so-well, you are here. But now, something must happen, and after that something else. All that happens may be delightful: but can any such series quite embody the sheer state of being which was what we wanted?" --Lewis

"You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words . . . Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction . . . - something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires . . . you are looking for, watching for, listening for?" --Lewis

"In speaking of this desire…which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you -- the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot tell because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience." --Lewis

"...for I thus understood that in deepest solitude there is a road right out of the self, a commerce with something which, by refusing to identify itself with any object of the senses, or anything whereof we have biological or social need, or anything imagined, or any states of our own minds, proclaims itself sheerly objective. Far more objective than bodies, for it is not, like them, clothed in our senses; the naked Other, imageless (though our imagination salutes it with a hundred images), unknown, undefined, desired." -Lewis

“...the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given--nay, cannot even be imagined as given--in our present mode of spatiotemporal experience.” -Lewis

“The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain-a curious wild pain-a searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfigured and infinite-the beatific vision-God.” -Bertrand Russell (was an atheist and philosopher)

“The origin of poetry lies in a thirst for a wilder beauty than earth supplies.” --Edgar Allan Poe

“…certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy Earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at it's best and least corrupted, it's gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of 'exile'.” -J.R.R. Tolkien

“We are exiled from our homeland - but it's memories haunt us.” --St. Augustine

Here then we have a longing, a desire, for something for which our experience cannot account. Like I said before, any other desire or longing you can account for – in your example your loved ones whom you wish to speak to again have caused your longing. But here no finite thing will suffice, so that the only other route besides affirming the AfD is to say it’s a desire for nothing. That, however, is to say we desire nothing, which, logically, is to say we have no desire! This is completely different than an imaginary desire, for though Santa doesn’t exist the things of which he’s composed do, thus it is a desire for certain things in a certain relation – not for nothing, which is the absence of something.

You wrote:
::Finally, I still don’t see why you assume that this desire is for something outside of space and time. If there is such a natural desire, I doubt it’s that specific. Due to society, we may come to see it as a desire for the non-spatial and non-temporal, but I don’t see any reason to think that this is natural, especially given the many societies that have conceived of gods that were within both time and space.

Of course the Christian response is that’s precisely why they were idols! And precisely why images were not to be associated with God.

Again, you’re understanding the word “natural” here in a way it’s not intended to be used. I mean, it is natural for man to seek to know about the universe, isn’t it? But simply because he’s been wrong most of the time doesn’t mean everything we’ve learned, will learn, or can learn is wrong – nor does it mean science is not natural. It’s quite reasonable to expect that just as Democritus was wrong with his particular theory of atoms so others were and are wrong in their particular ideas of God. Or should we not believe in atoms :-) ?

Lastly, concerning why this desire is for something outside space and time, Lewis writes, “All the value lay in that of which Joy was the desiring. And that object, quite clearly, was no state of my own mind or body at all. In a way, I had proved this by elimination. I had tried everything in my own mind and body; as it were, asking myself, ‘Is it this you want? Is it this?’ Last of all I had asked if Joy itself is what I wanted; and, labeling it ‘aesthetic experience,’ had pretended I could answer Yes. But that answer too had broken down. Inexorably Joy proclaimed, ‘You want—I myself am your want of—something other, outside, not you nor any state of you.’”