Quote:
Originally posted by boobmaster
You miss the whole point of the argument.
(1) Every natural, innate desire in us corresponds to some real object that can satisfy that desire.
(2) But there exists in us a desire which nothing in time, nothing on earth, no creature can satisfy.
(3) Therefore there must exist something more than time, earth and creatures, which can satisfy this desire.
(4) This something is what people call "God" and "life with God forever."
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The argument is fallacious. There's any number of conditions inherent to the fragility of the human brain what could cause a person to desire the impossible, improbable or just plain wierd. Read through the case studies of paranoid delusionals sometime.
... however, lets just start with one simple concept that puts this 'desire for god' into perspective:
Immortality.
Throughout time, man has sought it, desired it, engaged in wars and quests about it, generated massive mythologies surrounding it.
It doesn't exist.
Why does a desire for immortality exist, then? I would suggest that people want immortality because they fear the unknown instinctively, and noone has come back to tell people what it's like (aside from some random people who were either 'dead' for PR reasons, or had an enormous post-mortal mythos built up). The assertion is, therefore, a logical fallacy.
"God" isn't the reason why religion exists. Religion exists to provide answers to things which, at the moment, are unanswerable by means of deduction. Back in the old days those questions were "what are those shining dots in the sky at night? why does water fall on my head?", nowadays its limited pretty much to the time-honoured questions of 'where are we from, why are we here, what happens when we die'. Rational thought has come up with better, more verifiable answers to the other questions.
God isn't the source of the desire. God is the temporary answer, until we can find something better. It's the "tastes like chicken" solution in the face of insufficient information to supplant it.
Mind you, even imperfect abstractions can be highly effective. Crystal spheres sorta did the job until Copernicus, Kepler, Brae and Newton came along. Classical mechanics was plenty useful until Einstein. Saying that God would strike down those who ate pig was still an effective means of keeping people from dying from eating undercooked pork, even though we know today that there's a better reason why it happened.