The longing for food and sex is only for things we know. I’ve never heard of a person who doesn’t know what chocolate is but longs for it. After he tastes it the first time, he can long for it.

Yishai, that is exactly his claim. If someone longs, then he presumably knows the object of his longing. From here it follows that God exists. QED.

I would formulate the claim differently:
If I see that there is coordination between parts of reality (the longing for food in the soul and the existence of the object in reality—food), then I assume that if there is a longing for the metaphysical, there is probably in reality an object of that longing.

I happened to end up here by chance; sorry for my ignorance if I write nonsense. You’re writing here about absolute proofs. If A then B. I don’t think it works that way. For me personally, the very desire for God is enough to make me search for Him, and it also forms a link in my motivation to believe someone who shows me paths to Him. So from my personal point of view, this is a correct statement. There is no reason to think I am a completely exceptional creature, so it will probably speak to others too. Have a good week, and don’t forget: simplicity and innocence are the most important things! Especially for those who philosophize.

Abraham, note my wording: I deliberately didn’t write “proof of God,” I wrote “sign of God.” I also don’t think there are absolute proofs (except maybe in mathematics and logic); I’m speaking only about plausibility and self-persuasion.

Shai, I don’t agree with that formulation at all. Food is a survival need, and if someone who needed it did not find it, he would become extinct.

I didn’t understand the difficulty. I’m claiming that a person is born with a drive to eat and with a drive toward the metaphysical, so what if the drive to eat is an existential need?
Eating is a lower need of existence, and metaphysical thirst is a drive of the higher part of man, that part which demands meaning.

Because the drive to eat is an existential need, if in our world there were no food, mankind would have become extinct. If mankind still exists (after all: I long, therefore I exist), that proves there is food. But the mere drive for food does not prove that food exists. Therefore one can still argue that religious longing or drive proves nothing. There is no comparison between the two.
And if I return to the formulation you suggested: one cannot prove from the matter of food that there is coordination between parts of reality, but only regarding what is required for our very existence (that is the anthropic principle).

You’ve got the logic backwards.
Food is defined as that thing which satisfies hunger.
And according to your definition of God, God is defined as that thing which satisfies your longing for X.
If you think about it a bit, you’ll see that there is no difference at all between the properties of this X and idolatry.

The Last Decisor, it could be that the religious drive is a drive toward idolatry; I didn’t say that this drive is directed toward the Jewish God.
I’m only claiming that if I experience something, it is reasonable to assume that it exists in some way; otherwise I don’t understand what this experience is if it isn’t directed toward some object.

Rabbi Michi,
I didn’t mean to argue that appetite for food proves that there is coordination between parts of reality. I’m suggesting that if I start from the assumption that there is coordination between parts of reality, then if I were to meet a person longing for food and I didn’t see the food, I would infer the existence of food from seeing the person’s drive toward it.
In my opinion, every drive has an object that justifies it.

You explicitly wrote that what satisfies your longing is some concept that exists in your soul/imagination, and for some reason you defined that concept as God. I don’t see any difference between such a belief and children’s belief in all kinds of imaginary creatures.

In general, psychologically speaking, lacks are not things that something in reality can satisfy; rather, they are feelings created as a result of needs not having been met in the past.

The Last Decisor,
I’m asking why, or from where, this need arises. Is it an illusion?

The argument in its original form in Aquinas goes roughly like this (I’m not making an effort to be precise):

1. Every thing naturally tends toward (or desires) existing in the way characteristic of it.
2. In rational creatures, desire follows knowledge (a very basic assumption in Thomistic psychology).
3. Although the senses do not grasp what existence is except under the conditions of the here and now, the intellect grasps the concept of existence absolutely, and for all time, and therefore every being with intellect naturally desires to exist forever.
4. But a natural desire cannot be in vain.
5. Therefore, an intellectual being exists forever.

And there is a similar argument from desire for God (a natural desire for rational creatures that grasp the concept of God) to the conclusion that God exists.

In my opinion the argument is not as bad as it may seem to someone who buys the modern critique against scholastic metaphysics, but to show this one has to establish the entire metaphysics underlying it (teleological causation, substantial forms, and the like). It assumes that nature does not produce natural desires in vain. If there is a natural desire fitting for a creature of a certain kind (for example, the desire for knowledge in rational creatures), then in principle there is something in reality capable of satisfying it (regardless of whether without that thing the creature would survive or not).

Hello everyone! I’m still here. The discussion here is interesting; it’s a kind of therapy during exam period. Again, I really apologize if I’m writing nonsense. I’m trying to think straight; I don’t always succeed. I wrote that there are no proofs, only pieces of evidence. Seemingly that was agreed to, at least by Shai. Even so, people keep discussing whether it is a proof or not. More than that, the impression I get is as if there is a world of proofs and the question is whether this belongs to that world. And what bothered me most were Copenhagen’s words (who surely understands much more than I do), who brought Aquinas (sorry for my ignorance, I have no idea who that is), for whom this is a proof.

So what’s the problem? (I hope I’ll manage to be understood.)

Instead of deciding by means of the wisdom God gives us and according to our own feelings, we take the discussion out of ourselves and move it to another world. To Aquinas’s world or the world of proofs (which do not exist).
So what, then? The feeling, the need, exists in me; the feeling exists in many people in the world, a drive toward God. What weight does that have? It is evidence; it is part of a whole; it has a price, which each person weighs in his own mind. Even if the evidence on the other side prevails, the price is still paid—that of denying man’s natural needs.

What Decisor wrote, that this need can lead to idolatry, is true in the same way that a need for food can lead a person to eat unhealthy food that will kill him. The way to deal with that is to identify a need and its correct implementation.

Shai,
If you assume coordination, then you have already assumed God even without the longing, because where did the coordination come from otherwise?! What I wrote is that the proof from longing for food is not a proof (because the coordination there is a result of evolution and the anthropic principle).

True, Rabbi Michi, but God the engineer is not something romantic and interesting; the psychological longing for Him is. ?

Abraham,

You say that these things bother you because “instead of deciding by means of the wisdom God gives us and according to our feelings, we take the discussion out of ourselves and move it to another world. To Aquinas’s world or the world of proofs (which do not exist).”

But note that the question at the opening of the discussion was not whether God exists or whether we have a desire for Him, but only: is there a sign of God from the religious experience, or, as the discussion later developed, from human longing. There is, after all, something rather strange about this: is it possible that some other species, like lions or flies, might develop a desire that naturally exists among all members of the species for something that does not exist at all? In other words, that is the specific question we are discussing here: can the very fact that man longs for God point to the objective existence of God outside of man’s desires?

To that I responded that this is an ancient argument which, for various reasons, does not receive the attention it deserves.