I was nine, and my Dad bought us tickets to see the new movie that was rocking the world. He was even taking us to the grand Glasgow Odeon…our biggest local cinema in 1977.
I couldn’t wait to see Star Wars. It was just one movie called Star Wars, back then. And when the big yellow words crawled across the giant screen in front of my young eyes…something happened. A longing was birthed within me … I touched a desire for something greater, something more. That sense has stayed with me through my life and I’ve recaptured it from time to time. That desire … that nothing in this real world ever seems close to satisfying.
C S Lewis realised something about the desires I’m talking about:
“The books or music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing … Do what we will, then, we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy.”[1]
It seems this deep desire is sparked within us by different things. Maybe nature, science or the arts. But it points towards something else. And it’s never ultimately satisfied in this life.
French existentialist and atheist Jean-Paul Sartre said, “There comes a time when one asks, even of Shakespeare [and Star Wars], even of Beethoven, ‘Is that all there is?’” Okay … I added Star Wars into the Sartre quote.
That deep longing, was used by C S Lewis to construct an argument pointing us from the thing that sparked our desire … towards God.
1 – Every natural, innate desire in us corresponds to some real object that can satisfy that desire.
2 – There exists in us a desire which nothing in time, or on earth, no creature can satisfy.
3 – Therefore there must exist something more than time, earth, and creatures which can satisfy it.[2]
We long for food. Well, there are many sources of nourishment available to us to eat and drink. We long for relationships and intimacy. Well, there are people with which to relate. We have a deep desire that nothing in life can satisfy… Well. If we are plagued by longings in our lives that nothing in this life seems to satisfy, then surely we were made for another world?[3]
My desire points me ultimately towards the God who created me who is able to satisfy me.
Andy Bannister observes a number of responses to C S Lewis’s argument from desire.[4]
1 – Just because you desire something does not mean it exists.
I would love to fly in the Millenium Falcon. But that doesn’t mean it’s real. (except in Disney Land, right?)
Yet this is a confusion. That’s not what C S Lewis is talking about. He’s referring to nature, innate desires that are universal. They are within all of us, and bubble up within everyone, whatever our culture.
2 – We don’t always get what we want.
But that’s not the point. I may be hungry but my fridge is empty and the shops are shut. Nevertheless, me being hungry points to the existence of food that will satisfy my hunger.
3 – I’m happy as I am think you. I need nothing, certainly not God.
Is this Pollyanna atheism, an unwillingness to face the consequences of unbelief? Kreeft has gone further, suggesting this response indicates that this needs “something more like an exorcism than a refutation.”[5]
Many atheists have been more honest or self-aware. Bertrand Russell has said:
“The center of me is always and eternally in terrible pain – a curious wild pain – a searching for something beyond what the world contains.”[6]
I think Russel speaks genuinely and honestly out of despair. And I think C S Lewis speaks to those same unfulfilled desires from a position of positivity and hope and purpose. We do not need to live our lives beating back the same of growing hopelessness. Hope is real, and is actually a Person. Our longings form part of the evidence that He exists and can be known by us.
[1] C S Lewis, The Weight of Glory (1949; report., New York: HarperCollins, 1980), 30.
[2] Andy Bannister, “Old Truths from Oxford C S Lewis and the New Atheists,” C S Lewis Discipleship of Heart and Mind, http://www.cslewisinstitute.org/Old_Truths_from_Oxford_CS_Lewis_and_the_New_Atheists.
[3] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, (London:@ William Collins, 2015), 137
[4] Bannister, “Old Truths”.
[5] Peter Kreeft, Heaven, the Heart’s Deepest Longing (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 225.
[6] Nicholas Griffin, eh., The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 2: The Public Years (London: Routeledge, 2001), 85.
Photo by Iswanto Arif on Unsplash
