Why to believe in God

Foundations of a Christian Worldview Before I proceed with what I taught during my Youth Group's winter retreat this past weekend, I figured I'd give a little background. What I presented is what the Bible already assumes we know. The Bible begins with an Axiomatic statement: "In the beginning, God..." and proceeds from there. The Bible does not try to 'prove' God exists; it merely documents the myriad of manifestations that God exists by showing what He has done. The majority of what I presented is basically 'school subject' material. In fact, a lot of it is Grad level and higher material. I had to do quite a bit of research for this. I will also try to post the sources of my material. I don't have it at the moment, so all I'm posting is the material itself. I tried to format the information to fit a webpage - we'll see how it goes :) Defining the foundation Axiom - (logic) a proposition that is not susceptible of proof or disproof; its truth is assumed to be self-evident. Absolute - Something that is conceived to be absolute; something that does not depend on anything else and is beyond human control. ( www.onelook.com ) certain; not to be doubted ( www.cambridge.org ) Absolute Statement - inflexible reality: fixed, invariable, unalterable facts. Fact - a piece of information about circumstances that exist or events that have occurred. a Priori - involving deductive reasoning from a general principle to a necessary effect; not supported by fact. Truth - a fact that has been verified. Objective Truth - a statement of inherent reality. It is something that is true independently of the question of its truth, or the opinions or observations of thinking beings. Law - In regards to human action a rule or body of rules of conduct inherent in human nature and essential to or binding upon human society; in regards to nature a generalization that describes recurring facts or events in nature. Opinion - a personal belief or judgment that is not founded on proof or certainty. A message expressing a belief about something; the expression of a belief that is held with confidence but not substantiated by positive knowledge or proof; a belief or sentiment shared by most people; the voice of the people. ( www.onelook.com ) Probability - a measure of how likely it is that some event will occur. Atheist - someone who denies the existence of god. Agnostic - a person who doubts truth of religion; uncertain of all claims to knowledge. I wanted to establish the definitions of the words we will be using to make our discussion clear. And with these defined words in mind, let's proceed with our discussion. Atheists and Agnostics assert absolute statements do not exist in every area of life. But we must concede every area of life contains absolute statements: 1. Math - 2+2=4 2. Science - The first law of thermodynamics states that energy can only be converted from one state to another, but cannot be created or destroyed. 3. History - George Washington was the first President of the United States 4. Language - a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z create the English language. 5. Philosophy - "There is a God." or "There is no God" (the point of our time together) I want us to consider the concept of "Absolute Statements" because our discussion is based in explaining two absolute statements: "There is a God," and "There is no God," of which one or the other is the cornerstone of everyone's belief system - a paradigm. Before we move on, there is a key factor that must be addressed and answered before proceeding with 'proving' the existence of God. If the person to whom you are talking does not at the very least admit the Bible could be true, there is no need to continue your discussion with them. For how can you believe in God if you are not willing to believe in the Bible? Or vice versa? Your best option at this point is to use Scripture. Hebrews 4:12 For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. My purpose today is not to allow Christians to win an argument or debate. My purpose today is 1. Help you know what you believe. 2. Prepare you to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you... The Bible begins with the axiomatic statement: In the beginning God... The Bible makes the assumption God exists; that He is self-evident. God is a foundational concept, an ultimate criterion - for believers He is the way we explain and understand everything. Therefore, He cannot be proven any more than skeptics can 'prove' their foundation, their 'ultimate criterion' for truth without using it. So, if God cannot be 'proven', why are we trying to prove He exists? We must realize we are not trying to prove anything. We are simply bringing to light the manifestations of God's existence. We are showing some of the logic behind what the Bible assumes we should already know. There are four things manifesting God's existence - Mind, Matter, Morality, and Music.

1. Mind

Recognizing Intelligence Scientists get excited about finding stone tools in a cave because these speak of intelligence - a toolmaker. They could not have designed themselves. Neither would anyone believe that the carved Presidents' heads on Mt. Rushmore were the product of millions of years of chance erosion. We can recognize design - the evidence of the out-workings of intelligence - in the man-made objects all around us. Similarly, in William Paley's famous argument, a watch implies a watchmaker.2 Today, however, a large proportion of people, including many leading scientists, believe that all plants and animals, including the incredibly complex brains of the people who make watches, motor cars, etc., were not designed by an intelligent God but rather came from an unintelligent evolutionary process. Design in Living Things Molecular biologist Dr Michael Denton, writing as an agnostic, concluded: 'Alongside the level of ingenuity and complexity exhibited by the molecular machinery of life, even our most advanced [twentieth century technology appears] clumsy. . . . It would be an illusion to think that what we are aware of at present is any more than a fraction of the full extent of biological design. In practically every field of fundamental biological research ever-increasing levels of design and complexity are being revealed at an ever-accelerating rate.'3 The world-renowned crusader for Darwinism and atheism, Prof. Richard Dawkins, states: 'We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully designed to have come into existence by chance.'4 Thus, even the most ardent atheist concedes that design is all around us. To a Christian, the design we see all around us is totally consistent with the Bible's explanation that God created all. Selection and Design Life is built on information, contained in that molecule of heredity, DNA. Dawkins believes that natural selection6 and mutations (blind, purposeless copying mistakes in this DNA) together provide the mechanism for producing the vast amounts of information responsible for the design in living things.7 Natural selection is a logical process that can be observed. However, selection can only operate on the information already contained in genes it does not produce new information.8 Actually, this is consistent with the Bible's account of origins; God created distinct kinds of animals and plants, each to reproduce after its own kind. One can observe great variation in a kind, and see the results of natural selection. For instance, dingoes, wolves and coyotes have developed over time as a result of natural selection operating on the information in the genes of the wolf/dog kind, but no new information was produced these varieties have resulted from rearrangement, and sorting out of the information in the original dog kind. One kind has never been observed to change into a totally different kind with new information that previously did not exist! In other words the first law of thermodynamics states that energy can only be converted from one state to another, but cannot be created or destroyed. Without a way to increase information, natural selection will not work as a mechanism for evolution. Evolutionists agree with this, but they believe that mutations somehow provide the new information for natural selection to act upon. Can Mutations Produce New Information? Actually, it is now clear that the answer is no! Dr Lee Spetner, a highly qualified scientist who taught information and communication theory at Johns Hopkins University, makes this abundantly clear in his recent book: 'In this chapter I'll bring several examples of evolution, [i.e., instances alleged to be examples of evolution] particularly mutations, and show that information is not increased . . . But in all the reading I've done in the life-sciences literature, I've never found a mutation that added information.'9 'All point mutations that have been studied on the molecular level turn out to reduce the genetic information and not to increase it.'10 'The NDT [neo-Darwinian theory] is supposed to explain how the information of life has been built up by evolution. The essential biological difference between a human and a bacterium is in the information they contain. All other biological differences follow from that. The human genome has much more information than does the bacterial genome. Information cannot be built up by mutations that lose it. A business can't make money by losing it a little at a time.'11 Evolutionary scientists have no way around the conclusions that many scientists, including Dr Spetner, have come to. Mutations do not work as a mechanism to fuel the evolutionary process. More Problems Scientists have found that within the cell, there are thousands of what can be called 'biochemical machines'. All of their parts have to be in place simultaneously or the cell can't function. Things which were thought to be simple mechanisms, such as being able to sense light and turn it into electrical impulses, are in fact highly complicated. Since life is built on these 'machines', the idea that natural processes could have made a living system is untenable. Biochemist Dr Michael Behe (see p. 17 this issue) uses the term 'irreducible complexity' in describing such biochemical 'machines'. '. . . systems of horrendous, irreducible complexity inhabit the cell. The resulting realization that life was designed by an intelligence is a shock to us in the twentieth century who have gotten used to thinking of life as the result of simple natural laws. But other centuries have had their shocks, and there is no reason to suppose that we should escape them.'12 Richard Dawkins recognizes this problem of needing 'machinery' to start with when he states: 'The theory of the blind watchmaker is extremely powerful given that we are allowed to assume replication and hence cumulative selection. But if replication needs complex machinery, since the only way we know for complex machinery ultimately to come into existence is cumulative selection, we have a problem.'13 A problem indeed! The more we look into the workings of life, the more complicated it gets, and the more we see that life could not arise by itself. Not only is a source of information needed, but also the complex 'machines' of the chemistry of life need to be in existence right from the start! A greater problem still! Some still try to insist that the machinery of the first cell could have arisen by pure chance. For instance, they say, by randomly drawing alphabet letters in sequence from a hat, sometimes you will get a simple word like 'BAT'.14 So given long time periods, why couldn't even more complex information arise by chance? However, what would the word 'BAT' mean to a German or Chinese speaker? The point is that an order of letters is meaningless unless there is a language convention and a translation system in place which makes it meaningful! In a cell, there is such a system (other molecules) that makes the order on the DNA meaningful. DNA without the language/translation system is meaningless, and these systems without the DNA wouldn't work either. The other complication is that the translation machinery which reads the order of the 'letters' in the DNA is itself specified by the DNA! This is another one of those 'machines' that needs to be fully formed or life won't work. Can information arise from non-information? Dr Werner Gitt, Director and Professor at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology, makes it clear that one of the things we know absolutely for sure from science, is that information cannot arise from disorder by chance. It always takes (greater) information to produce information, and ultimately information is the result of intelligence: 'A code system is always the result of a mental process (it requires an intelligent origin or inventor) . . . It should be emphasized that matter as such is unable to generate any code. All experiences indicate that a thinking being voluntarily exercising his own free will, cognition, and creativity, is required.'15 'There is no known natural law through which matter can give rise to information, neither is any physical process or material phenomenon known that can do this.'16 What is the source of the information? We can therefore deduce that the huge amount of information in living things must originally have come from an intelligence, which had to have been far superior to ours, as scientists are revealing every day. But then, some will say that such a source would have to be caused by something with even greater information/intelligence. However, if they reason like this, one could ask where this greater information/intelligence came from? And then where did that one come from ¦ one could extrapolate to infinity, forever, unless... ...Unless there was a source of infinite intelligence, beyond our finite understanding. But isn't this what the Bible indicates when we read, 'In the beginning God ¦'? The God of the Bible is an infinite being not bound by limitations of time, space, knowledge, or anything else. So which is the logically defensible position? That matter eternally existed (or came into existence by itself for no reason), and then by itself arranged itself into information systems against everything observed in real science? Or that a being with infinite intelligence,17 created information systems for life to exist, agreeing with real science? The answer seems obvious, so why don't all intelligent scientists accept this? Michael Behe answers: 'Many people, including many important and well-respected scientists, just don't want there to be anything beyond nature. They don't want a supernatural being to affect nature, no matter how brief or constructive the interaction may have been. In other words ¦ they bring an a priori philosophical commitment to their science that restricts what kinds of explanations they will accept about the physical world. Sometimes this leads to rather odd behavior.'18

2. Matter

The myth of atheism and science Many today think that science is anti-God. Atheists encourage this view by claiming that their way of thinking is 'scientific.' In claiming this, they are merely redefining science to exclude God. In fact, science began to flourish only when the biblical view of creation took root in Europe as the Reformation spread its influence. The presuppositions that enabled a scientific approach to investigating the worldthat the created universe is real, consistent, understandable, and possible to investigate, for examplecame from the Bible. Even non-Christian historians of science such as Loren Eiseley have acknowledged this.18 Consequently, almost every branch of science was either founded, co-founded, or dramatically advanced, by scientists who believed in the Bible's account of Creation and the Flood.19,20 And there are many scientists today who believe the Bible.21 Is it Science? Science has given us many wonderful things: men on the moon, cheap food, modern medicine, electricity, computers, and so on. All these achievements involve doing experiments in the present, making inferences from these results and doing more experiments to test those ideas. Here, the inferences, or conclusions, are closely related to the experiments and there is often little room for speculation. This type of science is called process, or operational, science, and has given us many valuable advances in knowledge that have benefited mankind. However, there is another type of science that deals with the past, which can be called historical, or origins, science. When it comes to working out what happened in the past, science is limited because we cannot do experiments directly on past events, and history cannot be repeated. In origins science, observations made in the present are used to make inferences about the past. The experiments that can be done in the present that relate to the past are often quite limited, so the inferences require a deal of guesswork. The further in the past the event being studied, the longer the chain of inferences involved, the more guesswork, and the more room there is for non-scientific factors to influence the conclusionsfactors such as the religious belief (or unbelief) of the scientist. So, what may be presented as 'science' regarding the past may be little more than the scientist's own personal worldview. The conflicts between 'science' and 'religion' occur in this historical science, not in operational science. Unfortunately, the respect earned by the successes of operational science confounds many into thinking that the conjectural claims arising from origins science carry the same authority.

A. Natural law

There is a universal tendency for all systems of matter/energy to run down.30 Available energy is dissipated and order is lost. Without either a programmed mechanism or intelligent action, even open systems31 will tend from order to disorder, from information to non-information, and towards less availability of energy. This is the reason why heat flows from hot to cold, and why the sun's energy will not make a dead stick grow (as opposed to a green plant, which contains specific, pre-programmed machinery to direct the energy to create a special type of order known as specified complexity). Applied to the origin of the first life, this denies that such specified complexity can possibly arise except from outside information impressed on to matter. Applied to the whole universe, which is acknowledged as winding down to 'heat death' (that is, 'cosmos to chaos'), this implies a fundamental contradiction to the 'chaos to cosmos, all by itself' essence of evolutionary philosophy.32,33 So, the universe had to be 'wound up' at the beginning and it could not have existed eternally. This requires some agent outside the universe to wind it upjust as a clock cannot wind itself!

B. Living things

Observed changes in living things head in the wrong direction to support evolution from protozoan to man (macro-evolution). Selection from the genetic information already present in a population (for example, DDT resistance in mosquitoes) causes a net loss of genetic information in that population. A DDT-resistant mosquito is adapted to an environment where DDT is present, but the population has lost genes present in the mosquitoes that were not resistant to DDT because they died and so did not pass on their genes. So natural selection and adaptation involve loss of genetic information. From information theory and a vast number of experiments and observations, we know that mutations (copying mistakes) are incapable of causing an increase in information and functional complexity.34 Instead, they cause 'noise' during the transmission of genetic information, in accordance with established scientific principles of the effect of random change on information flow, and so destroy the information.35 Not surprisingly, several thousand human diseases are now linked to mutations. This decrease in genetic information (from mutations, selection/adaptation/speciation and extinction) is consistent with the concept of original created gene poolswith a large degree of initial varietybeing depleted since. Since observed 'micro' changessuch as antibiotic resistance in bacteria and insecticide resistance in insectsare informationally down-hill, or at best horizontal, they cannot accumulate to give the required (uphill) changes for 'macro' evolution, regardless of the time period.36 These small changes are erroneously used as 'proofs of evolution' in biology courses, yet they cannot be extrapolated to explain ameba-to-man evolution. Such extrapolation is like arguing that if an unprofitable business loses only a little money each year, given enough years it will make a profit. The observed changes do, however, fit a Creation/Fall model well.

C. Fossils

Although Darwin expected millions of transitional fossils to be found, none have been found, except for a mere handful of disputable ones. Evolutionist Dr Colin Patterson of the British Museum of Natural History responded as follows to a written question asking why he failed to include illustrations of transitional forms in a book he wrote on evolution: 'I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualize such transformations, but from where would he get the information? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic license, would that not mislead the reader? 'I wrote the text of my book four years ago. If I were to write it now, I think the book would be rather different. Gradualism is a concept I believe in, not just because of Darwin's authority, but because my understanding of genetics seems to demand it. Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. As a paleontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. You say that I should at least show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived. I will lay it on the linethere is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.'37 Even the often-claimed transition between reptiles and birds, Archaeopteryx, shows no sign of the crucial scale-to-feather or leg-to-wing transition. While it is always possible to maintain faith in evolution by belief in unobservable mechanisms,38 the evidence of such a systematic paucity of the anticipated evolutionary 'links' on a global scale is powerful, positive support for biblical creation, regardless of any argument about how and when fossils may have formed.

D. The age of things

The evidence for a 'young' earth/universe is, by definition, evidence for biblical creation, as naturalistic evolution, if it were at all possible, would require eons. There is much evidence that the universe is relatively young,39 such as the decay of the earth's magnetic field, including rapid paleomagnetic reversals,40 fragile organic molecules in fossils supposedly many millions of years old,41 not enough helium in the atmosphere,42 not enough salt in the sea,43 carbon-14 in coal and oil supposedly millions of years old, polystrate fossils that extend through strata supposedly representing many millions of years, inter-tonguing of non-sequential geological strata,44 small number of supernova remnants,45 magnetic fields on 'cold' planets, and much more (see What about carbon dating?). Elapsed time extending back beyond one's own lifetime cannot be directly measured, so all arguments for either a long or a short age are necessarily indirect and must depend on acceptance of the assumptions on which they are inevitably based. Young-earth arguments make sense of the fact that many fossils show well-preserved soft parts. This requires rapid deposition and rapid hardening of the encasing sediment for such fossils to exist. Observations of multiple geologic strata and canyons, for example, forming rapidly under catastrophic conditions in recent times, indicate that the entrenched slow-and-gradual, vast-age thinking may well be markedly in error.46,47

E. Cultural-anthropological evidence

Hundreds of worldwide traditions among indigenous peoples about a global Flood, each with features in common with the biblical account, provide evidence of the reality of that account. Also widespread, but less so, are accounts of a time of language dispersal. Linguistic and biological evidence has recently revealed a hitherto unrealized genetic closeness among all the 'races' of people, consistent with a recent origin from a small population source. This denies the previously widely held belief that human races evolved their characteristic features during long periods of isolation. Molecular studies suggest that, relatively recently, one woman provided the mitochondrial DNA which gave rise to the sequences in all people alive today.48 Such evidence may be squeezed into an evolutionary model, but it was not a direct prediction of it. However, it is directly consistent with biblical creation.

F. Design and complexity

Incredibly complex coordinated biological systems are known in which no conceivable part-coordinated, part-functioning, simpler arrangement would be other than a liability.49 Some examples are the blood-clotting mechanism, the bacterial flagellum (used for propulsion), the photosynthetic apparatus, and the pupal transformation of caterpillars to butterflies. Examples abound in living things. The immense complexity of the human brain, its creativity and power of abstract reasoning, with capacities vastly beyond that required for sheer survival, is perhaps the most 'obvious' evidence for intelligent creation. At the molecular level, the organization that characterizes living things is inherently different from, for example, a crystal arrangement. The function of a given protein, for instance, depends upon the assembly sequence of its constituents. The coded information required to generate these sequences is not intrinsic to the chemistry of the components (as it is for the structure of a crystal) but extrinsic (imposed from outside). During reproduction, the information required to make a living organism is impressed upon material substrates to give a pre-programmed pattern, by systems of equal (or greater) complexity (in the parent organism/s) which themselves had the same requirement for their formation. Without pre-programmed machinery, no spontaneous, physico-chemical process is known to generate such information-bearing sequencesthis requires the operation of outside intelligence. The most reasonable inference from such observations is that outside intelligence was responsible for a vast original store of biological information in the form of created populations of fully functioning organisms.50 Such intelligence vastly surpasses human intelligenceagain consistent with the concept of God as revealed in the Bible.

3. Morality

One of the things we see when we look at life is an inescapable sense of moral obligation. This is more than saying that there are moral values or moral feelings. All people know it is right to be generous, kind, honest, courageous, and fair - and wrong to be selfish, cruel, deceptive, cowardly and unjust. But what we mean by right is not merely that we feel good a out the such actions, but that people are obligated to them no matter what they feel about them. An obligation is objective, not subjective - it is there no matter what anyone thinks or feels about it. But if there is no God, it is very hard to see where these objective obligations come from. Someone may say to you, But I don't believe in objective moral obligation. Every moral statement is only an expression of the subjective feelings of the speaker. Consider what you do when you affirm that there are no objective moral obligations. You are saying, you ought not to evaluate me by your moral principles. But to say this you are pressing an obligation upon me that you are appealing to that is outside of me, to which you say I ought to be accountable. Why? Now if there is a God who created a moral order, so that we are accountable to Him and it, then surely it is fair to say, We ought to be reasonable and tolerant. But if there is no objective moral obligation, how can you even make an argument? If you cannot deny objective moral obligation without using it, then you should admit that you do see it and believe in it. Another person may object with But isn't morality just a product of cultures and relative to them? The problem for those who espouse relativism is that they cannot avoid comparing cultures. Do you think it was a good thing for America to abolish slavery? Are you critical of any ethical practices in your own culture? Do you think that child sacrifice was a bad thing? The only way you can do so is by appealing to objective moral obligations to which others are as bound as yourself. But isn't our sense of morality a product of evolution? It helped us survive. One problem with this view is that it is difficult to prove that unselfishness, kindness, fairness are genetic traits that help one survive! But the problem is that the evolutionary theory can only account for moral feelings, not moral obligation. If a person says, but there are not moral obligation, only evolved, genetically based moral feelings that means that they espouse that murder and rape are not truly wrong, only impractical. But the one espousing this shows the very next moment that he or she does not believe it. They should never be morally outraged or hold anyone responsible for rape and murder. They should not ever hold people morally responsible for swindling and cheating. If our actions show that we believe certain acts to be objectively wrong despite our internal psychology, we show that we don't believe the evolutionary model to be true. Ok. Maybe you're talking to someone who concedes, There are moral obligations. How does that prove God? This is a weak argument. What it is saying is while the view that there is a Creator God would lead us to expect moral obligations, and the view that there is no God would not lead us to expect it, I am going to hold to an atheistic viewpoint anyway. Moral obligations in a world without God mean that the atheistic world would be absurd. Here you have unavoidable obligations to do things that will give you no benefits in this life at a ll. Honestly and courage and love are often extremely impractical, leading to diminishment of money, health, even the end of life. Why would such obligations have ever arisen in a world where death is the end of everything? We know that napalming babies, starving the poor, raping the vulnerable, and buying and selling people is wrong - does not just feel wrong. But if your premise [that there is no God] leads you to a conclusion that you know isn't true [namely that these things only feel wrong, but are not wrong] why not change the premise?

4. Music

One of the things that we see in the world is that great art makes us feel that there is meaning in life, that love is real, that some things are valuable. For example, Leonard Bernstein aid, Listening to Beethoven's Fifth, you get the feeling there's something right with the world, something that checks throughout, something that follows its own laws consistently, something we can trust, that will never let us down. This is a simple fact of experience. We all disagree on which art is great and which art affects us like this, but we all experience it. But if there is no God, love is an illusion - it is just a function of my brain chemistry, and beautiful music is also an illusion - it is just the way my nervous system is designed. Either there is a God, or love and beauty is an absolute illusion. C. S. Lewis put it quite well: Let us suppose that Nature is all that exists... you can't, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atom, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behavior of your genes. You can't go on getting very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it. You may still, in the lowest sense, have a 'good time'; but just in so far as it becomes very good, just in so far ax it ever threatens to push you on from cold sensuality into real warmth and enthusiasm and joy, so far you will be forced to feel the hopeless disharmony between the universe in which you really live (and the universe in which you think you live). So either there is a God, or love and beauty and meaning are a complete illusion (and why would these deep convictions have ever arisen, anyway?) Someone may object with, But just because we feel these things are real is no argument that they exist. But are we only talking about feeling here? There is a difference between innate and artificial desires. For example, jut because you want a Coke doesn't mean there is a Coke at hand, nor does it mean that one exists anywhere in the world. But thirst is fundamental and innate, and it does mean that there is such a thing as liquid. The desire for coke came from factor outside of us (advertising, personal experience), but the thirst desire is completely natural and innate. Artificial desires can exist without a corresponding object. But innate desires correspond always to real objects that can satisfy them, such as with sexual desire (corresponding to sex), physical appetite (corresponding to food), tiredness (corresponding to sleep), relational desires (corresponding to friendship). Now there exists in us a desire that nothing in time and space can satisfy, a desire for an unknown something that no amount of food, friendship, success can satisfy. Human beings everywhere and at all times have been overwhelmingly religious, believing in something beyond the here and now that will fill the desire for that something. There is an innate desire. Again, Leis put it best. So a duckling wants to swim - such a thing as water; a baby wants to suck - such a thing as milk. And if I find in myself a longing which this world cannot meet, then it probably means that I was made for another world as well.