Videos: "Does love exist?"

"Does love exist?"

1 March 2010

ZJ: Does love exist? This question is sometimes posed by religious believers as a response to the question, "Does God exist?" It's intended to draw parallels between the experience of love and the experience of God, in that both are personal in nature and cannot be proven to exist.

But is this a valid comparison? In many ways, the concept of love and the concept of God are not at all similar, which greatly weakens this argument in its attempt to portray God as an experience comparable to love. Yet at the same time, there are certain similarities between the feeling of love and the feeling of God which lead to another conclusion that those who use this argument probably weren't intending to make.

First, what is love? Love is an emotion, a sensation, a feeling. As with all emotions, it is a phenomenon that occurs in the brain and nervous system. This phenomenon is restricted to the person and their mind, and it is not a process that takes place anywhere outside of people's bodies.

So, does love exist? And what does it mean to say that love exists or does not exist? Numerous studies have shown that the feeling of love is associated with increased activity in specific regions of the brain, and these patterns of activity are largely consistent between individuals. This demonstrates that love is represented by certain states of the brain, which are very much real. So yes, love does exist, this can be proven, and it has been proven.

Now, under what circumstances could it be said that love does not exist? Suppose that every living thing in the universe capable of experiencing love were to suddenly disappear. In that event, would love still exist? No. Love is the result of specific brain activity, and if this activity never takes place, there is no love. Love has no existence apart from beings that experience love. It is not an entity that exists separately from us and influences us in a way that makes us feel love. Love is generated within our own minds.

This is quite different from the concept of God, which is typically envisioned as a separate and external entity that, in this argument, presumably causes us to "feel God". These spiritual feelings are real, just as real as love. And, as with love, these feelings have been mapped to different patterns of brain activity.

But although these feelings are real, in that they are genuinely taking place within people's brains, this does not mean that the God is real. This is where the comparison between feeling love and feeling God breaks down. The feeling of love is love. And that feeling is sufficient to indicate that love exists, because love is that feeling. But the feeling of God is not the same thing as God. It does not indicate the existence of a separate, independent being known as God. The feeling of God is just that: a feeling, generated within the brain. Just like love.

"I feel love, therefore love exists" and "I feel God, therefore God exists" are not equivalent statements, because love and God are two completely different things. One is an emotion, the other is a hypothetical deity. So while the original argument is seriously flawed, it does show that God exists, as a feeling in some people's minds, which they have decided to call "God".

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