The presence of our enhanced human consciousness not only differentiates humans from animals, it also aids in making the case for the existence of God. That’s because through our human consciousness we desire five transcendental experiences, none of which are necessary for survival. These five transcendental desires are our yearning for: (1) perfect knowledge/truth, (2) perfect love, (3) perfect justice/goodness, (4) perfect beauty, and (5) perfect home/being.

Most interestingly, any earthly satisfaction of these five inner desires leaves us feeling frustrated and wanting more. That’s because what we desire is a perfect experience of each of these five transcendental desires. But, since perfect knowledge/truth, perfect love, perfect justice/goodness, perfect beauty, and perfect home/being don’t exist here on earth, why do we seek them? It makes no sense for us to seek that which is unattainable. We only seek that which is attainable, if not here then in the hereafter.

What we seek is something transcendental, something beyond our world and beyond our earthly experience. What we seek is God, who is the Perfect Knowledge/Truth, Perfect Love, Perfect Justice/Goodness, Perfect Beauty, and Perfect Home/Being. For as St. Augustine of Hippo wrote nearly 1,600 years ago, “Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”

Priest, philosopher, and theologian Fr. Robert J. Spitzer, S.J., Ph.D., has written several books about how our ultimately unfulfilled yearning for these five transcendental experiences provides evidence of the existence of God. Let’s take a closer look at each of these five transcendental desires found within the human condition and how they reveal God's existence.

(1) Desire for Perfect Knowledge/Truth

Even in young children, we find a desire for perfect knowledge when they ask “Why is that?” and when given an answer they then ask the next question, “Well, why is that?” It seems this questioning would go on forever, at least until an adult brings it to an end! This process reveals that children (indeed, all of us) recognize the inadequacy of a partial answer, and that true satisfaction will occur only when a complete and perfect understanding has been achieved.

Humans do not seek just practical knowledge (e.g., “How do I get the food I need to survive?”). Rather, we want to know just for the sake of knowing, and we have an innate desire for a full and complete explanation. This is evident in the ongoing work of science in seeking a more complete understanding of our world. We know we have not yet reached a perfect understanding of our world, so we research and seek more knowledge, more truth.

Interestingly, we know our knowledge is not complete. If we did not know it was incomplete, we would not keep asking additional questions. It is our awareness that there is more to be known at the very moment when something is known which drives us to additional questioning. We have an awareness of the more.

The issue then arises: Why do we continue asking questions every time something is understood, as if we intuitively know that our current knowledge is limited and does not meet our desire to know all that is to be known? How can we be aware of something beyond everything we currently understand? Why do we have an awareness that what we now know is only a partially complete answer?

This intuitive awareness that there is more to be known than what we now know seems to defy a naturalistic explanation. All our knowledge is incomplete and we know it. But why are we aware that there is more to be known beyond what we currently know?

It seems the best explanation is that our conscious desire for perfect knowledge and complete truth has been written in our human nature by God, who is the Perfect Knowledge and Perfect Truth that we seek. This awareness of the more reveals the presence of God to human consciousness and grounds the belief in human transcendentality (the presence of our soul).

(2) Desire for Perfect Love

We humans also have a desire for perfect and unconditional love. However, this desire can mislead us into expecting perfect love from another human being. When the relationship does not fulfill our desire for perfect love, this expectation leads to frustration and quite possibly to a decline in the relationship. For example, as the imperfections in the love of our beloved manifest themselves (e.g., our spouse is not perfectly understanding, kind, forgiving, self-giving, and concerned for me and all my interests), we at first become irritated. This irritation often leads to frustration, which in turn becomes dashed expectations. These dashed expectations may become either quiet hurt or overt demands, both aimed at extracting a more perfect love from our beloved. When this perfect love does not happen, thoughts of terminating the relationship may arise.

Why do we fall prey to such an obvious error? Because our desire is for love to be perfect and unconditional, but the reality is otherwise. We humans just cannot satisfy each other’s desire for perfect and unconditional love, no matter how hard we try. Thus, our dissatisfaction and frustration arise out of a conscious desire for a perfect love, a love that cannot be experienced in our relationships with others here on earth.

But what is the origin of our deep desire and yearning for perfect love? Why would we have this desire for perfect love, especially as it just leaves us feeling dissatisfied and frustrated when we cannot find it with another person? Why do we have an awareness of and desire for a type of love that we have neither known nor will experience from another human being?

It seems we are searching for perfect love in all the wrong places. Our desire for perfect and unconditional love can only be met by the Perfect Love (God). Again, we find that God has implanted in each of us a conscious desire for a perfect love that only God can fulfill.

(3) Desire for Perfect Justice/Goodness

In addition, we have a conscious desire for perfect justice and goodness. For example, even in young children an imperfect expression of justice from their parents will elicit the immediate response, “That’s not fair!” Adults do the same thing. We feel the same outrage toward groups, social structures, and even God when we perceive that we have not been treated fairly. We truly expect that perfect justice ought to happen, and when it doesn’t we feel a profound and deep outrage. We expect more justice and goodness than our finite world can deliver, and this causes outrage and cynicism when it does not come to pass.

Once more, what could be the source of our desire for perfect justice and goodness, especially when it seems well beyond the actual justice and goodness we can possibly experience? Given that our desire for perfect justice/goodness cannot be found in an imperfect world, it seems that its origin is from perfect Justice/Goodness itself. For this reason, philosophers have associated this notion of perfect Justice/Goodness with the presence of God to human consciousness.

(4) Desire for Perfect Beauty

Once in a great while, we think we have found perfect beauty. This might occur while looking at a scene of wonderful natural beauty: a magnificent red sunset over the water or majestic snowcapped mountains against a horizon of blue sky. Yet, even then, we get bored and strive for an even more perfect manifestation of natural beauty--a little better sunset, another vantage point of the mountains that’s a little more perfect.

As with the other transcendentals, we seem to have an innate awareness of what is most beautiful. This incites us to desire a perfectly beautiful ideal, which leads to both positive and negative results. The positive result is the continuous human striving for artistic, musical, and literary perfection. This striving has left a magnificent cultural legacy of architecture, art, music, drama, etc. However, the negative effect is that we grow bored or frustrated with any imperfect manifestation of beauty. For example, a flowering garden can achieve a certain degree of beauty. But our continued desire to improve it only makes us feel dissatisfied when we cannot perfect it indefinitely.

As with the other transcendentals, we are innately aware of and attracted to perfect beauty itself. But where does our conscious sense of perfect beauty (which does not even exist in our world) come from? Since it seems that the notion of perfect Beauty cannot be obtained from a world of imperfect beauty, we are led to the realization that its’ origin arises out of perfect Beauty itself. For this reason, philosophers have associated this notion of perfect beauty with the presence of perfect Beauty (i.e., God) to human consciousness.

(5) Desire for Perfect Home/Being

The fifth transcendental is our desire to be at perfect harmony and peace in our being and in our world. When our desire for perfect home is even partially fulfilled, theologians, saints, and mystics throughout the ages have referred to this as joy, love, awe, unity, holiness, and/or peace. Again, we need to ask what gives rise to our desire for perfect harmony and our yearning to feel comfortably at home in our world? Once more, the origin of this awareness seems to be traceable to the perfect Home itself. For this reason, philosophers and theologians have associated our desire for a perfect home with the presence of God to human consciousness.

In summary, we find evidence of God’s existence in our desire for these five transcendental experiences. Our yearning for “more” leave us with an emptiness that only God can fill. For as C.S. Lewis stated in Mere Christianity, “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food... 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.”

God is perfect and wants us to be one with Him. Thus, our inner craving for perfection must come from and is directed towards God alone. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church (#27) states, “The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for.”

"The greatest of these," wrote the Apostle Paul, "is love" (1 Cor. 13:13). Many centuries later, in a culture quite foreign to the Apostle to the Gentiles, the singer John Lennon earnestly insisted, "All we need is love."

Different men, different intents, different contexts. Even different types of "love." You hardly need to subscribe to People magazine or to frequent the cinema to know that love is the singularly insistent subject of movies, songs, novels, television dramas, sitcoms, and talk shows—the nearly monolithic entity known as "pop culture." We are obsessed with love. Or "love." With or without quotation marks, it’s obvious that this thing called love occupies the minds, hearts, emotions, lives, and wallets of homo sapiens.

Yet two questions are rarely asked, considered, contemplated: Why love? And, what is love? These aren’t just good questions for philosophical discussions—these are important, powerful questions that all Catholics and atheists should consider.

What Is This Thing Called Love?

One man who spent much time and thought considering the why and how of love was St. John Paul II. "Man cannot live without love," he wrote in Redemptor Hominis, his first encyclical. "He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it" (10).

That is a statement both St. Paul and John Lennon could agree with, for it states something that is evident to the thoughtful person, whether Christian or otherwise: I need love. I want to love. I am made for love.

But what is love? Many profound works have considered this question at great length and with intense detail. They have plumbed the depths of the various types of love—familial, sexual, and agape. I’ll start with the basic brushstrokes of a definition of love between humans.

The Thomist Josef Pieper, in his essential book On Love, wrote that this love is personal, active, and evaluating. It gauges what is beautiful, right, and—especially—good, and affirms that it is such. "Love," Pieper states, in articulating a philosophical understanding, "is therefore a mode of willing. … To confirm and affirm something already accomplished—that is precisely what is meant by ‘to love’" (On Love II).

How Wonderful That You Exist!

But what is willed by loving? When we say to another: "It is good that you exist, that you are!"—what do we mean? The question is not nearly as abstract or obtuse as it might sound, for it does serious damage to the flippant claim that man is able to "make a meaning," for love is not about making something ex nihilo, but the recognition and affirmation of what already is. Or, put another way, in seeing the good of another, we choose to embrace and treasure that good.

So Pieper makes an essential distinction: "For what the lover gazing upon his beloved says and means is not: How good that you are so (so clever, useful, capable, skillful), but: It’s good that you are; how wonderful that you exist!" (On Love II). This seemingly simple point has profound ramifications, for it is an affirmation of what is. It involves the recognition that something outside of myself is objectively good and worthy of my love. Because reality is knowable and has objective meaning—not shifting, subjective "meaning"—love is possible and can be known. This, of course, raises the question: Where does the objective meaning of love ultimately originate from if not from myself? It is a question sometimes ignored by skeptics, but worth asking of both those who deny God’s existence and those who reject the existence of objective truth: "If your love for your spouse or family is subjective and of a ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ sort, what meaningful, lasting value does it really have?"

The true lover, Pieper argues, intuitively understands, even if not with precise logic, that an affirmation of the beloved’s goodness "would be pointless, were not some other force akin to creation involved—and, moreover, a force not merely preceding his own love but one that is still at work and that he himself, the loving person, participates in and helps along by loving" (On Love II).

Human love, therefore, is an imitation, a reflection, of the divine love that created all that is, including each of us. In the words of Pope Benedict XVI, in Deus Caritas Est, "there is a certain relationship between love and the Divine: love promises infinity, eternity—a reality far greater and totally other than our everyday existence" (5). Even Sartre, who is not known for being happy about much of anything, remarked in Being and Nothingness, "This is the basis for the joy of love . . .; we feel that our existence is justified" (3.I).

Grateful to No One in Particular

It is here that Pieper makes a significant connection, proffering (as even Sartre’s remark suggests) that all love must contain some element of gratitude. "But gratitude is a reply," he argues, "it is knowing that one has been referred to something prior, in this case to a larger frame of universal reference that supersedes the realm of immediate empirical knowledge" (On Love II).

This is noteworthy because there are atheists and skeptics who insist that it is perfectly logical, even laudable, to be grateful. Recently, The Philosopher’s Magazine ran a piece titled, "Thank Who Very Much?", written by Ronald Aronson, Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Wayne State University. It opened with a rather honest and blunt assessment of the situation faced by atheists and agnostics:

"Living without God today means facing life and death as no generation before us has done. It entails giving meaning to our lives not only in the absence of a supreme being, but now without the forces and trends that gave hope to the past several generations of secularists. . . . By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the modern faith that human life is heading in a positive direction has been undone, giving way to the earlier religious faith it replaced, or to no faith at all."

So, what to do? Aronson maintains a stiff upper lip, exhorting his fellow unbelievers to "shape a satisfying way of living in relation to what we can know and what we cannot know" and so forth. Noting that Christianity and Judaism tend to be filled with gratitude since they believe in a personal God, he offers a rather startling suggestion, worth considering at length:

"But there is an alternative to thanking God on the one hand and seeing the universe as a 'cosmic lottery' or as absurd on the other. An alternative to being grateful to a deity or to ignoring such feelings altogether.
 
Think of the sun’s warmth. After all, the sun is one of those forces that make possible the natural world, plant life, indeed our very existence. It may not mean anything to us personally, but the warmth on our face means, tells us, and gives us a great deal. All of life on Earth has evolved in relation to this source of heat and light, we human beings included. We are because of, and in our own millennial adaptation to, the sun and other fundamental forces.
 
My moment of gratitude was far more than a moment’s pleasure. It is a way of acknowledging one of our most intimate if impersonal relationships, with the cosmic and natural forces that make us possible."

Why Does It All Exist?

We can be grateful, I suppose, for Aronson’s suggestion but still find it unconvincing. His notion of an "intimate if impersonal relationship" is, at best, paradoxical, and at worst, illogical. It is an attempt to assign meaning to something (creation) whose value has already been denied (since the world and our lives are the accidental offspring of molecular chaos). If I understand his proposition correctly, man should extend personal, relational reaction in response to a reality that is not only impersonal, but possessing no personal basis or value. And then we are stop there, without contemplating, "Where did all of this come from? Why does it even exist?"

Aronson recognizes this problem and appeals not only to "our gratitude to larger and impersonal forces," but to man’s dependence "on the cosmos, the sun, nature, past generations of people, and human society." Which still does not explain why the cosmos, the sun, and nature exist, or why they exist so as to sustain human life. Strip away the sincere intentions and we are still left with a simple fact: It’s not enough. The vast majority of people down through time have never found it enough to extend an intimate and personal note of gratitude to impersonal, biological forces that do not care about us or love us. Responding in gratitude to the sun, the fallow earth, the dewy meadow, the complexity of DNA is either sentimental neo-paganism or points to man’s natural knowledge that Someone must be responsible for those lovely—and love-revealing—realities. Skeptics should be led to ask themselves: "Are you grateful to be alive? If so, does it make sense to be grateful to immaterial forces and objects that don’t care at all about your existence?"

The novelist and essayist Walker Percy, a former atheist who believed in his youth that science would provide the answers to all questions and problems, impatiently dismissed the "grateful, but to no one" position in his rollicking self-interview, "Questions They Never Asked Me":

"This life is much too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then be asked what you make of it and have to answer, 'Scientific humanism.' That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight; i.e., God. In fact, I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything else."

Aronson, like many skeptics, puts on a brave face, but ultimately settles for too little. His philosophical approach is merely a more sophisticated version of the crude belief: Create your own meaning. Yes, he essentially says, I readily admit that the universe is diverse and full of unbelievable phenomena, but at the end of the day I conclude it still has no meaning other than that which I give it. Ironically, it is the skeptic who takes an illogical leap of faith. Fortunately—or rather, providentially—faith does not have to be the enemy of reason, as long as it is faith in the right Person.

Love Is of God

The most convincing explanation for human love is divine love. As Benedict explains so well in Deus Caritas Est, Christianity carefully distinguishes between divine love and human love, but also recognizes that the latter results from the former. On one hand, man cannot know and grasp the theological virtue of love by his natural powers. Yet by his nature man is drawn toward God even through human love—especially through human love. And it is the Christian story—the Christ story—that makes sense of man’s hunger to love and to be loved. The great surprise is that God’s love is most fully revealed in the death of the God-man, Jesus Christ, on a cross, which was the culmination of the great scandal of the Incarnation and was validated by the great mystery of the Resurrection.

"In the mystery of the Cross love is at work," wrote Pope John Paul II in Dominum et Vivificantem, "that love which brings man back again to share in the life that is in God himself" (41). This love allows man to participate in the life of the Triune God, who is love (1 John 4:16). The perfect love in and of the Trinity is the source of love and the home of love. The Son’s redemptive work of love unites us to himself, the Holy Spirit perfects our will in love and makes us more like the Son, and both guide man toward the loving heavenly Father. Such is the path of divine life and love, the joy of divinization. "God himself," the Catechism summarizes, "is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and he has destined us to share in that exchange" (CCC 221).

"Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new," wrote Augustine in his Confessions. As a young man he had sought love in many places, things, and people. Why? Because he knew that he was made to love and be loved. Everyone, in the deepest recesses of their hearts, has the same knowledge, no matter how scarred and distorted it might be. Some have even made love their god, failing to see that we cannot love love, nor can we worship love. Lennon sang, "All we need is love." More accurately, all we need is the One Who is Love. Now that is a lyric worth singing for a lifetime and beyond.
 
 
Originally published in This Rock Magazine. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Wikimedia)

NOTE: Today we continue our four-part series by philosopher Fr. Robert Spitzer addressing the question, "Why Would God Allow Suffering Caused by Nature?" Instead of focusing on the existence of moral evil, or suffering caused by the free choice of humans, he examines why an apparently good God would create an imperfect world replete with natural disasters, physical disabilities, and unavoidable heartache.
 

 
In philosophy, agape is one of the highest forms of love. For our purpose here, suffice it to say that agape is a gift of self which is frequently expressed in self-sacrifice. It is grounded in empathy with the other which makes transparent the unique and intrinsic goodness, worthiness, and lovability of that other, which creates a unity with that other whereby doing the good for the other is just as easy, if not easier, than doing the good for oneself. As such, agape arises out of a desire to give life to the intrinsically valuable and lovable other. That other could be a stranger or a friend.

Furthermore, agape seeks no reward – neither the reward of romantic feelings intrinsic to eros (romantic love), nor the reward of reciprocal commitment and care intrinsic to philia (friendship), nor even the feelings of love and delight intrinsic to storge (affection). In agape, it is sufficient to see the other as valuable and lovable in him or herself. The well-being of the other (in him or herself) is a sufficient reward for the commitment of one’s time, future, psychic energy, physical energy, resources, and even self-sacrifice. The well-being of the other in him or herself is its own reward.

As can be seen, agape begins with empathy, a feeling for another, or perhaps better, a feeling with another. That produces a recognition of the unique and intrinsic goodness and lovability of the other, which produces “caring for” and “caring about” the other (in him or herself). Finally, that leads to unity with the other whereby doing the good for the other is just as easy if not easier than doing the good for oneself.

Most of us would agree to the proposition that this “feeling for and with another” is quite natural. We can meet another for a few moments and get a sense of the goodness and lovability of another from that other’s mere benevolent glance. We can see another in need and intuit the worthiness of that other by merely looking into their eyes. We can meet our students on the first day of class and intuit from the ethos exuded by them that they are worth our time and energy. Mere presence, mere tone of voice, mere benevolent glance engenders a recognition of unique and intrinsic goodness and lovability which causes us to care about the other, to protect the other, to attend to the other’s needs, to spend time with the other, and even to sacrifice oneself for the other – even a total stranger. It is as if we have a receptor, like a radio antenna, which is attuned to the frequency of the other’s unique and intrinsic goodness and lovability, and when the signal comes, whether it be from a smile, an utterance, a look of need, we connect in a single feeling which engenders a gift of self.

Yet, even though most would agree that empathy is natural to us, we must hasten to add that our own desires for autonomy and ego-fulfillment can block our receptivity to the other’s “signal.” We can become so self-absorbed or self-involved that we forget to turn on the receiver, and even if we have turned on the receiver, we have the volume turned down so low that it cannot produce adequate output in our hearts. It is at this juncture that suffering – particularly the suffering of weakness and vulnerability arising out of an imperfect world, proves to be most helpful.

This point may be illustrated by a story my father told me when I was a boy. I think he meant it more as a parable about how some attitudes can lead some people to become believers and other people to become unbelievers and even malcontents. But it became for me a first glimpse into the interrelationship between suffering and compassion, love and lovability, trust and trustworthiness, co-responsibility and dignity, and the nature of God.

Once upon a time, God created a world at a banquet table. He had everyone sit down, and served up a sumptuous feast. Unfortunately, He did not provide any of the people at the table with wrists or elbows. As a consequence, nobody could feed themselves. All they could do was feel acute hunger while gazing at the feast.

This provoked a variety of responses. At one end of the table, a group began to conjecture that God could not possibly be all-powerful, for if He were, He would have been all-knowing, and would have realized that it would have been far more perfect to create persons with wrists and elbows so that they could eat sumptuous feasts placed before them. The refrain was frequently heard, “Any fool can see that some pivot point on the arm would be preferable to the impoverished straight ones with which we have been provided!”

A second group retorted, “If there really is a God, it would seem that He would have to be all-powerful and all-knowing, in which case, He would not make elementary mistakes. If God is God, He could have made a better creature (e.g., with elbows). If God exists, and in His omniscience has created us without elbows or wrists, He must have a cruel streak, perhaps even a sadistic streak. At the very minimum, He certainly cannot be all-loving.”

A third group responded by noting that the attributes of “all-powerful” and “all-loving” would seem to belong to God by nature, for love is positive, and God is purely positive, therefore, God (not being devoid of any positivity) would have to be pure love. They then concluded that God could not exist at all, for it was clear that the people at the table were set into a condition that was certainly less than perfect (which seemed to betoken an imperfectly loving God). They conjectured, “We should not ask where the banquet came from, let alone where we come from, but just accept the fact that life is inexplicable and absurd. After all, we have been created to suffer, but an all-loving God (which God would have to be, if He existed) would not have done this. Our only recourse is to face, with authenticity and courage, the absence of God in the world, and to embrace the despair and absurdity of life.”

A fourth group was listening to the responses of the first three, but did not seem to be engaged by the heavily theoretical discourse. A few of them began to look across the table, and in an act of compassion, noticed that even though they could not feed themselves, they could feed the person across the table. In an act of freely choosing to feed the other first, of letting go of the resentment about not being able to “do it for myself,” they began to feed one another. At once, agape was discovered in freedom, while their very real need to eat was satisfied.

This parable reveals a key insight into suffering, namely, that “empathy has reasons that negative theorizing knows not of.” The first three groups had all assumed that weakness and vulnerability were essentially negative, and because of this, they assumed that either God had made a mistake or He was defective in love. Their preoccupation with the negativity of weakness distracted them from discovering, in that same weakness, the positive, empathetic, compassionate responsiveness to the need of the other which grounds the unity and generativity of love. This lesson holds the key not only to the meaning of suffering but also to the life and joy of agape.

The experience of the fourth group at the table reveals by God would create us into an imperfect world – because the imperfection of the human condition leads to weakness and vulnerability, and this weakness and vulnerability provide invaluable assistance in directing us toward empathy and compassion, and even in receiving the empathy and compassion from another.

As I've noted in past posts, weakness and vulnerability are not required for empathy and compassion, for many people will find empathy and compassion to be their own reward. They will see the positivity of empathy and compassion as good for both others and themselves.

Again, I must repeat that this was certainly not the case for me. Even though I saw the intrinsic goodness and worthwhileness of empathy and compassion (for both myself and others), my egocentricity and desire for autonomy created such powerful blocks that I could not move myself to what I thought was my life’s purpose and destiny. I needed to be knocked off my pedestal; I needed to be released from the spell of autonomy and egocentricity through sheer weakness and vulnerability. This happened to me – the weakness and vulnerability of an imperfect genome in imperfect conditions in an imperfect world.

Like the fourth group in the parable, my imperfect condition gave me a moment to reconsider the entire meaning of life – what really made life worth living, and it was here that I discovered empathy, love, and even compassion. The process was gradual, but the “thorn in the flesh” gave me the very real assistance I needed to open myself to love as a meaning of life.

Is suffering really necessary for agape (empathy, the acceptance of love’s vulnerability, humility, forgiveness, and compassion)? For a being like God, it is not, for God can, in a timeless, completely transparent act, through His perfect power and love, achieve perfect empathy, perfect acceptance of love’s vulnerability, perfect humility, perfect forgiveness, and perfect compassion. I suppose angelic beings could also do this in a timeless and transparent way.

There are some people who can easily move to this position without much assistance from suffering. But for people like me, suffering is absolutely indispensable to removing the blocks to agape presented by my egocentric and autonomous desires, my belief in the cultural myth of self-sufficiency, my underestimation of the goodness and love of other people, and all the other limitations to my head and heart.

God allowed an imperfect physical nature and an imperfect world for people like me not only to actualize agape freely (at least partially), but also, and perhaps more importantly, to even notice it. God asks people who are better than me in love to patiently bear with the trials that are indispensable for people like me to arrive at an insight about empathy, humility, forgiveness, and compassion. But then again, they already have the empathy, humility, and compassion to do this, so God’s request is truly achievable.

God works through this suffering. He doesn’t waste any of it. For those who are open to seeing the horizon of love embedded in it, there is a future, nay, an eternity for each of us to manifest our own unique brand of unconditional love. Without suffering, I do not think I could have even begun to move freely toward that horizon which is my eternal destiny and joy.

Next week, Fr. Spitzer will finish our series by exploring why God provides room to build a better world.
 
 
(Image credit: Vew Online)

NOTE: This fictitious dialogue takes place between two friends, Chris, a Catholic, and Sal, a sincere skeptic, and centers on some basic questions here at Strange Notions regarding faith, reason, and the existence of God.

Sal: Chris, before we go any further in our conversations about Christianity, I have to ask you a very basic question.

Chris: Ask away.

Sal: Do you think this is going to get us anywhere, arguing about religion?

Chris: What you mean by "arguing"?

Sal: Fighting with words.

Chris: I don't want to do that. We're friends, not enemies. What I mean by "arguing" is just "giving reasons".

Sal: Trying to prove something, right?

Chris: Yes.

Sal: Well, I'm not sure that's going to get us anywhere either.

Chris: Neither am I, but I'm not sure it isn't, either. So if there's a chance, let's take it. Let's try.

Sal: Why?

Chris: If a lot of people say a great prize is behind a door, should you try to open it, or not?

Sal: You should, but what does that have to do with arguing?

Chris: The prize here is the truth about God and the meaning of our lives, whatever that truth may be. That's what we're both committed to, isn't it?

Sal: Truth, yes.

Chris: And isn't that valuable, like a prize?

Sal: Yes, if we ever find it.

Chris: Shouldn't we try? Shouldn't we knock at the door?

Sal: What's the door?

Chris: Honest dialogue. Looking for reasons.

Sal: Reasons to believe?

Chris: Yes. Or not to believe.

Sal: I don't think it'll work. I don't think you can reason your way into religion.

Chris: Oh, neither do I. But you might reason your way to the place where you can believe - like walking to the beach, and then swimming. Walking to the beach is like reason and swimming is like faith. You have to go to the place where you can swim before you can swim. And you have to go to the place where you can believe before you can believe.

Sal: You mean you have to prove it first by reason before you can believe it?

Chris: No, not at all. But I think it's your reason that's holding you back from believing. I think your reason is asking some good questions that no one has ever answered for you.

Sal: That's true.

Chris: So if we can find the answers to those questions, we can at least make faith possible for you. Then it's up to you, of course.

Sal: I see. You agree, then, that religious faith is a matter of personal choice.

Chris: Of course.

Sal: But reason and logic isn't the way we usually make personal choices. Therefore it's not the way to make the choice about religious faith.

Chris: That sounds like pretty good logic, Sal. Let's examine your argument. What do you mean by a "personal choice"?

Sal: What's right for one person can be wrong for another.

Chris: I see. You mean things like getting married or not, or deciding on a career, or how to spend money.

Sal: Right. There's no one right way for everybody.

Chris: But religion isn't like those things, Sal.

Sal: I thought you agreed it was a personal decision.

Chris: I did. But it claims to tell you something that's true for everybody. What's personal is your response to it.

Sal: What do you mean, "true for everybody"? What religious things are true for everybody?

Chris: Things like God and Heaven - whether they're true or not doesn't depend on you, or on your personal choice, any more than the sun does.

Sal: But if I believe it's true, then it's true for me, and if I don't then it isn't true for me.

Chris: Do you think that believing something makes it true?

Sal: True for me, yes.

Chris: But really true? Objectively true?

Sal: There's no objective truth. Truth is subjective.

Chris: Really?

Sal: Yes.

Chris: Truly?

Sal: Yes.

Chris: I don't think so. Am I wrong? Is this a truth I don't see?

Sal: Yes.

Chris: An objective truth, then. It's an objective truth that there is no objective truth.

Sal: Oops.

Chris: And you were so logical a minute ago!

Sal: Wait a minute. We're talking about religious truth. That's subjective.

Chris: You mean nobody can be right or wrong about religious truth?

Sal: Right.

Chris: Except you?

Sal: What do you mean?

Chris: You first said nobody can be right or wrong about religious truth. Then you assumed you were right about religious truth when you said it isn't objective.

Sal: You're tangling me up in my words.

Chris: No I'm not. You said it yourself. You tangled yourself up. You contradicted yourself.

Sal: Well, what I mean to say is that nobody can prove whether there really is a God or not.

Chris: Oh, but that's a different question, whether anybody can prove it. Surely God might exist without your proving it. Plenty of things exist that you can't prove, don't they?

Sal: Like what?

Chris: Like the fact that I'm thinking about the color yellow now. Or the fact that I honestly care about you. Can you prove those things?

Sal: No.

Chris: Then things can be true without our proving them.

Sal: Yes.

Chris: So God might be true even if we couldn't prove him.

Sal: O.K., but we can't prove him. No one can settle religious questions. So I think it's a waste of time to argue about them.

Chris: I see. And why do you think no one can settle religious questions?

Sal: I just think so, that's all.

Chris: You have no reasons to think that?

Sal: Sure I do.

Chris: I think you can guess what my next question is going to be.

Sal: You mean, what are my reasons?

Chris: Good guess.

Sal: Well, you can't prove God like you can prove other things, like galaxies and germs and scientific stuff.

Chris: You mean you can't use the scientific method.

Sal: Right.

Chris: And you think the scientific method is the only way to prove anything.

Sal: Really to prove anything, yes.

Chris: Can you prove that?

Sal: What?

Chris: What you just said: that the scientific method is the only way to prove anything.

Sal: Hmmm. I guess not.

Chris: Then you contradict yourself again. You say you should believe something only if it's proved scientifically, yet you believe that even though it isn't proved scientifically.

Sal: Pretty clever.

Chris: No. I'm not trying to be clever. I'm trying to show you that your faith in science isn't scientific. It's a faith.

Sal: Let me ask the questions for a minute.

Chris: All right.

Sal: Do you think there are other ways to prove things besides the scientific method?

Chris: Yes.

Sal: And can you guess what my next question is going to be?

Chris: "What are they?"

Sal: Yes. What are they?

Chris: Common sense, experience, intuition, insight, reasoning, and trustable authority. We use everything we have to look at all the evidence.

Sal: And how do you know which of those methods to use?

Chris: You use the method that fits your subject matter. You don't use the scientific method to understand people you love, for instance, any more than you use love to understand math or chemistry.

Sal: What do you use for God?

Chris: He's a person, so you use the method that fits persons: love and faith.

Sal: That's naive. Unscientific.

Chris: But it's right for persons. Look. Science is rightly critical and distrustful. It accepts nothing until it's proved. Nature treated as guilty until proven innocent, so to speak. But people are innocent until proven guilty. If we treated people the way science treats nature, we'd never understand them. The only way to understand them is to trust them, not to distrust them. And to love them.

Sal: Just shut your eyes and believe, eh?

Chris: No. Open your eyes and believe.

Sal: But "love is blind."

Chris: Not real love. Real love sees the other person's inside, like an X-ray.

Sal: But sometimes it makes mistakes. Sometimes you trust somebody and he lets you down. Trust doesn't always pay.

Chris: But it's a chance worth taking, isn't it? To live without loving anyone, without trusting anyone - that would be Hell, wouldn't it?

Sal: Yes.

Chris: Worse than being let down, wouldn't it?

Sal: I guess so.

Chris: Well, it's the same with God. It would be even worse never to try him, never to trust him at all, never to give him a chance, than to trust him and then be let down. But he won't let you down.

Sal: So you say.

Chris: I'm not asking you to believe it because I say it. I'm asking you to test it, like a good scientist. Faith is like an experiment. It's testable, like trusting a human being. Life is like a laboratory, and loving someone - whether a human being or God - is like an experiment. It's something you do, and you learn by doing.

Sal: I see. It either works or not.

Chris: Yes.

Sal: But I have to have reasons for doing this experiment of believing in God because you're asking me to put myself in the test tube. It's not a light little thing.

Chris: I'm glad you see that. It's not a little thing at all. All right, let's look at some reasons for believing in God next time.

Sal: O.K.
 
 
Excerpted from "Faith and Reason" in Yes or No: Straight Answers to Tough Questions about Christianity by Peter Kreeft (Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 1991), 23-30. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Autism After 16)

"I think one reason why religion is often seen in a negative light today is that people misunderstand dramatically what we mean by faith, hope, and love. The distortion of those three has led to all kinds of problems."

 
 
(Image credit: Gmalcarde)

All my atheist friends and family members believe in “love.” But what is love? Here’s a question:

If humans have no soul, and are merely evolutionary advanced animals, is ‘love’ anything more than instinct or hormones?

In a letter to his ten-year-old daughter, atheist Richard Dawkins explained the importance of evidence in science and in life:

"People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise you’d never be confident of things like ‘My wife loves me’. But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little tidbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn’t purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence."

What he is saying sure does sound like what “priests” talk about. But if love is not exclusively religious, then what is it? Let's explore the two most basic forms of love: love of a parent for a child and the nuptial love between husband and wife.

When mommy says to her one year old, “I love you,” the atheist says she is not expressing anything metaphysical or spiritual. In fact, says the atheist, the mother is verbalizing the instinct to preserve her species, just as a mommy zebra protects and fosters the growth of the baby zebra. That’s it. Nothing more. It is instinct combined with verbal tags. When a parent “loves” her child, she is just adding a verbal cue to an advanced evolutionary instinct to carry on the species.

The same empirical reality is true between two lovers. For the atheist, nothing sacramental, metaphysical, or spiritual is happening in a loving relationship. The two don’t “become one flesh” as we say in Biblical and matrimonial language any more than a rooster and a hen “become one flesh.”

When a man says, “I love you,” to his wife, he is simply expressing something about his hormonal levels toward her as a mate. What he is really saying is, “My hormones surge for you,” not “You are my soul mate,” because the atheist doesn’t believe in souls or metaphysical connections between humans.

Incidentally, a man’s hormones might start surging for another woman (or several women) at some point. The same man might also be ready to say, “I love you,” to these new women, too.

This position, if true, would produce the most dreadful Valentines cards, such as:

“Would you be my Valentine? I want to buy you dinner. My evolved breeding instincts respond well to you.”

“Your physical appearance sets off a hormonal response in me to mate with you.”

If there is no soul, then there is only the bubbling of the brain. There is only the response to stimuli and hormones. Yet Catholics root love in the soul. The problem for atheists, of course, is that the soul is a metaphysical reality that assumes the existence of God, or at least the supernatural.

When I love a friend, as a Christian, I mean, “I love you, body and soul.” But for an atheist, friendship is an evolved behavior related to living in a pack or herd or tribe. At root it has to do with self-protection and food acquisition.

I'd be interested in hearing how other atheists, besides Dawkins, would describe “love” to their daughters. I'd also like someone to help clarify Dawkins' claim that, “There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.”

What is this “inside/outside” dichotomy? It sure sounds like what we Christians have called “soul/body” for over 2,000 years.

How can an atheist say he loves someone and not mean anything more than instinct and hormones? I would especially like to hear from female atheists. Is love only a physical response?
 
 
(Image credit: Fun Lava)

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said that “just as important as the truth, and of the two the even more important one, is the mode in which the truth is accepted, and it is of slight help if one gets millions to accept the truth if by the very mode of their acceptance they are transposed into untruth.”

God hides himself so we will come to him in the right mode. He is not an object. He is not an old man in the sky, available to our observation, nor a slight grease on the surface of all things, available to our scientific probing. God is love. What merit is it to know of God’s existence as a man knows the existence of his right foot? God doesn’t want our observation, nor our pitiful attempts to “prove” his existence — he wants our love. He wants to be known in truth, as he is, as love, which is only known in the act of loving.

If we’re going to speak of “knowing” God at all, we must mean to know him in such a way that we infinitely strive for him, in which our knowledge and our panting after him are one in the same, for love is not known disinterestedly, rather, love is interest. We cannot know God cooly, as an object is known.

The knowledge of this tree or that apple sets myself and the object apart. I and the tree are divided into the categories of observer and object, because all knowledge is knowledge of something – some thing we refer to — apart from ourselves. But God is not a thing. God is love, and love will tolerate no separation.

Observation brings certainty. We see the tree and are certain of it. Our relationship is simple, call it I-thing. But with God, what’s needed is precisely uncertainty.

Uncertainties are known — not by knowledge, for knowledge attains certainty and thus eradicates uncertainty — but by belief, and belief always has the quality of hurling us upon another person.

For instance, my father calls, and before he hangs up, he says “I love you.” I do not know this to be an objective fact. I do not observe it with the certainty I observe the tree, because the words “I love you,” are an outward expression of my father’s subjective, interior life — a life I cannot know. From my perspective, his kindness to me may have been born out of no more than duty, the pressures of his surrounding moral society, or the desire to raise a child in such a manner that he does not become an embarrassment.

In short, the words “I love you” may not be true, and no objective knowledge can eradicate their uncertainty. Even if I were to add up all the constituent parts – his expression, his tone, our history, etc. — I could not arrive — with objective certainty — at the conclusion, “Yes, it all adds up to love,” and this is apparent in the fact that no one bothers to engage in such arithmetic. I cannot know love as an objective fact, existing outside of myself and available to my objective verification. I can only believe in it.

But this is the point. My believing in the love of my father and my entering into that love are one in the same, for in believing — which embraces the uncertainty precisely as an uncertainty — I fling myself entirely on him. I trust in his word. I trust him as I would myself. This blurring of he and the I in the moment of love’s expression; this taking on of the other’s hidden, subjective, interior life as if it were my own; this taking for myself as true what only he can know is true — this is love. In believing I participate in the life of the one I trust to believe. What a pitiful, boring world which elevates objective knowledge over belief! By belief I attain a greater certainty of what cannot be known than the certainty I have of those things that can.

Now we approach, with trembling hearts, the infinite uncertainty of God himself. God is invisible, and this terrible absence, this awful gap in our ability to attain certainty, and this necessary possibility of atheism is also the way in which we come to know God as he is, in truth and in right relation to him. By being objectively uncertain, yet communicating himself to us in beauty, in truth, in the goodness that inexplicably guides our lives, and ultimately in the fullness of revelation, through his only begotten Son, he offers us a qualitatively different type of certainty that would not be possible were he visible in the way a tree is visible. He gives us he opportunity to believe, to know him in such a manner that our knowledge of him is simultaneously a total reliance on him, indeed that our “knowledge” — which we should refer to as faith, for it maintains the objective uncertainty by never rendering Eternity objectively visible — is a participation in the life of God himself.

“If God had taken the form, for example, of a rare, enormously large green bird, with a red beak, that perched in a tree on the embankment and perhaps even whistled in an unprecedented manner–then [the modern man] surely would have had his eyes opened,” says Kierkegaard, but then we would not have related to him in truth, but in untruth. But since God is hidden, we must believe, and in belief we approach God in truth, as we approach love.

That this is truly the proper mode for “knowing God” seem evident in that difference between belief and simply knowing a visible something is that the former requires eternity while the latter requires a moment. Once the green bird is seen, it is known. No further effort is required. We may walk away from the embankment, close our eyes, and still know that the green bird exists. All that was required was the singular moment of perception. But when it is precisely an objective uncertainty that is being offered, an invisible reality expressed to us, the effort to know this uncertainty must be an eternal effort. At no point do we master God. At no point can we walk away. At no point do we attain a certainty by which we are “finished” with the project of belief. Belief is knowledge that comes from a participation in the life of another, and thus our belief in God only remains insofar as we, in every moment of our life, actively participate in the life of God. “I must continually see to it that I hold fast to the objective uncertainty, see to it that in the objective uncertainty I am “out on 70,000 fathoms of water” and still have faith.”

This is precisely why the Christian says he is saved through faith. To be saved means to become the self who you are, the self you are for all eternity, and only by faith do eternal selves act eternally. Only by faith do we participate in the self-offering of God, do we freely and eternally participate in the life of Love himself, do we attain that reality which, in religious tradition, is referred to as Salvation, or Heaven.

But this is hardly a distant mystery: As goes life so goes love, for there are few distinctions between the two. The words “I love you” — spoken in truth and by their very nature — tend towards relationships that last forever. Man and woman marry to express with a lifetime what cannot be expressed in a moment. The one requirement of erotic love is faithfulness, not simply in reaction to the evil of its opposite, which we call adultery, but because the very essence of love is belief in the other, a participation that renders adultery unthinkable. Theirs the eternal, theirs the ritual, theirs the belief in the other’s love that is simultaneously a participation in that love. And what lovers would prefer objective knowledge over the infinite strive of faith? What lovers would demand the singular moment that forever establishes certainty over a lifetime of active love, over the ecstatic comedy of forever proving the unprovable and rendering visible the ever-invisible?

God wants us to relate to him in love, for only by relating to God in love do we relate to him as he is — love himself — and only in this relation are our finite frames expanded and exploded with the infinite. God does not want our validation of his existence any more than the lover wants the beloved to simply say “You exist.” He wants us all swept up in love, forever and ever, amen.
 
 
Originally posted at Bad Catholic. Used with author's permission.