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.
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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.”
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.
