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What’s the argument from desire, and how can we effectively use it in evangelization? In this episode, we’ll look at variations from Pope Francis, author C.S. Lewis, mathematician Blaise Pascal, former NFL quarterback Tom Brady, philosopher Peter Kreeft, and Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1:
You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Hi, and welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Today I want to talk about the argument from desire. It’s a case for Christianity that I think works differently than a lot of the arguments. So you’ve got a lot of arguments that are based on cosmology. God created the entire universe. And so you get into these scientific questions and about the origin of the universe and everything else, or you’ve got these arguments from history about Jesus rising from the dead and the first century evidence, all of this. Well, the argument from desire works at a different level. It works the level of the human heart, and there are a lot of different formulations of the argument. Someone who explored from several different thinkers, whether it’s Pope Francis or CS Lewis, Tom Brady even, Peter Kreeft. And then we’re going to see it in action with Jesus Christ himself. How does he employ the argument from desire?
But before we get there, what do I mean by the argument from desire? I’m going to give a little two sentence version, but like I said, you’ll find variations of this. So the two sentence version goes something like this, we have a hunger for something that nothing in this world can satisfy, and all of our attempts to satisfy it come up short. So think about all of the excesses that we go to, food, drink, sex, power, fame, you name it, whatever it is, we’re hungry and insatiably hungry and these things that we think will make us happy don’t, or at least they don’t make us as happy as we want to be. We find there’s still something lacking. Pope Francis, he puts it really simple. I gave a two sentence version. Here’s a one sentence version. He just says, “Our infinite sadness can only be cured by an infinite love.”
So implicit within that is that number one, there is an infinite sadness that we have. And number two, that this infinite sadness cannot be cured almost definitionally by any of the finite things on earth, that it’s not that food, drinks, sex, power, friends, family, fame, fortune, whatever it is, it’s not these things are bad, it’s that they’re not enough and they’re not enough in a way that the more you pursue them, the more I think profoundly you realize that. So when we talk about the argument from desire, we can talk about it two ways. First is at the theoretical level, how does this prove the existence of God? And then second, because this is an argument about the human heart at a practical personal evangelization level, what does that look like?
So I’m going to start with more, I guess you could call it the theoretical level. This is CS Lewis. Many of you know him, an early 20th century writer, philosopher, theologian, lay theologian, he wouldn’t necessarily use those terms for himself. He’s famous for things like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Chronicles of Narnia series, but also for works like mere Christianity and a lot of Christian apologetics. But he put his argument like this in mere Christianity. He says, “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for these desires exists.” What does he mean? Well, give us some examples. A baby feels hunger. Well, there’s such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim. Well, there’s such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire. Well, there’s such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. That’s the argument at a theoretical level, that just logically speaking, we can say this, every other desire we have corresponds to some fulfillment.
All of those things that he mentions, hunger, their sexual desire, you name it, these correspond to real things, satisfy those desires, but then we find it in ourselves, this other desire that isn’t satisfied by all of those things, this desire for something more, for something deeper, and the things of this world they might partially satisfy, but they satisfy it really in completely. If you’re ever really hungry and you don’t have food and you drink water instead, you’ll find like, okay, it does a little bit. It helps some, but it’s not really satisfying the hunger that you’ve got. Well, likewise here too. You’ve got this craving and all the worldly pleasures in the world, not that they do nothing, they just don’t do enough. They aren’t satisfactory. So that leaves two possibilities. Number one, we have an evolutionary glitch. We have this hard-wiring for a happiness, a satisfaction, a completion, whatever you want to call it. This hunger, this thirst that is insatiable. And that leaves us always a little bit unhappy, leaves us always with this what Pope Francis calls the infinite sadness, that there’s something just lacking.
Or this is evidence that we’re made for something more than this life. So either you have to say that even though the rest of our desires are well adapted, we have this one really poorly adapted desire. Here’s what I mean by that. An atheist or anyone, whatever your views on evolution, hunger, thirst, sexual desire, these things make sense. They exist for the completion of the person, the propagation of the species, these kind of things. Without them, you don’t survive, the species doesn’t survive, et cetera. We can make sense of all of those things and significantly all of those things can be satisfied in an earthly context.
But then we have this otherworldly desire and this other worldly desire helps explain why people ask big questions about the afterlife, helps explain why people have religions all over the world. Atheists are always like, “Look at all the religions out there,” as if that’s an argument against religion. Seems to me that’s like saying, “Well, look at all the food out there. How can you believe in hunger?” Well, yes, there are better or worse ways of satisfying hunger. There are better and worse ways of satisfying the religious impulse. But the fact that everybody seems so, pardon the expression, hell-bent on satisfying the religious impulse points to the depth of this desire. So either we have to say this is the one glitch, all the other desires make sense, all the other desires have a correspondence satisfaction, but this one doesn’t or, and Lewis argues this is more probable, this one also has a satisfaction. It’s just not anywhere in this life, which is why we haven’t found it in this life.
So that’s the short version that Pope Francis and CS Lewis argue for. Blaise Pascal, the mathematician and philosopher and I guess theologian as well. He’s famous for a bunch of work in mathematics, also famous for Pascal’s wager. He puts the argument a bit longer. This is in his journal, what’s called the Pensées. He begins by making the argument that all men seek happiness. He says this is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war and others avoiding it is the same desire in both attended with different views. That is the person who says, “I’m going to go out and fight for my country,” and the person who says, “I’m going to avoid combat,” both of them are looking for happiness. They have different ideas about how to get there, but they’re both looking for happiness.
And he argues that the will never takes the least step but to this object. Now, if you know anything about Aristotle, he argues the same thing. There’s a whole wealth. There’s literally thousands of years of argument on this point that just as your intellectual is always seeking the truth, your will is always seeking goodness even when you try to satisfy it with something that isn’t actually good. And so he says this is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves. That’s a really intentionally extreme example, especially in Pascal’s day. This is the worst thing you can do when he’s saying, “Look, even the person who commits suicide is looking for some kind of happiness.” Maybe that happiness is the avoidance of pain, whatever it is. But there’s still that same hard-wiring of the will to constantly be looking for happiness. That’s the first part of the argument.
The second part is that the will doesn’t find the happiness it’s looking for as much as it wants. He puts it like this. He says after so such a great number of years, no one without faith has reached the point to which all continually look, all complain, princes and subjects, noble men and commoners, old and young, strong and weak, learned and ignorant, healthy and sick, of all countries, all times, all ages and all conditions. So point number one is we’re constantly looking for happiness. Point number two is we’re not finding the happiness that we’re looking for. Again, not that we’re finding none of it, we’re not finding the amount we’re looking for, we’re desiring more than we’re able to find here on earth.
Well, the third point he makes is this. He says a trial so long, so continuous and so uniform should certainly convince us of our inability to reach the good by our own efforts.” Not only have we not been able to do it, no one anywhere ever has been able to do it. But he says example teaches us little. No resemblance is ever so perfect that there’s not some slight difference. In other words, you can look around and say, “Well, sure, everybody else who tried this has failed, but I’m going to do it a little differently.” And you think, “Well, they didn’t satisfy them, but it’ll satisfy me because I’m different.” So it doesn’t matter. You can literally hold up the entire history of humanity and as humans will still say, “Ah, but maybe it’ll be different from me.”
And so he says experience dupes us. From misfortune to misfortune leads us to death, their eternal crown. So we’re not satisfied in the presence, but we’re constantly thinking we’d be satisfied a little more. If I had what all those movie stars had, I’d be happy, even though they’re not. And so that’s the kind of lie that we’re able to tell ourselves. And Pascal’s point is there’s something a little ridiculous about that, right? If no one else has ever found happiness this way, the idea that you think you can do it isn’t just arrogant, it’s a bit ridiculous.
The fourth point he makes, he concludes from this. He says, “What is it then that this desire and this inability proclaim to us that there was once in man a true happiness of which there now remained to him only the mark in empty trace, which she in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present.” In other words, Pascal argues that this desire points to a remembrance, a remembrance of Eden, if you will. The idea that we were made for something more than this. And we have this sense of, wait a second, there’s more here I’m not getting. But he says, “All these present things are inadequate because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object. That is to say only by God himself.” You’ll notice it’s very similar to what Pope Francis is going to say later on, that we have this infinite abyss within and only the infinite God can satisfy it. Everything else is going to fall short.
But Pascal has one more part of the argument, that God is our only true good. And since we’ve forsaken him, it’s a strange thing that there’s nothing in nature which has not been serviceable in taking his place. In other words, we have turned to everything besides God to replace God, the stars, the heavens, earth, the elements, plants, cabbages, leaks, animals, insects, calves, serpents, fever, pestilence, war, famine, vices, adultery, incest. Now, Pascal is not saying all of those things were equally good. He’s saying something about the human heart, that having despaired of God, having said no to God, man has turned to everything but God and hasn’t found happiness there, but has turned to everything but God. And so he says, “Since man has lost true good, everything can appear equally good to him, even his own destruction, though so opposed to God to reason and to the whole course of nature.”
Pascal is approaching this in a philosophical way saying suicide philosophically doesn’t make a lot of sense. How can you expect your happiness will be achieved through your own self-destruction? Either you think you don’t have an immortal soul, in which case suicide seems like obviously the worst thing you can do, or you have an immortal soul in which suicide seems like obviously the worst thing you can do. Just logically, neither of those conditions, with or without an immortal soul, does suicide seem like a coherent way of achieving human happiness. If you’re trying to figure out what’s the best way to make my business flourish, burning my business to the ground is probably not going to be the answer to that question logically.
And that leaves aside the element of sin, the opposition to God, the theological problems, the moral problems, just the logical problems with it. And he’s saying, “Well, how do we make sense of this?” Well, because once you’ve said no to the one good that can satisfy this eternal happiness, every other good is equally capable of satisfying it, which is to say it’s not capable of satisfying it. Whether you pursue a really noble ambition or a really evil ambition, he’s not saying they’re morally equal. He’s saying they’re equally incapable of solving the problem. And so we’ve turned to everything but God. That’s his argument.
Now, I want to go back to the second argument he makes, that well, it’ll be different from me argument. And the idea is, “Okay, I’m unhappy now, but if I had a little more money, if I had a little more success, a little more fame, a little more fill in the blank, I’d be happy then.” And this is an argument that we make for ourselves that really only works as long as things aren’t going great, but you think they might go great in the future. So there’s all sorts of fascinating research related to this even in the realm of suicide. So for instance, people who are very depressed are actually less likely to take their own life than people who are a little less depressed. People who make very little money can imagine, well, if I made more money, I’d be happy. But the people who make more money find out, I guess that wasn’t it. That wasn’t the problem. I’m still deeply unhappy.
There’s all of these things where people who are actually at the bottom and whatever metric [inaudible 00:14:58] measure in the bottom still hold onto this hope that, “Well, if I just had X, Y, Z, then I’d be happy.” And then they get X, Y, Z aren’t happy and that leads to a real existential crisis, that leads to a real despair. So here’s where I want to turn to the philosopher Tom Brady. I’m kidding about the philosopher part, and I feel bad as the Chiefs fan saying anything good about Tom Brady, but Tom Brady actually seems like a decent human being.
And in 2005, he sat down with 60 minutes and he gave an interview. He is, what looked at the time, like it might be the height of his success. Now we know now that he had another 18 years in him of playing football, but he was already at the top of his game. He was already phenomenal and having achieved all that X, Y, Z, he realized that it didn’t actually make him happy. And it’s a really, in some ways, disturbing interview because in this interview, he’s going to say this and say, “What else is there?” And the interviewer who doesn’t have all the things Tom Brady has, it’s like, “Wait, this doesn’t make you happy?” He seems like he’s got it all. He’s got fame, he’s got fortune. He was, at the time, I think just named the most eligible bachelor, every metric you could imagine for worldly success. It seemed like he had it. So here’s Tom Brady’s existential crisis.
Speaker 3:
Why do I have three Super Bowl rings and still think there’s something greater out there for me? Maybe a lot of people would say, “Hey man, this is what it is. I reached my goal, my dream, my life is… Me? I thank God.” It’s got to be more than this. This can’t be what it’s all cracked up to be. I’ve done it at 27 and what else is there for me?
Speaker 4:
What’s the answer?
Speaker 3:
I wish I knew. I wish I knew.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Like I said, I find that kind of harrowing. I find it almost a little disturbing that here he is having found all of these ways of… Imagine you’re a young football player, Tom Brady is where you want to be, 2005 Tom Brady, 2013 Tom Brady, whatever it is. But we find that it doesn’t make him happy. And I don’t say this to be mean to Tom Brady at all. Again, as much as I enjoy rooting against him, he seems like a very decent human being, but we watched it destroy his life. He marries a model and isn’t happy. He’s got fame, fortune, whatever you want to measure success by and it all comes up short. And so the question is, are we delusional enough to think that we would be any different? Do we really think it would go differently for us if we just had a little more success?
And again, I think that the answer Pascal argues is well, oftentimes we are just that delusional, but we shouldn’t be. So I want to turn from Tom Brady to Peter Kreeft. Peter Kreeft is a philosopher at Boston College, he’s going to lay out the argument from desire in a very structured sort of way. So he begins with the first premise. Every natural innate desire in us corresponds to some real object that can satisfy that desire. Now, that is a more technical and nuanced, accurate way of saying what Lewis says about ducklings and men, that every natural and innate desire. In other words, you could imagine, oh, it’d be amazing to have a hotdog stand that was totally… You can come up with something, right? You can invent something in your mind that’s not a natural innate desire. You can say, “I really want nuclear fusion and cold fusion to work and a perpetual motion machine,” and all of these things that are impossible or impractical.
That’s not what we’re talking about when we talk about desire here. We talk about a natural and innate desire. We talk about a desire that is in us as humans. And all of those desires we find in us as humans, those correspond to some real object. That’s what we mean by natural and innate. You can create a desire for yourself. You can have induced demand. An iPhone comes out and I want that iPhone, even there is an object that satisfies that desire. But you can imagine someone making a sci-fi movie with some object in it, like a teleporter that you’re like, “Oh, that’d be amazing. It doesn’t exist.” That’s not a natural or innate desire. That’s what’s called an elicited desire. That desire has been drawn out or instilled, but it’s not just something that’s innate to you. But all of the natural innate desires we have other than this one at least, correspond some real object that can satisfy that desire.
Well, the second premise then, there exists innocent desire, which nothing in time, nothing on earth, no creature can satisfy. That’s why Tom Brady’s not happy because he’s got this desire that no amount of Super Bowl rings are going to fit or fill, and that leads to the conclusion that therefore there must exist something more than time, Earth and creatures, which can satisfy this desire, that were made for something more than this life. And Kreeft says, “This something is what people call God and life with God forever.” So if you’re going to disagree with the argument from desire, you should be able to say here is a premise I disagree with, or I don’t see how these premises lead to this conclusion or you should be able to point out exactly where do I get off this train because this is a logically sound argument in my view, that he’s making a coherent argument that appears to be factually correct.
But as I said, this is the intellectual argument. It remains to be seen how to use this in practice. Now maybe you see this and say, “Oh yeah, that rings true for me. That is the case in my life. I’ve been trying to satisfy this desire with something other than God, and I see now that only God can satisfy that desire.” If that’s true, great bravo, that’s wonderful. But if you’re wondering how to use this as a tool of evangelization, I think we get a really good example from Jesus. I know it sounds silly to say, I think we get a good example from Jesus, of course we do. But my argument is that in John 4, Jesus is using the argument from desire, although he doesn’t call it that.
So it begins with Jesus going into a city of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Now what is significant about that? Or Sychar, excuse me. Sychar is actually not the name of a town. Sychar is a rude Jewish slur for Shechem, and it’s from a word meaning drunken. So it’s like a nickname for the Samaritan town. It’s not what the Samaritans would call their own town. The Jews would call it that drunken town. And so already, the setting is going to be really important, that Jesus is at the well with a woman who is trying to satisfy her thirst in a city whose nickname means drunkenness, which points to the fact that Samaritans have been trying to satisfy the search for God and haven’t been, they’ve just been indulgent in worldly pleasures and they’re not left satisfied. And I think drunkenness is a really good image, even non metaphorically for what it is to scratch that infinite itch with something finite because what is drunkenness?
Well, drunkenness is trying to use a finite thing excessively to fill an infinite hole and trying to use a finite thing excessively doesn’t satisfy an infinite hunger. It just isn’t abuse of a finite thing. And you can imagine overdoing anything. Again, food, drinks, sex, pleasure, power, whatever it is, you can overdo it. You can misuse and overuse, and that’s what we’re finding. That’s what even the Samaritan town name or nickname points to. And so that should be one of our first clues, the fact that this is the name of the place, the fact that the context is a well where a woman is coming to satisfy her thirst tells us this is about thirst. That’s the theme of the passage. How is thirst going to be satisfied? And Jesus says to her, “Give me a drink.” And I love this part that Jesus makes a trivial request of this woman that he doesn’t have a bucket and she does.
So he puts himself almost in her debt as it were. Now, Ben Franklin has a whole thing about how if you want people to cooperate with you, a good way to do it is actually to ask a favor from them. This is counterintuitive, but it points to something in human psychology, that someone like this has probably felt like a burden to those around her. And Jesus is actually giving her this very human opportunity to not feel like a burden, to not feel like she’s just the recipient of a handout, to not feel like she’s just constantly the receiving end of aid, but to actually be able to do something positive to help others. So he puts himself in a position to receive from her, and she’s shocked by this because he’s a Jewish man and she’s a Samaritan woman, and so it’s unusual and slightly scandalous for them even to be talking. And she points this out.
And Jesus explains that he’s actually doing her a favor and he tells her that he has water to give that’ll satisfy her thirst. He says, “Everyone a drinks of this water will thirst to get meaning in the water she’s getting. But whoever drinks the water that I shall give him will never thirst. The water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water that I may not thirst nor come here to draw.”
In this act of constantly going to the well again and again and again to get water only to be thirsty again, in that futility of that action of constantly needing to go and get some more water, go and drink again, especially with the laboriousness of it, we can miss this now and you just turn on a faucet or open a can or a bottle, but when you have to actually go to the well and draw water from the well and bring it back and then you drink and then, oh look, I’m thirsty again, it’s easier to realize there’s something frustratingly futile about this. And Jesus is pointing to that futility. He’s pointing to how unsatisfying that ultimately is. And Jesus then makes it clear that he’s not talking about literal water, he’s talking about a spiritual thirst, and the way he does is just really fascinating. He says, “Ho call your husband and come here.” And the woman says, “I have no husband.” And Jesus says, “You’re right in saying I have no husband, for you’ve had five husbands and he whom you now have is not your husband. This you said truly.”
And so he’s pointing out to the woman, well, what is the thirst that you have? Well, you have a thirst for being in love. You have a thirst for companionship. You have a thirst for something that you’ve been trying to satisfy with one man after another, after another. She’s been collecting men the way Tom Brady was collecting Super Bowl rings and was finding it equally unsatisfying. And she’s struck by the accuracy of this, and she says, “Sir, I perceive that you’re a prophet.” They then have this interesting conversation about the nature of true worship. I’m actually going to skip over that because I think we can miss the argument from desire by focusing on those parts. If you jump down, the woman says, “I know that the Messiah is coming. He who’s called Christ. When he comes, he will show us all things.” And Jesus says to her, “I who speak to you am He.”
This is important, that in the argument from desire, it’s not actually enough to point out to people that they have a desire that isn’t being satisfied. If you just leave them there, “Hey, you’re thirsty for something you’ve never been able to quench, all right, have a good day.” That is not the end of the argument. You then have to point them to Jesus. And so Jesus having pointed out to her this desire that she has then points to himself as a fulfillment of that desire as the Messiah that she’s been waiting for.
The disciples then come back. We’re going to skip that part. And then the woman, this is a good detail, she leaves her water jar and went away into the city and says to the people, “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” It’s a great little description by John that she leaves the water jar. She realizes that the realtor she has isn’t going to be quenched with the jar. And so she’s seeing in him the solution to her real problems and her real problem is not just, I’m pretty thirsty right now. It’s something a lot deeper. And so I really like this. I like also what her testimony is, “Come see a man who told me all that I ever did.” That gets to the fact that this is an argument that is intensely personal.
And so just to draw this to a close, we have to first show the person their unmet thirst, help elicit it from them. If you know them well, maybe you can point to those things in their biography just like Jesus is able to point to this woman’s romantic history, whatever it is that this person has done that shows, “Hey, you seem like you’re unhappy and you’re trying to fill some void that isn’t actually being filled.” Get to know them and their story and the argument from desire works a lot better, that the point isn’t just that there’s this universal human desire, it’s that you have a desire that is not being met right now, and the more you are convinced you have that desire, the more effective the argument is. But then the second thing you do is you universalize the problem.
Jesus is really clear in his conversation with the Samaritan woman that this is salvation that he’s talking about for Jews and Gentiles alike, for Jews and Samaritans alike, I should say. And so it’s not true that you have something wrong with you. It’s that we as creatures, as human beings, have this unmet desire, and then you finally point to Jesus Christ as a solution, this universal and personal problem. That’s the argument from desire in a nutshell. So obviously there are variations of that. But again, I want to conclude with something I said before. One of the things that I like about this is you can make a lot of arguments for the existence of God that are metaphysical or scientific, and those are really good. They’re really interesting. I really like those. But the audience for them is pretty narrow. People who want to explore the contingency of being or who want to explore the origins of the universe, this is not going to be everyone, to put it mildly.
Even the more accessible historical arguments of the first century, you’re going to find people who say, “Well, I don’t know how reliable I find anything from the first century. Wasn’t that the Dark Ages?” people just don’t know a lot about the history. And so if you’re doing scientific stuff, metaphysical stuff, historical stuff, you can lose people pretty easily, especially people who aren’t particularly academic, we’ll put it that way, or who’ve maybe heard things that are misleading or inaccurate, but the argument from desire to see how that works, you only have to know yourself. Now, again, not everybody is going to fall in that category. There are going to people who say, “Well, I don’t have any unmet hunger. I don’t have any unmet thirst.” And that’s where you have to maybe do a little work to help them see it in their own life because it is possible to live in such a state of distraction. You don’t notice how thirsty you are. You don’t notice how hunger you are.
But still, this is an argument for the human heart, from the human heart. And you can then couple this with your own testimony. You can couple this with your own experience and say here with what this looked like in my own life, here was this hunger thirst I had. Here’s how I tried to satisfy it. It didn’t work. Here’s how it’s satisfied in Jesus Christ. And that can maybe also be relatable. The heart speaks to heart, and that can help people to maybe see it if they don’t see it in their own life, that hearing about it in your life may be like, “Oh, okay, now I see. Now I see what that looks like in my own life.” But yeah, it’s an argument for the human heart, from the human heart and shows how Jesus is the solution to the problem.
Now, this is just a bare bones, so I haven’t answered every possible objection. Someone could say, “Well, how do we know Jesus is the answer to that? How do we know?” So great, those are good questions. There’s a lot more that could be said about it, but I wanted to give just the basic structure to what the argument for desire looks like. At the very least, we know that the solution has to be infinite. We know that it has to be something not from this world because all of the finite things we’ve ever encountered, everything we’ve ever encountered in this world has proven itself incapable of solving it.
And so it is a hunger for the eternal. It’s a hunger for the other worldly, or we might say heavenly, something other than we see in this life. That’s what this argument really gets to. And then it’s a pretty short step from there to explain how Jesus both presents himself as and proves himself to be the solution to that problem. So I hope that helps, and I hope that you actually find that useful and usable and God willing to actually use it. I’m Joe Heschmeyer Catholic Answers. This is Shameless Popery. God bless you. I hope you found the helpful.
Speaker 1:
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