Love is Real

An oft used “evidence” for God is that there are intangible things that we cannot study with science.  The existence of such things thereby allows that God could also be beyond the scope of science and could exist.  The favourite employed example of such a non-quantifiable thing is “love.”  This is stretched even further since the Christian god is defined as love (in certain verses He is also defined as Jealous, but that’s mainly OT).  So if we can all believe in family or romantic love, how can we deny God’s love?

First, we need to define love.  In Anchorman Brick Tamland says “I love carpet, I love desk, I love lamp.”  Clearly we need a definition that’s a bit deeper than Bricks’ or this is essentially meaningless.  Love describes an emotional feeling of connection and affection.  There are many kinds of love from family, to pets, to significant others, to religious, to just about anything.

When two people say they love each other, what they are expresses is a description of the feelings they have for one another.  This love is real and quantifiable (potentially by number of presents, pleasantries, or the distance the two might go for one another).  Their feelings stem from a biologically evolved system of chemicals and hormones in the brain that attempt to make us have babies.  This isn’t to say their feelings aren’t real, just that they are the byproducts of biochemistry.

So the argument as originally stated, tries to express love as something that cannot be explained by definition, and then goes from there to say god exists.  While in reality, we can explain love, and test it scientifically.  This argument does not prove the existence of anything other than the arguers ignorance.