Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Further Reflections on Theism 247
assuming what is implicit in the second premise, namely that it is impossible
that a natural desire should be frustrated, then the conclusion follows from
the premisses. Of course, what the critics ridicule is not the logic of such
arguments but the assumptions themselves. It is largely an empirical matter
whether there is, in fact, a natural religious desire and, if there is, how
extensively it is distributed. Given that desires are identified by their objects,
by what they are desires for, that we typically know what people desire by
hearing what they say and watching what they do, and that the meaning of
what is said and done is often ambiguous, sometimes opaque, and generally
indeterminate, there is scope for difficulty in even resolving what is to count
as evidence for attributing religious desire. This is why the question of its
existence is not wholly empirical: it is also conceptual. Several times in his
contribution Jack Smart speaks of his wonder at the ultimate mysteriousness
of the universe, the fact of its existence. He confesses to feelings of awe in the
face of this and even to a ‘sneaking’ appreciation for Heidegger’s pressing of
the question of why there is anything at all. This recurrent desire for an
answer to the question of being is, I think, a religious one; it is a ‘why’ for
which God is the only possible answer. Less abstractly, cultural anthropology,
history, and the arts and literature, as well as specifically religious forms of
human organization and practice suggest that more explicitly religious desires
are extensively and deeply rooted.
The real problem, then, would seem to attach to the second premise. Why
on earth should we think that every natural desire has a real object, let alone
that this object will be attained? After all when philosophers want to illustrate
intensionality they often cite cases of a desire for something that does not
exist (as when Smart gives the example ‘Joe wants a unicorn’, p. 156). If one
were already persuaded that God exists then one might see it as providential
that we have implanted in us a desire for God, and see that this desire is not
destined to be frustrated for want of an object. But I cannot simply assume
theism, so how else might the desire for God be invoked? The answer,
I believe, is as part of an inference to the best explanation. At the very outset
of his Confessions St Augustine writes: ‘You made us for yourself, Lord; and
our hearts are restless until they come to rest in you.’ I have read this sentence
many times: when things have been going well and when they have been
going badly; when I have been confident in my beliefs and when I have
doubted them; when feeling lifted by grace and when feeling burdened by sin.
Augustine’s words seem ever apt, and I ask myself why that should be. The
answer is just a repetition of the words themselves: ‘our hearts are restless
until they come to rest in you’. Our striving and struggling, wishing and
wanting, seek completion in something that is itself complete (without beginning
or end); something that made us for itself, not as an act of narcissism
but as one of gratuitous generosity, and something that has the power to