Ontological Airbnb

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 whic…