 Religion does not originate, as philosophy does, from a theoretical or speculative impulse to understand the world, but in a practical concern to influence the course of events that transpire within it. Belief in gods thus presupposes a desire that there should exist beings capable of guaranteeing the success of human endeavors, and faith is preceded by hope in the logical order of things religious. If human beings did not have a powerful desire, say, to be liberated from bondage or to avoid death, belief in the Promised Land or in immortality would never have arisen. In biblical terms, faith in God is trust in what God promises, but what is promised by God is what is sought after or desired by human beings. The religious significance of God’s promises is contingent upon their correspondence to deep-seated human desires. Whereas, in The Essence of Religion, Feuerbach referred to the feeling of dependence as the “ground” of religion, he now attributes the psychological origin of the gods to the wish. The wish, considered as an act of striving for what remains beyond the limits of human power to achieve, is theogonic in the sense that theophanies (i.e., manifestations of the gods or of God) described in the Homeric epics and in the Bible, considered as narrative events, occur as responses to powerful human wishes or needs, or else as expressions of gratitude and celebration in response to occasions where these needs are believed to have been met through the cooperation or assistance of a divine agency (T 32). The gods owe their existence to “sensualism and materialism” insofar as they are the product of the material needs of finite, embodied human subjects.