The God Desire opens, appropriately enough, with a quotation from a non-existent book. Written by Virginia Brook, a fictional atheist in the play God’s Dice by the comedian David Baddiel, The Belief System begins:
A close friend once said to me: but don’t you want to believe in God? I said: yes. Desperately. That’s why I know He doesn’t exist.
There is some irony here. Desperately wanting an atheist to argue for disbelief from the intense desire for God, Baddiel invented one who does. That doesn’t mean that none exists. There’s Baddiel himself, author of The God Desire, which makes the very argument attributed to Brook.
Does Baddiel’s existence refute his own reasoning? “There’s a flaw in my argument, obviously,” he disarmingly concedes on page 19: “Things you wish for can exist.” Baddiel attempts to repair the inference from intense desire to non-existence by adding a third term: “invisibility,” by which he means the insusceptibility of God’s existence to empirical verification. At which point, the argument becomes old news: some will contend that there is empirical evidence for God; others will appeal to non-empirical proof; still others will deny the need for reasons of either kind. Aiming to sidestep traditional arguments for and against the existence of God, Baddiel falls into the pit of religious epistemology.
It doesn’t follow from the fact that we want something to be true that it’s actually false. But you might argue that, if we want it to be true, and this desire is the cause of our belief, then the belief is unfounded. Alternatively: if your belief is explained by your desire, it would be at best an accident if the belief is true—which means it won’t amount to knowledge.
And yet this inference is tricky, too: it’s sometimes called “the genetic fallacy.” The reply is that it doesn’t matter how you came to believe something so long as the belief is warranted now. There’s no way to avoid engaging with arguments pro and con. What’s more, were I a theist, I’d deny that the connection between our desire for God and God’s existence is an accident: the desire was installed in our nature by God. Virginia Brook’s argument does not show that belief in God cannot be knowledge, let alone that we know he doesn’t exist.
Still, there is something to admire in her emotional honesty—and in Baddiel’s. “My argument … requires an admission,” he writes, “which frankly most atheists, I’ve noticed, aren’t prepared to make. Which is: I love God. … Who would not love a superhero dad who chases off death?” Baddiel has little time for macho atheists who disdain the comforts of belief, “disavow[ing] the presence in themselves of what religion is meant to serve.”
Baddiel puts fear of death at the root of theism, but he mentions, too, the desire for narrative, and meaning, and more:
All of this indicates another benefit we get from God, psychologically, which is—and I’m aware that this isn’t a word—parent-ness. God the Parent—God the Father and Mother—synchronises all the other benefits. It is parents who, initially, give our lives meaning and allow us to tell stories about ourselves.
I used to think I had the God desire: I wanted there to be a God, whatever my beliefs. But I wouldn’t say that now. I don’t desire a personal God. (When I went to Jewish services with my wife and read the translations of the prayers, the relentless praise made me cringe.) What I want is not a superhero dad but for the universe to make sense, for it to meet what Hegel called our “absolute need” to be at home in the world. I can see why Baddiel might frame this need in filial terms, as a desire for God the Parent. But those who didn’t feel at home at home may crave a more impersonal consolation: a rational proof, or truth, or narrative that salves our ontological homelessness.
We may also be more modest in our hopes. I’m as terrified of death as anyone, but I have no dreams of immortality. I cannot think that justice will be done in some divine tribunal, that everything has happened for good reason in the best of all possible worlds. My hopes are more precarious, more painful, more provisional: that we will bend the arc of future history towards justice—an ontological Airbnb.
Hegel believed that our fate is more secure. The world is essentially such as to meet the absolute need for rational, ethical order—eventually. (Those who lived before the French Revolution are out of luck.) Baddiel is less sunny:
Atheists throughout the centuries, from Spinoza [sic] to Santayana, seem to have felt the need to say, there is no God, then what? And to go on to offer various ways in which humans can still survive adequately or reorganize their thinking, to combat things like ‘the problem of evil’. Whereas what seems to me to need to be said is there is no God: that’s just what is. What follows from the truth is not the responsibility of the truth.
Which is bleak, but true. Contemplating now not just the death of God but the perilous arc of history, the fragile state of humankind, I think of Adorno in Minima Moralia: “Today … it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.”
Well expressed. Thank you.
But isn't to not be fully "at home in one's home" (or to be at home in the distance in which we live (Gadamer)) also a religious impulse or an expression of a religious sensibility?
İ like what Arendt says: just when we came to believe we were only terrestrial animals we have wanted to escape earth. That desire to escape earth and finitude seems to have in some quarters become even more pressing once God was 'killed'.
And maybe there's a paradox: without a transcendental reference have we become *more* homeless? Has the world become more 'worldless'?