"Our Deepest Desires" by Gregory Ganssle

Gregory Ganssle's Our Deepest Desires: How the Christian Story Fulfills Human Aspirations is short book that thinks carefully about what we are made for and why it matters. Here is what it argues.

The Core Identity

Ganssle starts with a distinction that is more useful than it sounds. You have a surface identity — the things you can lose without ceasing to be you. I am a philosophy professor; I might lose that job tomorrow and still be me. I am a Californian; I might move to Albuquerque in five years and still be me.

Then you have a core identity — your deepest beliefs and desires. Not what you say you believe, but what you actually believe in the way you live. Not what you say you love, but what you actually love in the way you spend your attention. Most of us are not fully conscious of what these are. They are usually only visible to us when they come into conflict with each other, or with our circumstances.

This is the layer Ganssle is interested in. His claim is that we can learn something about ourselves, and possibly something about the universe, by paying careful attention to what we find at this depth.

Dissonance

When your beliefs and your desires come into conflict — or when two desires you hold at the same time come into conflict — you experience dissonance. The example that has been on my mind lately is baseball.

I grew up visiting my grandparents in San Diego, and they took me to Padres games. Tony Gwynn was my guy. The Padres were stitched into the sentimental layer of my childhood the way certain teams get stitched into the sentimental layer of all children who are taken to games.

I drifted away from baseball for a couple of decades. The love faded. Years later I happened to attend a few Angels games, found them fun, and reasoned to myself: I live in Orange County now. I should be a fan of the local team. I had absorbed the general belief that one should be a fan of the local team, and I adopted the Angels accordingly.

The Angels are not having a good era. Good players keep aging out of a system that does not replace them well, and the ownership has been frustrating for the better part of a decade. Watching them, I noticed something underneath my belief about local teams — a deeper desire to cheer for a team that is actually trying to be good, that respects its fans by competing seriously. That deeper desire was conflicting with my surface belief, and the dissonance was getting harder to ignore.

Meanwhile, the Padres have been good. And I work in Chula Vista now, which is deep enough in San Diego that it is practically Mexico.

So I have a tangle. I want to cheer for a team that is doing its best to succeed. I believe you should not be a bandwagon fan. I believe you should root for the local team. I love the Padres. I love the Angels. The loves are in conflict; the loves are in conflict with the beliefs.

What I actually did, when I sat with it, was reorder. The deep desire to cheer for a team that competes seriously stayed where it was. The belief about local teams got revised slightly — you should root for the team you have an affiliation with, which is usually the local team — and the affiliation I have through twenty years of childhood Padres memories plus a current job in San Diego came back to the top. My loves and beliefs settled into a stable order again. Padres above Angels.

This is the kind of small, low-stakes example Ganssle uses to make a bigger point.

Desires Outrank Beliefs

When beliefs and desires conflict, what tends to win is whatever sits deeper. And what Ganssle argues, and what I think is right, is that at the deepest level desires beat beliefs. We will sooner revise a belief that conflicts with a deep love than abandon the love. We treat our beliefs as evidence-responsive, but our deepest loves are the data the rest of the belief structure has to fit around.

This is why what you love says more about you than what you believe. Your stated beliefs can be shaped by argument, fashion, social pressure, or the last book you read. The loves at the bottom of your soul are harder to shake. They are what you actually orient your life around when nothing is asking you to perform.

If that is true, then a good way to understand a person — including yourself — is to ask what they most deeply desire and then watch what their belief system has had to do to accommodate it.

Ganssle's Project

Here is where the book turns interesting.

Ganssle's argument is that the Christian story comports very well with what we find at the deepest level of human desire. Not — and this is important — that the comportment proves Christianity true. He is careful about this. The argument is narrower and, in a way, more useful.

There is a kind of skeptical reader who has already ruled Christianity out because they take it to be incompatible with their deepest desires. They imagine it as life-denying, joyless, anti-human. Ganssle's project is to show that whatever else Christianity may or may not be, it is not that. The Christian story actually fits what humans most deeply want at a level that most other belief systems have a harder time matching.

If you accept that argument, you have not been given a proof. But you have been freed up to consider Christianity on its actual merits without the assumption that it is asking you to amputate the most important parts of yourself.

This is, by the way, exactly the kind of move a philosopher recovering from a hard stretch needs. The book does not try to bully you into anything. It just patiently shows that the door is open.

Four Deepest Desires

Ganssle identifies four categories of deepest human desire and walks through how the Christian story makes sense of each. The four are persons, goodness, beauty, and freedom. Let me walk through the first one in detail, because it is the strongest and gives you the shape of his argument. You can read the rest of the book to see how he handles the others.

Persons

Happiness is, on most accounts, our deepest desire. But happiness for a person is not just the satisfaction of appetites. Heraclitus had a sharp line about this twenty-five hundred years ago: if happiness were just pleasure, we would have to call oxen happy whenever they find vomit to eat. We do not. The kind of happiness we actually want — the kind we feel the absence of when we are miserable — is tied to something more than physical satisfaction. It is tied to being a person.

Ganssle draws out what this means. We want our lives, our work, and our relationships to be meaningful. We want our actions to count for something. We want to matter as agents, not just as pleasure-receptacles. (This, incidentally, is the same insistence Huxley was making in Brave New World and that I worked through in my post on that book — that human beings want more than calibrated comfort, and that a system optimized for pleasure ends up amputating exactly the part of us that needed flourishing.) All of these features are essentially features of persons — only persons can be agents, only persons can take things to be meaningful, only persons can love other persons in the way we want to be loved.

So the things that make us deeply happy are all tied to the fact that we are persons. Personhood is, in a quiet way, the structural condition for our happiness. We treat it as enormously important, even when we cannot say why.

On the Christian story, this makes immediate sense. God is a personal being. God created everything, and made us in the divine image — which is to say, made us as persons. If the source of reality is itself personal, then it is no surprise that we find personhood to be the carrier of meaning and value. The universe has a person at the bottom of it.

Contrast this with a strict materialist atheism. On that view, persons are an extremely unlikely accident of chemistry. We exist because configurations of matter happened to produce things that experience themselves as agents. In that case, it would be very strange if personhood actually carried objective meaning and value. Subjective meaning, yes — we can certainly feel that our lives matter, even if they do not. But the kind of meaning we are reaching for when we say a person's life has worth is not just felt-meaning. It is meaning that holds even when no one is looking.

Things that exist only in our minds are, by definition, imaginary. If a materialist universe is what we have, then either personhood does not really matter (in which case we have been kidding ourselves), or it does matter in a way that materialism cannot explain (in which case materialism is incomplete). Ganssle's point is not that this disproves atheism. It is that our deepest desire for our lives to be meaningful does not fit the materialist story comfortably.

There is a further move, and it is the one I found most striking. We also want relationships. Even the loners among us have to have some human contact. Connection seems to be essential to what we are.

On the Christian story, this is also unsurprising. God is not just a personal being — God is, in the historic Christian formulation, a Trinity. Three persons sharing one nature. Relationship is built into the deepest structure of reality itself. If you are a person made by a personal-relational God in the image of that God, then of course you would have an essential need for relationship. The need traces back to the source.

Ganssle handles the Trinity well. He grants that it is hard to picture. We cannot fully visualize how three persons can share one nature — but we also cannot fully picture how an electron occupies a valence shell or what it is doing between observations. We do not require comprehensibility from physics in order to think it tracks something real. We should expect even more mystery, not less, when the subject is an infinite God. Mystery is not the same thing as contradiction, and Ganssle is careful to keep them apart.

If God were an eternal solitary being, by contrast, the human need for relationship is harder to explain. You would expect, on that picture, more isolated and self-sufficient creatures. Instead you get us — wired for connection, miserable in prolonged solitude, made (by the Christian reading) in the image of a God who has been in relationship from before there was a universe.

The Other Three

The remaining three desires — goodness, beauty, and freedom — get similar treatment. I will not walk through them here because Ganssle does it better than I would in a blog post, but a few notes.

The chapter on goodness engages the standard challenge that morality is relative and therefore not a real datum about the world. Ganssle's response is more interesting than the usual one. I have a video on the moral argument and the problem of evil that overlaps with this section if you want to go deeper.

The chapter on beauty was the one I appreciated most. Ganssle takes a transcendental view — beauty as a real feature of reality that we encounter, not just a subjective response we project — and the case is stronger than I expected before reading it. I have recently been convinced of how pivotal beauty is to our sense of reality, partly through D. C. Schindler's Love and the Postmodern Predicament, which I might review here at some point. Or just teach out of.

The chapter on freedom is the most political of the four, and the one where Ganssle has to be most careful, because freedom is the desire most often invoked against religious frameworks. He handles it with the same patience he handles the others, and the result is one of the more humane treatments of human freedom in recent apologetics.

A Note on C. S. Lewis

What Ganssle is doing is in the family tree of an older argument C. S. Lewis used to make — sometimes called the argument from desire, or the argument from joy. Lewis's version: every natural human appetite has a corresponding object that satisfies it. Hunger points to food, thirst points to water. We have a deep recurring desire that nothing in this world fully satisfies. The implication, Lewis thought, was that this desire points to something beyond this world.

Ganssle does not run the Lewis argument as an argument for the truth of Christianity. He runs a softer version: the fit between our deepest desires and the Christian story is striking, and it should at least be taken seriously as data when you are considering what to believe.

If you wanted to run the stronger Lewis-style version using Ganssle's groundwork, the materials are there. The book is a careful preparation for an argument it does not quite make. That is, I think, a feature rather than a bug. The reader is given room to draw the conclusion themselves.

The Bottom Line

Our Deepest Desires is the right book if you have ever felt that some standard objection to Christianity has stuck in you without your being sure why, and you want a careful philosopher to walk through what the Christian story actually claims about what we are made for. It is also the right book if you are going through a hard stretch and need something gentle, serious, and short.

It is the wrong book if you want a triumphant proof, an academic monograph, or a book that flatters the reader. Ganssle does not do any of those things, and the book is better for it.

Two thumbs up from me. It carried me through a tough season of life, and the central insight — that what you love says more about you than what you believe — is the kind of thing that stays with you long after you put the book down.