In Mere Christianity, Christian myth-maker C.S. Lewis sought to reason his way to the existence of a God he desired, (his version only, however, not that of others) by offering his “Argument from Desire.” After his wife Helen passed away, however, Lewis felt as forsaken by God as Jesus on the cross, leading him to conclude that God was a “Cosmic Sadist,” an “Eternal Vet,” and a "Spiteful Imbecile." So, what changed?
The answer to that question has to be unpacked in three parts. But first: why does it matter anyway? It matters because, as this argument illustrates only too well, the creative ways we can use our reasoning can lead us to very different answers to this argument. And, as Lewis’s change reflects, our emotions are often the catalyst for more creative ways of thinking. The question all of this raises is whether the answer we reach when considering this argument is one that makes us more dependent upon a brand of religion or ideology, which is like a bird becoming dependent upon a particular airline to fly, or more independent, which allows that bird to learn how to use its own wings to fly instead. To achieve the former, simply convince that bird they were born an ugly duckling. To do the latter, you have to show that “ugly duckling” they were really born a beautiful swan. The former lives in fear of rejection, while the latter can only learn how to fly through love.
It should be noted that the damage done to a person by teaching them their “soul” is effectively an “ugly duckling” (because it comes stained with original sin) is used to create community cohesion through conformity and dependence on “group” approval, and then presenting that "approval" as "the love of God."
To see how this argument is so often used to hijack a person’s creativity, turning a person into “The Little Match Girl” who is forced to use their creativity to sell the brand of matches she has become dependent on for survival, we have to approach this argument in two parts. In Part I, we first have to understand the different reasoning methods and modes of analysis we can use to consider this question. Doing so will allow us in Part II, to see how those methods can lead us to different answers. Those answers, rather than being personal only to Lewis, reveal a major difference in human reasoning on the whole. But the only way we can appreciate that difference is to consider how those different methods of reasoning can lead us to two very different conclusions, like two different butterflies each flapping their wings and producing two very different hurricanes of human understanding. Only then can we appreciate how the change in conclusion Lewis reached can be the result of a change in the way Lewis was using his own brain.
By changing his view of God from a personal savior to a cosmic sadist, Lewis teaches us something important about how our “desires” can be affected by our emotions, and also by our method of thinking and reasoning. Prior to her passing, the method of reasoning that allowed Lewis to hold firmly to his Christianity was as anchored to certain core assumptions about life as he was to Helen. After her passing, his method of reasoning appeared to become as unmoored from those assumptions as Lewis himself no doubt felt at the loss of his other half. The former was grounded in the beliefs he relied on to make sense of the world, while the latter was free to consider other perspectives and possibilities. And that’s why this argument is so useful in helping us to better understand ourselves and, by extension, each other.
Often rejected by atheists as a tautology and a non sequitur, the argument from desire can be an invaluable tool for understanding how and why good people can reason their way to completely different conclusions, even like Lewis at different times in their own lives, while also leading those same people to conclude that anyone who reaches a conclusion different from their own is both irrational and wrong. By doing so, the shift in his “desire” from seeing God as a savior to a sadist reveals how, at the heart of the Argument from Desire, there is a paradox that beats within each and everyone one of us.
Most people see this argument in black and white, and think it boils down to the question of whether a particular brand of God is real or imagined. But that’s just a question this argument asks us to think about on the surface level, even though it fails to answer “which God” we should “desire.” But there is also a deeper structure to the question. That deeper structure is what we might call “the meta-question.” That meta-question has less to do with whether anything we are capable of calling a “God” exists or not. On a deeper level, in other words, 80% of the iceberg this argument invites us to consider is a question about our own cognition, method of reasoning, and mode of analysis.
Cognition: Intuitive vs Reflective
In psychology, cognition refers to the mental processes involved in acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses. It encompasses all aspects of thinking, learning, memory, and perception. Essentially, cognition is how we acquire, process, and use information. Thinking about how we use our cognitive processes, in an attempt to see how we reason our way to a conclusion, is a form of metacognition.
Metacognition is focused on the understanding and management of how one reasons. Simply put, it is an awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes. Thinking about how our mind operates leads us to discover we each possess two kinds of cognition: reflective and intuitive.
Reflective and intuitive cognition represent two distinct modes of thinking. Sometimes referred to as System 2 thinking, Reflective cognition is a slow, deliberate, and conscious process. Intuitive cognition, which is sometimes referred to as System 1 thinking, is fast, automatic, and largely unconscious. Reflective thinking relies on logical reasoning, analysis, and evidence-based decisions, whereas intuition involves gut feelings, patterns recognition, and past experiences. Each tends to rely on a different method of reasoning. To understanding that difference, we have to engage in what we call “meta-reasoning.”
Meta-reasoning refers to the process of thinking about one’s own thinking and reasoning processes, including monitoring, controlling, and evaluating them. When combined with metacognition, meta-reasoning can be thought of as “metacognitive reasoning.” Often described as “thinking about thinking,” metacognitive reasoning involves understanding and regulating one’s own cognitive processes. It’s a higher-order thinking skill that allows individuals to monitor, evaluate, and adjust their thinking strategies, leading to not only more effective learning and problem-solving, but also more dynamic understandings.
Studies show that these mental processes occur in two different parts of our brain. The slower reflective processing occurs in the adult “thinking” sections of the brain, like the prefrontal cortex, which is the slowest part of our brain to develop, only doing so fully around our mid 20s. In contrast, our quicker more intuitive processing occurs in the child “feeling” sections of the brain, which we are born with fully wired. Trauma often affects the “child” sections of our brain, and is then woven into a story that is taught to, and eventually told to us by, the “father” sections of our brain. When trauma happens, our “father”-brain can end up with a story that is felt by the child-brain like judgement, rejection, or unworthiness. Such experiences leave a child feeling like the world is an unsafe place, preventing them from ever becoming their authentic self. Such insecurity can lead us to dissociate from our needs and ourselves as we strive to be whoever we need to be to remain attached to those we feel we need to survive.
Physically, trauma that leads our reflective “father” sections of our brain to dissociate from our intuitive “child” sections of our brain can cause our sympathetic and para-sympathetic nervous systems to become dysregulated. The sympathetic nervous system acts like the body’s gas-pedal, while the para-sympathetic nervous system acts like the body’s brake pedal. Dissociation, as such, is like driving a race car through a shopping mall with “the pedal to the metal” and no breaks.
In 2015, Dr. Andrew B. Newberg performed experiments that revealed something about how religious practices may affect how these two sections of our brains relate to each other. His study dealt with altered states of mind during intense Islamic prayer. What he found was that such practices accompanied decreased cerebral blood flow to the “father” and reasoning prefrontal cortex and related frontal lobe structures of the brain. The prefrontal cortex is traditionally thought to be involved in executive control, or willful behavior, as well as decision-making. So, the researchers hypothesize, it would make sense that a practice that centers on relinquishing control would result in decreased activity in this brain area.
Consider what this means. If prayer causes blood to flow out of those sections of our brain that deal with control and decision making, then the section of our brain that gains the upper-hand in controlling our thoughts and behaviors is that section that may be suffering from trauma. This is like the pilot of an airplane passing-out and a child who is prone to temper tantrums taking the wheel, so to speak. The neglected child that has just been given controls of the airplane, which carries all the possible future versions of ourselves we could grow up to be if we were not suffering from such trauma, bases its worth on the approval of others, which it seeks to obtain through obedience and conformity. Obedience to who or what? Often, to the source of trauma, resulting in what is described as “trauma bonding” that forms the basis of Stockholm syndrome and battered spouse syndrome.
So, what happens when that traumatized “child” brain is told it must prove itself “worthy” by sacrificing its only son, by burning witches or heretics, or by flying that plane into a building?
Metacognitive reasoning helps us to better understand all of this, and why it matters, by putting our reasoning under a microscope. Doing so reveals how we can best understand Lewis’s change in perspective about God by understanding how the method of reasoning he used before and after the death of his wife Helen, determined what Lewis felt about his ideas of God.
That change in Lewis’ reasoning leads us to a question: Does the method of reasoning being relied on lead us to a single inescapable conclusion for the heaven and God Lewis desired prior to the death of his wife, despite his later feelings of abandonment by that God and his rejection of a belief that “heaven” or hell could balance the scales of injustice here on Earth after her death, or does it lead to a form of rationalizing, which can equally be exercised to justify perhaps a “belief” in any heaven or “God” a person may “desire”?
To clarify, for us to fully understand and appreciate the Argument from Desire, we first have to understand how, when looked at through the microscope of metacognitive reasoning, it can be used to illustrate the difference between two methods of reasoning that can be applied to it. Without our awareness of their differences, those methods can both seem equally rational even as they can lead us to very different and even opposite conclusions. So subtle is the main difference between these two forms of reasoning that it often goes unnoticed how much their starting points can be, but aren’t always, as radically different as the North and South pole. Both methods can lead to the same conclusion, however, if the assumptions of each start closer to the equator. Like a mirror reflecting identical but opposite images of the same thing, those two forms of reasoning are known as deduction and induction.
Deductive vs Inductive Reasoning
Like intuitive and reflective cognition, the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning is that the former is more scripted and automatic while the other is more elastic. One reasons more like a lawyer, anchored to a perspective or theory, while the other is more like a scientist or an artist who is willing to cut ties with a perspective or theory to consider other points of view which may be better than one’s own. For one, evidence and logic are often used to support the theory we start with; for the other, they tend to be more free to follow their own path. Like a parent, one molds evidence to meet our approval, and the other tries to allow the evidence to express its own authenticity.
“In the beginning,” deductive reasoning was the reasoning of survival. It began, as a result, with the intuitive assumption of our own mortality. Inductive reasoning was more mature. Letting go of the apron strings of previously held assumptions, it began when a reflective desire for understanding surpassed our need to focus on survival. Life was lonely, brutish and short, the former reasoning was forced to conclude, but curiosity and creativity made it worth it, the latter came to discover, for only in both were we truly limitless. It was the difference between a body holding on to a piece of drift wood for dear life, and a mind bursting with a creative curiosity that could travel to the ends of time and space and beyond. That difference can be seen in the difference between human understanding overall when we switched from relying on a faith grounded in a desire for eternal life, to one being guided by a faith in accepting our mortality in exchange for endless possibilities. The former allowed fear to fasten human understanding to an anchor of obedience to tradition for the sake of tradition, while the latter let go of those fears to discover everything from space travel and the internet to quantum physics. One clung to religion to give us meaning in an unknown universe, in other words, while the other gave birth to the modern world by teaching us everything we have come to know about the universe, and even beyond.
To see how this happened, we have to start with the Prometheus who dared to free our minds to question everything by choosing the path of thinking less traveled by. That man wrote a book proposing a “new method,” one which Islam had been exercising since the seventh century. That book ignited the light of possibility that blazed across Europe, culminating in the Enlightenment. Who was the Adam who dared to pluck the fruit of knowledge through a willingness to trust his curiosity more than an obedience to tradition, and by doing so, armed Isaac Newton with the ability to ask why that apple fell from that tree and hit him in the head? Francis Bacon.
The New Science
In 1620, philosopher Francis Bacon published his Novum Organum Scientiarium (“new instrument of science”; in English, The New Organon). Before Bacon, “natural philosophers,” as scientists were then called, developed their models via the Aristotelian or “deductive” method that proceeded from axioms — unquestioned principles that formed the basis of all further reasoning. In this system, observable facts were almost an afterthought, and used only to confirm the idea it was assumed those axioms led to.
Breaking from this sacred form of reasoning, which at times became circular, his New Organon began with nothing as the best place to begin creating understanding. It did this in two ways. First, it recognized that the old Aristotelian system of deductive reasoning, as powerful a tool of investigation as it had been, was nevertheless stifling human progress by dragging around such a “sacred tradition” like a ball and chain. Like turning water into wine, religion then used the idea that “the fear of God is the road to wisdom” to make us believe such a method was the only way to tap into “divine revelation.” Only through that revelation could we ensure survival even in the afterlife, to avoid Plato’s relatively recent invention of what we today call “hell.” With the rise of Christianity, it was God Himself who was said to have shared such knowledge, but only with “the chosen” few (who we must simply “believe” are always the most ancient and special of us all, even if the only thing they all tend to agree on is the need for us to fear and fight each other for God’s “love,” which is really just a form of divine approval).
And second, it proposed a viable alternative: rather than using religious “revelations” as a starting point “in faith,” which enables even the greatest of lies to masquerade as the greatest of truths, it would start from a point of doubt. Doing so would empower us to separate the wheat of the one from the chaff of the other. With doubt at its starting point instead of “faith” in claims to “infallibility” and inerrancy, the new method allowed for the meticulous gathering of empirical data without the coloring effects of our subconscious confirmation bias. Then, that unbiased data could be matched against different theories. Today, this process has become the essence of the modern scientific method.
In her book, “Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson,” Jennifer Michael Hecht provides a sweeping history that celebrates the doubt enthroned by this new method as an engine of creativity and as an alternative to the political and intellectual dangers of certainty. Just as belief has its own history featuring people whose unique expressions of faith have forever changed the world, doubt has a vibrant story and tradition of its own, with its own saints, martyrs, and sages. One of those martyrs was the heretical Catholic monk Peter Abelard, who died in 1142. Like Adam, Socrates, and Jesus Christ, Abelard dared to break with obedience to tradition by following his own curiosity.“The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting,” Abelard concluded, for “by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth.”
In the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, Renee Descartes had discovered the power of doubt when he proclaimed “I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.” And, along with Pierre Bayle, Descartes and Bacon’s courage to doubt ignited an intellectual revolution that spread across Europe. Freed from dragging dogma around like an old battle axe, that revolution of thought emphasized reason and individualism, and the willingness to question, over obedience to tradition. Curiosity and creativity turned from chasing its tale in pursuit of a mysterious and unknowable “God,” to seeking what could be known about the mysteries of everything in creation, regardless where it all came from. Promoting skepticism from a heretical sin to a lantern of scientific thought brought the candle of human curiosity out from under the table of tradition where it had been place by religion, and held it up as a torch to light our way forward through the unknown. As its fire grew in the salons of France, the welter of human curiosity it ignited throughout Europe eventually crossed the Atlantic Ocean and exploded in the American Revolution. The Enlightenment had begun and The Age of Reason, as Thomas Paine referred to it, would go on to awaken the human mind from its religious torpor.
Born of the original sin of skepticism — which would’ve protected Adam & Eve from being curious enough to trust the greatest salesman God has ever created than the threat of eternity in an afterlife that looks like the ovens of Auschwitz — the Enlightenment opened a path for independent thought resulting in the discovery of a staggering amount of new knowledge. Drastic expansions occurred in the fields of mathematics, astronomy, physics, politics, economics, philosophy, and medicine. The American Declaration of Independence, the United States Bill of Rights, and France’s Declarations of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, were just a few of the contributions that a broad education, intellectual stimulation, and independence of thought, could produce.
And all of the advances in science, medicine, and technology of the modern world are the result of the power of doubt and the inductive method of reasoning, while religion defends its right to claim it is the source of all wisdom and morality by convincing us of “beliefs” in the moral imperative to use those technologies against each other.
And where science creates the technologies that destroy us from within and without, even as scientists work together to reach “truths” that may be uncertain and are subject to change, religions work together to convince us the only moral thing we can do to avoid hell and reach heaven, in this life or at least the next, is use those weapons against each other in the name of “God’s will.”
To clarify the difference between the two in practice, deduction is a method of reasoning that starts with a theory and tries to mold observable evidence into supporting that theory. In contrast, induction starts with observing evidence and then proposes theories that could best explain the evidence. One starts with a theory of who done it, and arranges the evidence to confirm the theory, while the other starts with a presumption of innocence so the evidence can speak for itself. Indeed, perhaps what looks like a crime was really just an accident. One spends its energy trying to prove a person is a witch, and that they are in league with Lucifer, while the other questions whether such things as Lucifer or “witches” are real or imagined. Even if both may lead to false conclusions, the true test is about who’s method of reasoning is a better guide for judging whether a person should be defined as “evil,” like those who burned witches, or simply different, like those accused of being witches.
Within a few generations, Bacon’s intellectual children — Hooke, Boyle, and Newton, to name but a few — established the Royal Society for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge (now known simply as the Royal Society). This spawned similar groups throughout Europe, and with them followed a prodigious acceleration of scientific discovery and an explosion of human understanding. Simply put, the shift from deductive to inductive reasoning amounted to a “big bang” in human knowledge and perspective which went on to change the political order of Europe and America from monarchy, built as they were on the assumptions of deductive reasoning, to democracy, as inductive reasoning invited people to question and think for themselves, what was really the “truth” natural order of things: something we learned from each other, or something we were told?
To us today, these two kinds of reasoning often look like a contest between irrationality and reasoning. We consider reasoning to involve reaching conclusions based on logical thinking and evidence, whereas what we often think of as “irrationality” tends to involve explaining or justifying something to make it appear proper or correct, often without a solid foundation. One offers a diagnosis of dementia that should be treated, while the other offers a diagnosis of demonic possession that suggests the person, at the very least, has a soul that had failed to accept Jesus as it’s personal Lord and Savior. In truth, we all rely on both forms of reasoning, especially when it comes to matters of the heart, even if we deny or are often oblivious to the fact we do.
Rationalism and Empiricism
Deductive and Inductive methods of reasoning often lead to two distinct modes of analysis called rationalism and empiricism. In our study of knowledge, otherwise known as epistemology, these two modes represent different approaches to understanding how we gain knowledge and what the nature of truth is. Rationalists believe that reason and intuition are the primary sources of knowledge, while empiricists emphasize sensory experience as the foundation of knowledge. The former tends to rely more on deductive reasoning, while the latter relies more on inductive reasoning.
Rationalists rely heavily on deductive reasoning, moving from general principles to specific conclusions. For example, a general rule of things that exist is that they were created from something by something. This leads to a “belief” in a “God.” Empiricists use inductive reasoning, drawing general conclusions from specific observation. This leads to a “doubt” about the ability to ever know or define what is meant by the word “God”. Since a principle of quantum mechanics suggests that particles can spontaneously appear and disappear from the quantum vacuum (a state that, despite its name, is not actually nothing), somethings can come from nothing. Also, the law of conservation of energy states that energy cannot be “created” or destroyed, only transformed from one form to another. Rationalist Christians call the “Creator” that itself has no creator “God,” a “being” they seek to emulate and appease through their obedience and behavior. Empiricist scientists strip away the bias for anthropomorphizing by replacing the word “God” with the word “energy.” While other empiricists theorize that the universe may not have been created from nothing, but rather may have evolved from pre-existing matter or conditions that, like the Christian God, has always existed in one state or another. The difference is that, unlike Christian rationalists, the scientific empiricists do not seek to persecute and punish each other for thinking differently.
Monotheism can contribute to this problem. It does so when monotheistic religions claim to be the foundation of all “truth,” even though these two forms of reasoning can lead us all to two different kinds of truth. After all, scientific truth about the nature of the Sun and the Earth is different from personal truth about what religion one feels is right for them, and what a person feels about whether a God exists or not, and if so, which one to worship, and why, how, and when to so. Ironically, the induction flowered when it detached itself from assumptions about the material world it was anchored in, while deduction clung to its ideals for fear of spiraling into the void of immateriality embodied in the God of monotheism. St. Augustine confused the latter for the former when he concluded that the Sun rotated around the Earth, which he believed was flat, because the Bible said so. For him, because anything the Bible said was the “truth,” its’ claims always formed the basis of all reasoning, at a time when all reasoning was deductive in nature. Anyone who challenged this view by daring to think more inductively, on the other hand, was seen as a heretic and an enemy of all truth everywhere.
By asserting themselves as the necessary foundation of all truth in this way, especially to a mind that fails to notice the difference between factual and experiential truths that can often be at odds with each other, monotheistic religions like Christianity can drive people toward Science as a counter refuge to the claims such religions seek to impose on others. Unaware of the difference between the two kinds of truth claims, as such, many feel forced to choose one camp or the other.
Today, this need is exacerbated by the pressure of identity politics, even as our own brains continue to rely on both forms of truth to survive, fall in love, and make decisions. Yet even while apparently unaware of the difference between deductive vs inductive reasoning, the ancient Greeks nevertheless understood how we all relied necessarily on two forms of different kinds of truth claims: one which operated in the realm of logos or logic, and the other which operated in the realm or in the guise of mythos or myth.
Only by understanding all of this can we finally move on to Part II, so we can understand why this argument — which many rely on as one of the principle supports for their Christian conception of “God” — is ultimately the latter masquerading as the former.
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