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The World Is Not Enough

“Is This All There Is?”

Something went wrong on the way to having it all. I’m in my forties, and many in my age group have now worked long and hard enough to reach the top of their professions. Unfortunately, as Ilya Shapiro writes, “we are not happy. . . . Generation X143 has arrived, made its presence felt, looked around, and is wondering, ‘Is that all there is?’” He notes that even those who seem to have it all are still looking for fulfillment.

We have everything we could ever want in this stage of life, but still we search for meaning.

Like the government lawyer who tries to have a “parallel life” as a historian. . . . Or the jet-setting consultant who makes films on the side. Or the real estate developer who used to be a filmmaker/banker/musician. . . . These are the people living supposedly perfect lives (or lives on course for perfection) yet feel empty, not being able to find meaning or fulfillment in either materialism or new age spiritualism, Porsches or Pilates.144

Perhaps it will get better as we get older, Shapiro hopes at the end of the article. Not likely, suggests baby boomer Gregg Easterbrook. He opens his book The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse with this thought experiment:

Suppose your great-great grandparents, who lived four generations ago, materialized in the United States of the present day. . . . They would be dazzled. Unlimited food at affordable prices, never the slightest worry about shortage, unlimited variety—strawberries in March!—so much to eat that in the Western nations, overindulgence now plagues not just the well-off but the poor.

Not to mention other aspects of contemporary life that would “strike our recent ancestors as nearly miraculous,” such as an almost doubling of the average life, the defeat of history’s plagues, the end of backbreaking physical toil for most wage earners, instantaneous global communication, same-day travel to distant cities, the end of formal discrimination, mass homeownership, and incredible advances of freedom. “All told, except for the clamor and speed of society, and for the trends in popular music, your great-great-grandparents might say the contemporary United States is the realization of utopia.”145

But it isn’t utopia. Easterbrook concludes by saying that although everything is better, his generation is also not happy.

Yet how many of us feel positive about our moment, or even believe that life is getting better? Today Americans tell pollsters that the country is going downhill, that their parents had it better, that they feel unbearably stressed out, that their children face a declining future. . . .

The percentage of Americans who describe themselves as “happy” has not budged since the 1950s, though the typical person’s real income has more than doubled through that period. Happiness has not increased in Japan or Western Europe in the past half-century, either, though daily life in both those places has grown fantastically better, incorporating all the advances noted above plus the end of dictatorships and recovery from war. . . . [Even in an era of abundance and social progress,] the citizens of the United States and the European Union, almost all of whom live better than almost all of the men and women in history, entertain considerable discontent.146

If you are looking for a penetrating and thought-provoking fact to drop into your discussion, that is a great place to start. People are not satisfied. Longing for something more is simply a universal fact of life. As we will see in this chapter, this is best explained by the Christian worldview.

The Data of Personal Experience

We spent the previous chapter discussing a fact generally presented by skeptics as evidence against Christianity. Now we’ll turn to truths that believers usually introduce into the conversation in support of the Christian worldview. As I mentioned earlier, there is plenty of evidence available, and dozens of good apologetics books that explain the arguments. Feel free to go with whatever topic you feel most comfortable at this stage in the conversation.

However, I suggest that you emphasize (or at least not ignore) the more personal and experiential evidences for Christianity. For example, the Christian worldview offers the best explanation for the universal human experiences of longing (the topic of this chapter), guilt, and the feeling that an unseen power is directing our lives in some way.147 Christianity also better accounts for more uniquely individual experiences such as mystical encounters with the presence of God, answers to prayer, miraculous healing, encounters with spirits, and direct providential guidance. We’ll discuss those experiences in the next chapter.

Here are a couple of reasons to focus on the experiential.

First, it enables you to keep your discussions personal and relevant to everyday life. It’s easy to let worldview debates get so academic that they verge on esoteric. You want to avoid that. Evangelistic conversations are not about trying to get the skeptic to sign off on a bunch of abstract facts or even historical propositions; you are trying to bring the unbeliever into a relationship with Jesus. Skeptics need to know more than that God exists or that science supports Christianity, or even that Jesus rose from the dead 2,000 years ago; they need to know that Jesus is living and active in people’s lives today.

Of course this assumes that Jesus has changed you for the better and you see how he is active in your life today. I hope that is true. Unfortunately, for many Christians, Jesus is just somebody to believe in, not someone to know personally. Henry Blackaby notes that he was motivated to write his best-selling book Experiencing God because he found too many believers

coming to church every week and learning more and more about God, but they were not experiencing Him. To many, He was simply a faraway God to be believed in, a doctrine to affirm, an invisible deity to whom they recited their prayers. They needed to know He is a Person with whom Christians can enjoy an intimate, growing, loving fellowship.148

Charles Kraft adds that a major problem with Western Christianity is that it is full of “practicing deists”149 who treat God as if he were a distant creator who got the universe going but now leaves it to run like a machine. This is a tragedy. As we will discuss in more detail in the next chapter, God is very active in the world today. To miss out on an experiential relationship with God is to miss a wonderful blessing.

This leads to the second reason to focus on the experiential: God not only acts, he acts for our good. I argued in chapter 1 that we shouldn’t “sell” the gospel as if it were a consumer product. That does not mean, however, that the truth doesn’t provide exactly what people need: love, purpose, meaning, freedom from guilt, and guidance through life, among many other benefits. The gospel is called “good news” for a reason. This is a great time in the conversation to emphasize that. The more you can show the skeptic how the truths you are explaining have had a personal impact on you and can greatly improve his life, the better.

Step One: Present and Clarify the Data

Let’s start, as always, by clearly establishing the facts we are presenting. The data on the table in this chapter is that all people feel unfulfilled, and nothing the world offers satisfies their desire for something more. As Doug Groothuis summarizes, “There is, on the one hand, the pained longing for the transcendent and, on the other, the sense of the inadequacy of merely earthly goods to satisfy that longing.”150 People can’t find contentment within themselves, they can’t find it in other people, and they can’t find it in things. That is the problem.

This is not to say that people don’t experience moments of happiness and joy, or even that some people are not basically okay with the general state of their lives. We are not claiming that everyone is deeply depressed all the time. We are simply making the point that deep down inside everyone is a metaphysical restlessness that can’t be satiated with temporal treasures. Nothing is able to completely satisfy our yearning. No matter how much we gain, the ache remains.

To further clarify, this is not a restlessness that comes from obvious vain pursuits. We are not referring to the guy who sinks all his time and money into collecting string and then wonders why getting his name into the Guinness Book of World Records for largest ball of twine isn’t more satisfying. The surprising thing about metaphysical restlessness is that it persists even when we pursue worthwhile goals, such as loving relationships and wisdom and the experience of traveling in beautiful and exotic lands. We can gain all the goods the world has to offer and still want more. “There comes a time when one asks even of Shakespeare, even of Beethoven, is this all?”151

The Skeptic and the Data

Will the skeptic affirm that universal metaphysical restlessness is a fact? Probably. In my experience, most people are honest and self-aware enough to grant you this one. However, some might reject it, primarily for two reasons.

First, some people simply haven’t thought much about it. “I don’t know—I’m basically happy,” they might respond. However, this view is not the result of any extended or deep reflection on the subject. The sad reality is that many people go through every minute of every day either busy with work and social duties or plugged in to some form of entertainment. Many people simply don’t contemplate life’s biggest questions, ever. If you can get these folks to actually think about their lives for even a minute, they should realize and admit that life is not all they wish it would be.

Indeed, the fact that people spend their lives so distracted by work and entertainment is evidence, I would suggest, that they aren’t content. They don’t want to have to think about the pointlessness of it all, and they keep themselves busy so they don’t have to. These people don’t see entertainment as something restful, recuperative, and contemplative, as it has been traditionally understood, but as an escape from the real world. Why would anyone want to escape from a world in which they are content and happy?152 Blaise Pascal saw diversion for what it is—an attempt to escape an unpleasant reality marked by inconstancy, boredom, and anxiety.153

Just asking “Really?” might be all you need to do here. A moment or two of actual reflection could be enough to get your conversation partner to realize the truth. If she insists that she desires nothing further to make life perfect, you can be almost certain that claim is made only for the sake of her argument with you and not out of deep and honest reflection. No one is completely satisfied with every single aspect of life. If the skeptic insists that she is, it might be best to move on to another point and leave her with her conscience.

A skeptic might also reject your data because he still holds on to the idea that something out there will make him truly content. “If I only had 50 million dollars and a Ferrari and a new supermodel girlfriend every other week, everything would be fine.” Peter Kreeft points out,

The reply to this is, of course, “Try it. You won’t like it.” It’s been tried and has never satisfied. In fact, billions of people have performed and are even now performing trillions of such experiments, desperately seeking the ever-elusive satisfaction they crave. For even if they won the whole world, it would not be enough to fill one human heart.154

One doesn’t have to be an expert in the history of powerful, rich, and famous people to know that they are no more content than the rest of us. Indeed, the fact that they actually reached the highest rung on society’s ladder and still weren’t satisfied seems to be partly responsible for the depression and dysfunction that so often accompany this type of success.

You also might take a minute to point out one of the main reasons people find temporal goods unfulfilling: the fact that they are temporal. Nothing lasts forever, as the saying goes. That shiny new car will one day be a useless hunk of rusted junk; that beautiful big house will be torn down eventually; and, as sad as it is to consider, everyone we know and love is destined to die. Scientists assure us that the universe itself is doomed to extinction. The problem here is that if everything eventually ceases to exist, then nothing has ultimate meaning or value. In a billion trillion years, when the earth is gone and everyone who ever lived is forgotten, will anything you learned or accomplished or owned matter? As King Solomon, a man who had everything the world had to offer, realized, death sucks the purpose out of everything. He gained wisdom, but came to realize that, ultimately, the wise man is no better off than the fool:

The same fate overtakes them both. Then I said to myself, “The fate of the fool will overtake me also. What then do I gain by being wise?” I said to myself, “This too is meaningless.” For the wise man, like the fool, will not be long remembered; the days have already come when both will be forgotten. Like the fool, the wise too must die! So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

Ecclesiastes 2:14–17

William Lane Craig notes,

If each individual person passes out of existence when he dies, then what ultimate meaning can be given to his life? Does it really matter whether he ever existed at all? It might be said that his life was important because it influenced others or affected the course of history. But this shows only a relative significance to his life, not an ultimate significance. His life may be important relative to certain other events, but what is the ultimate significance of any of those events? If all the events are meaningless, then what can be the ultimate significance of influencing any of them? Ultimately it makes no difference.155

In other words, your environmental activism may have an effect on life here and now, but it will have no ultimate effect. The end will be the same regardless of what anyone does. Craig’s Reasonable Faith, particularly chapter 2 on the absurdity of life without God, is excellent in this area, and discussing this may help the skeptic see your point about the insufficiency of worldly goods to satisfy. However, as I said above, if he won’t agree to your data point fairly quickly, I suggest choosing another piece of evidence to discuss. Assuming that most people will agree with the idea that all people long for something more in life, let’s move on to explaining that fact.

Step Two: Offer the Christian Explanation of the Data

I’ve switched the order of steps for this chapter (putting the Christian explanation ahead of the skeptic’s) because the Christian is presenting the evidence and the conversation will probably flow naturally into the believer’s explanation of that data. However, as I mentioned in the last chapter, this is obviously not a hard-and-fast rule. If the skeptic jumps in and offers her explanation, and you want to discuss it first, of course that’s fine.

A Desire for God

According to the Christian worldview, the reason nothing on earth satisfies our deepest desire is that we do not desire anything on earth. Rather, we desire God. More specifically, we desire the intimate relationship with God for which we were created and that we lost at the fall. Even more specifically, we long for true love. We are desperate to love and be loved by our heavenly Father. Because, as we saw in chapter 4, if we love ourselves and the creation more than the Creator we are unsatisfied. Disordered love creates chaos, not contentment. C. S. Lewis explains that when Satan convinced Adam and Eve that they could be their own gods, he was selling the idea that humans could create happiness for themselves apart from their creator. “And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, [social] classes, empires, slavery—the long, terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”156 This will never work because we were created for God: “God cannot give us happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”157

As creatures designed for relationship with God, we cannot escape the fact that we will never be fulfilled until we have that relationship. Kreeft offers good insight in this area as well:

Like it or not, we come into this world with predesigned equipment, spiritual as well as physical. And we can never alter or erase that design, no matter how desperately and darkly we try. We are cursed with the knowledge of God. We are spoiled by our knowledge of the Best and can therefore never be totally satisfied with anything less.158

This truth has been stated many ways over the centuries. Saint Augustine famously said that, even in his sinful and rebellious state, part of man longs to praise God. “The thought of you stirs him so deeply that he cannot be content unless he praises you, because you made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.”159

Randy Alcorn calls this a longing for heaven, the place where this rest will be complete:

Nothing is more often misdiagnosed than our homesickness for Heaven. We think that what we want is sex, drugs, alcohol, a new job, a raise, a doctorate, a spouse, a large-screen television, a new car, a cabin in the woods, a condo in Hawaii. What we really want is the person we were made for, Jesus, and the place we were made for, Heaven. Nothing less can satisfy us.160

Kreeft makes the same argument in suggesting that what we really seek is agape, the love of God. He notes that, while the perfection of our relationship with God will occur in heaven, the relationship with God that we long for is available right now.

The deeper and more honestly we look, the closer we approach Ecclesiastes’ terrifying truth about this world: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” . . . Nothing here under the sun can fill our hearts and still our restlessness. But God can fill us and still us, and God is agape, and agape is here under the sun. Agape is eternal because it is the very stuff of God. That is why it is the only thing in life that never gets boring. Not ever. Agape is the only answer to Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes says, “I have seen everything” (Ecclesiastes 1:14). But he has not. He missed one thing: agape.161

So while we may never completely eradicate the longing we feel for heaven until we get there, part of our desires can be met by a current relationship with God.

Regardless of their various points of emphasis, these theologians all agree that the unfulfilled longing people feel is the result of being separated from God. Only God will fill the hole in our lives. In fact, God has erased the ache that millions of people have felt before they met him.

Here you could tell your own story of finding peace and contentment through a relationship with Jesus (assuming you have one and have found some peace) or relate the testimony of any of the millions of other Christians in history that have done the same. Take Saint Augustine, for example. His classic Confessions is all about how he struggled to discard his “load of vanity”162—all the earthly goods he had chased so hard after and yet failed to satisfy—and finally found fulfillment in Christ.

In my own case, I came to an abrupt realization of the futility of earthly goods while lying on a hospital bed completely unable to move. It was the early nineties, and I was a typical cocky young twenty-something, living for nothing more than a good time. My friend and I were driving home from playing hockey in southern Saskatchewan when my beloved black Chevy short-box hit a patch of black ice on a bridge and slid into a ditch filled with hard-packed snow. The truck flipped several times, throwing me out the driver’s side window before coming to a rest just inches from my head. I woke up in the hospital, paralyzed. All I could think of was what a waste my life had been to that point. I had made some money and had some fun, but for what? Right then and there I told God he could do whatever he wanted to do with me. If that meant going to Africa as a missionary (the standard fear of every pious young evangelical I knew), well, so be it, but I was done chasing after stuff that would never satisfy.

It was a key turning point in my life. By the next morning I was able to move (there had been no major injuries) and I was released from the hospital later that day. I was also released from the confines of a meaningless and empty life. As I will talk about more in the next chapter, God has faithfully guided and supported me since that day, and I have never for a second regretted surrendering my life to him. He has brought me joy, contentment, and purpose beyond my wildest dreams.

A Possible Objection to the Christian Explanation

Let’s briefly address a popular objection you might hear to the Christian explanation of longing: “The fact that we long for something doesn’t mean that it exists. Even if I grant that we long for God, that doesn’t prove that he exists. When I was young, I wished that Santa Claus was real, but that didn’t make it so.”

First, we are not trying to prove God exists in the mathematical sense. This is not a logical syllogism that states, “I long, therefore God must exist.” We are practicing inference to the best explanation. We think the data of longing is best explained within the Christian worldview; that is not to say that other explanations are not possible.

Second, we need to make a distinction between innate natural desires and externally conditioned artificial desires. We naturally desire things like food, sleep, and friendship and naturally shun things like starvation and loneliness. On the other hand, we also may desire fame, fortune, and the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but these do not come from within us. They are socially conditioned by advertising, TV, comic books, and the like. Natural desires are universal, but artificial desires vary from person to person. Also, we do not recognize the lack of an artificial desire in the same way we do a natural one. We commonly refer to being hungry or tired, but we don’t think in terms such as “Ferrari-less.”163 All this to say that natural desires always correspond to things that exist. As C. S. Lewis reasoned,

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. Man feels 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.164

This doesn’t mean that we always attain the objects of our desires. However, it is a good indication that the objects exist.

A man’s physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will.165

Step Three: Evaluate Alternate Explanations

Frankly, I’m not sure what you will hear in the way of alternate explanations for longing. In my experience, skeptics, if they can come up with anything at all, are all over the map on this one. However, that is not to say that there are no alternate answers. Thinkers have been trying to come up with a solution to the problem of discontentment since the fall. Indeed, that quest has been at least partly responsible for some of the more serious and enduring philosophies and religions in the history of the world. It’s just that these ideas have not really taken hold in common American consciousness. That said, I do want to address, in broad strokes and on a very popular level, three theories that you may run into (in one form or another) in day-to-day conversation. We’ll start with the one that developed most recently and move our way backward in history.

The Existentialist Answer

The most common response you hear will probably sound something like this: “Well, okay, maybe there is nothing outside of us that will satisfy everyone’s longing, but I just think it’s up to each of us individually to choose our own meaning in life. We can be fulfilled; we just have to decide for ourselves how we want to be fulfilled.”

This response owes much to nineteenth- and twentieth-century atheist existentialist philosophers like as Jean-Paul Sartre. After coming to the realization that life without God is absurd and objectively pointless, Sartre was filled with anguish, abandonment, and despair at the prospect of facing a world in which he was without a transcendent guide or purpose.166 He posited that man must create purpose for himself by following a freely chosen path. Sartre settled on Marxism.

You see this mind-set in the current preoccupation of our youth in finding something to join that is “bigger than themselves.” From communism to environmentalism, people sign on because it provides them something to live for beyond their paycheck. Al Gore made this point explicit in a New York Times op-ed about why everyone should be a part of his anti-global-warming crusade. After explaining that there would be some financial benefits from a switch to clean energy, he concludes:

But there’s something even more precious to be gained if we do the right thing. The climate crisis offers us the chance to experience what few generations in history have had the privilege of experiencing: a generational mission; a compelling moral purpose; a shared cause; and the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict of politics and to embrace a genuine moral and spiritual challenge.167

This is an existentialist statement. Gore is saying that, contrary to what previous generations of unfortunate fools had done, this generation can find a meaning in life by choosing to join the anti-global-warming movement.

The obvious flaw in this thinking is that the whole notion of self-created meaning is absurd on its face. As Craig points out:

Without God, there can be no objective meaning in life. Sartre’s program is actually an exercise in self-delusion. For the universe does not really acquire meaning just because I happen to give it one. This is easy to see: for suppose I give the universe one meaning, and you give it another. Who is right? The answer, of course, is neither one. For the universe without God remains objectively meaningless, no matter how we regard it. Sartre is really saying, “Let’s pretend the universe has meaning.” And this is just fooling ourselves.168

Also, what if the “meaning” you choose for your life is evil? Sartre chose Marxism, an ideology that presided over more than 100 million murders in the twentieth century. Was that a valid choice? This is something you might ask the person who thinks we should choose our own meaning in life. If there is no ultimate standard, is finding “fulfillment” by breaking into homes and stealing your neighbor’s stuff okay? These are the kinds of logical ramifications you will want to explore with an existentialist.

The Stoic Answer

The Stoic agrees with the existentialist that we need to tackle the problem of longing by exercising our will. However, where the existentialist claims we should choose to find fulfillment in something, the Stoic says we should choose to stop desiring fulfillment at all.

Stoicism began about 300 BC and is represented in the thought of philosophers such as Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. They taught that almost all types of human desire are subordinate to the will. In other words, if you feel a need for something, it is because you chose to feel that need, or at least allowed yourself to feel it. Feelings don’t occur unless you exercise your will. As Epictetus wrote, “If, therefore, any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone.”169 In other words, if you are sad, it’s not because of outward circumstances, it’s your own fault for choosing to be sad. Consequently, they reasoned, the key to getting rid of longing is to simply choose to stop longing.

While it is certainly true that our choices can influence and direct our feelings for good or ill, the Stoic view goes too far in attempting to deny our natural desires and emotional responses to objective reality. For example, it is perfectly normal to be sad when a loved one dies. To attempt, through an act of will, not to be sad is to act contrary to our true nature. There may be a time to “suck it up,” but at a certain point that becomes destructive.170 It is like trying not to be hungry after not eating for a few days. While willpower can have positive effects on our appetite, at some point the body legitimately needs food, and to suppress that desire is actually harmful.

As I mentioned earlier, there is a difference between natural longings, such as hunger, and artificial longings, such as the desire for a Ferrari. Natural longings are not fundamentally the result of choice. While it might be right to stop longing for a sports car, one should not stop wanting to eat, although we may want to stop wanting to eat quite as much as we do. Existential angst is a natural desire that needs to find its object. We need God, and no amount of willpower will change that.

Eastern Answers

Buddhism and Hinduism, currently in vogue among many Westerners, are both directly concerned with humanity’s discontentment and have similar prescriptions to the problem of desire.

For example, “The Four Noble Truths” of Buddhism (arguably the central teaching of that religion) address the problem of humanity’s unfulfilled longing explicitly. The first truth is that life lacks satisfaction. While people may find happiness for a moment here and there, it is always fleeting. Everything changes and so nothing keeps us content. The second truth is that we are dissatisfied because we crave and cling and thirst. We need to get rid of that desire, which is the result of ignorance. The problem is that we see a distinction between ourselves and the thing we desire. We think that the things of the world will add something to our lives if we could only attach ourselves to them. In reality, according to Buddhism, there is no separation between you and things. All is one. To desire something is to mistakenly think that you exist independently from the thing you desire. The third and fourth truths teach how to reach a level of experience in which you “realize emptiness” and cease to desire anything, largely because there ceases to be a “you” to do anything at all. All distinctions are gone.

Hinduism, for its part, similarly teaches that the goal of its various paths and stages of life is “liberation” from the desires of life and union with the divine. Although it recognizes that people can legitimately give themselves to lesser goals, such as sensual pleasure, wealth, worldly success, and moral duty, ultimately the goal is to escape worldly pursuits and the worldly cycle of death and rebirth to enter Nirvana, where these desires will be no more.

In discussing and evaluating these positions, I usually emphasize the logical ramifications of the teaching that all distinctions are illusions. If everything is actually one, not only are you not different from the thing you desire, you are no different than me or that tree over there. Personhood is an illusion. Does this seem like the best explanation of the evidence? No one lives as if that is true. Also, this teaching means that there is no such thing as good or evil, as those distinctions are illusory as well. Is your conversation partner willing to admit that the difference between Hitler and Mother Teresa is ultimately an illusion? Not likely. And if they do, that just helps you clarify further the difference between Christianity and Eastern belief systems: Whereas those worldviews explain away a plain sense interpretation of our most basic experiences (i.e., being different from a rock, judging Hitler as evil) as illusions, Christianity accepts them as valid and correct.

Conclusion

In answer to the problem of longing, the Christian worldview is the only one that treats our desire for transcendence as real. It teaches that those longings correspond to something or someone outside of ourselves and can be fulfilled by finding relationship with God. In other words, Christianity treats our longing for God as if it were the same as longing for water and food. If you want to be satisfied, eat and drink. Let’s revisit the famous passage from Isaiah:

Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare. Give ear and come to me; listen, that you may live.

55:1–3

On the other hand, all the other views we mentioned (and many others we didn’t) focus on the desire itself as the problem. The existentialist says that we must change our desire, settling for something less than what we thought we needed. The Stoic says we must get rid of our desire. And the Buddhist or Hindu pantheist says we have to realize that there is nothing to desire. In other words, if they were talking about one’s desire for food, they would say: Try to live on air instead of food, stop wanting food, or realize that food is an illusion. What makes the most sense of the data?