C.S. Lewis, British writer and lay-theologian, 1898-1963
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“The Christian says, ‘Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find until after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others do the same.’”
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— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952), The C.S. Lewis Signature Classics, HarperOne, 2017 p114

Peter John Kreeft, American professor of philosophy, 1937-
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“The first premise implies a distinction of desires into two kinds: innate and externally conditioned, or natural and artificial. We naturally desire things like food, drink, sex, sleep, knowledge, friendship and beauty; and we naturally shun things like starvation, loneliness, ignorance and ugliness. We also desire (but not innately or naturally) things like sports cars, political office, flying through the air like Superman, the land of Oz and a Red Sox world championship.“Now there are differences between these two kinds of desires. We do not, for example, for the most part, recognize corresponding states of deprivation for the second, the artificial, desires, as we do for the first. There is no word like ‘Ozlessness’ parallel to ‘sleeplessness.’ But more importantly, the natural desires come from within, from our nature, while the artificial ones come from without, from society, advertising or fiction. This second difference is the reason for a third difference: the natural desires are found in all of us, but the artificial ones vary from person to person.

“The existence of the artificial desires does not necessarily mean that the desired objects exist. Some do; some don’t. Sports cars do; Oz does not. But the existence of natural desires does, in every discoverable case, mean that the objects desired exist. No one has ever found one case of an innate desire for a nonexistent object.”
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— Peter Kreeft, “The Argument from Desire,” 20 Arguments for God’s Existence (website)


“The conclusion of the argument is not that everything the Bible tells us about God and life with God is really so. What it proves is an unknown X, but an unknown whose direction, so to speak, is known. This X is more: more beauty, more desirability, more awesomeness, more joy. This X is to great beauty as, for example, great beauty is to small beauty or to a mixture of beauty and ugliness. And the same is true of other perfections.
“But the ‘more’ is infinitely more, for we are not satisfied with the finite and partial. Thus the analogy (X is to great beauty as great beauty is to small beauty) is not proportionate. Twenty is to ten as ten is to five, but infinite is not to twenty as twenty is to ten. The argument points down an infinite corridor in a definite direction. Its conclusion is not ‘God’ as already conceived or defined, but a moving and mysterious X which pulls us to itself and pulls all our images and concepts out of themselves.
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“In other words, the only concept of God in this argument is the concept of that which transcends concepts, something ;no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived’ (1 Cor. 2:9). In other words, this is the real God.”

— Peter Kreeft, “The Argument from Desire,” 20 Arguments for God’s Existence (website)

Sir John Templeton, British investor & philanthropist, 1912-2008
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“Wouldn’t it be strange if a universe without a purpose accidentally created humans who are so obsessed with purpose?”

— Sir John Templeton, The Humble Approach: Scientists Discover God, Templeton Foundation, Philadelphia, 1998
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Michael Guillen, American science writer & editor
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“Bambi doesn’t walk through the woods praying. Bambi doesn’t go through life wondering if there is a heaven or hell, and wondering if he’s going to one place or another. We alone are the only creature on this planet but does all those things. We are the only creation on the planet that is spiritual.”

― Michael Guillen, PhD, “Church du Soleil,” OC Weekly, August 4, 2005

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Paul Davies, PhD, English physicist & professor, 1946-
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“Many practicing scientists are also religious. Following the publication of God and the New Physics, I was astonished to discover how many of my close scientific colleagues practice a conventional religion. In some cases they manage to keep these two aspects of their lives separate, as if science rules six days a week, and religion on Sunday. A few scientists, however, make strenuous and sincere efforts to bring their science and their religion into harmony. Usually this entails taking a very liberal view of religious doctrine on the one hand, and on the other hand imbuing the world of physical phenomena with a significance that many of their fellow scientists find unappealing.
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“Among those scientists who are not religious in a conventional sense, many confess to a vague feeling that there is ‘something’ beyond the surface reality of daily experience, some meaning behind existence. Even hard-nosed atheists frequently have what has been called a sense of reverence for nature, a fascination and respect for its depth and beauty and subtlety, that is akin to religious awe. Indeed, scientists are very emotional people in these matters. There is no greater misconception about scientists than the widespread belief that they are cold, hard, soulless individuals.
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“I belong to the group of scientists who do not subscribe to a conventional religion but nevertheless deny that the universe is a purposeless accident. Through my scientific work I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact. There must, it seems to me, be a deeper level of explanation. Whether one wishes to call that deeper level ‘God’ is a matter of taste and definition. Furthermore, I have come to the point of view that mind – i.e., conscious awareness of the world – is not a meaningless and incidental quirk of nature, but an absolutely fundamental facet of reality. That is not to say that we are the purpose for which the universe exists. Far from it. I do, however, believe that we human beings are built into the scheme of things in a very basic way.”
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— Paul Davies, The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p15-16

John Baillie, Scottish theologian, 1886-1960
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“Our conviction of the reality of God first forms itself in our minds in close association with a wide context of other beliefs. In the course of our later intellectual development, however, many of these beliefs are seen by us to be false and are quite rightly surrendered. The effort of dissociation that is then required in order to separate our deep-seated belief in God from that part of its original context which we have now been forced to reject, is an effort to which our mental powers are not always equal, so that we are faced with the difficult alternative of either keeping our belief in God and keeping it with certain other beliefs the falsity of which seem quite obvious to us, or else surrendering these false beliefs and surrendering with them our belief in God also.”

— John Baillie, Our Knowledge of God, Oxford University Press, 1939 p59-60 (quoted by Jerome I. Gellman, Experience of God and the Rationality of Theistic Belief, Cornell University Press, 1997 p158-159)
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Jerome I. Gellman, Israeli professor of philosophy, 1940-
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“[John] Baillie is here noting a phenomenon which has accelerated since his words were written: the phenomenon of the dismissal of God’s existence for reasons that do not really support the conclusion that there is no God. The reasons are thought to count against the existence of God only because they count against ideas and doctrines often closely associated with belief in God. In considering here the counterevidence to God’s existence, therefore, we are not to include such reasons in our reckoning.”

— Jerome I. Gellman, Experience of God and the Rationality of Theistic Belief, Cornell University Press, 1997 p159

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