In a previous essay, I argued that if there is no God, then there is no objective, or real, value, whether positive or negative: no goodness, no evil, no right or wrong, and no other values either.<\/p>\n
Now, Christianity is unique among the world\u2019s philosophical traditions in claiming that God is Love. <\/em><\/p>\n God is <\/em>Love.\u00a0 And this in turn means several things.<\/p>\n First, God is not, and cannot be, some abstract, impersonal force or entity.\u00a0 God is not \u201cthe God of the Philosophers,\u201d a pantheistic \u201csubstance\u201d of the kind envisioned by Spinoza, say, or Hinduism. \u00a0God is not Lao Tzu\u2019s \u201cTao,\u201d Heraclitus\u2019 \u201cLogos,\u201d Parmenides\u2019 \u201cthe One,\u201d Anaxagoras\u2019 \u201cMind,\u201d or Plato\u2019s \u201cthe Good.\u201d<\/p>\n Nor can God be the God of the deist\u2019s imagination, like Aristotle\u2019s \u201cUnmoved Mover\u201d or a Jeffersonian Watchmaker that created the world but has since turned His (Its?) back on it.<\/p>\n No, if God is Love, which He is, then God must be personal<\/em>. He must be intensely, intimately, passionately <\/em>personal.<\/p>\n Secondly, more specifically, God must be a family<\/em> of Persons, for love is necessarily relational.\u00a0 <\/em>God, that is, cannot be Unitarian.<\/p>\n Thus, only if God is something like Three-in-One, as Christianity has uniquely asserted with its doctrine of the Holy Trinity, can God be Love.<\/p>\n Thirdly, it is Love that is the central organizing feature of the whole of creation.\u00a0 This means that the cosmos is as ancient and medieval thinkers had always insisted it is: It is teleological.\u00a0 <\/em>There is a point and purpose to the universe.<\/p>\n It is inherently, objectively meaningful<\/em>.<\/p>\n This in turn implies that, contrary to what modern science would have us think, the universe isn\u2019t just a thing to be described<\/em>.\u00a0 Importantly, it is normative. <\/em><\/p>\n The universe is an \u201cis.\u201d\u00a0 But it also is an \u201cought.\u201d The world, nature, tells us what is and what we ought to do.<\/p>\n Ultimately, the meaning of the world is to know and love God, i.e. to know and love the Love Who endowed the world with being.\u00a0 The <\/em>norm of all norms and duty of all duties to derive from God\u2019s creation is the norm or the duty to love, to love God by loving His creation, particularly persons.<\/p>\n It is Love that powers and pervades the world.<\/p>\n We can anticipate at least one objection to this:\u00a0 There are other values, like truth, justice, compassion, beauty, honor, and many others.\u00a0 Isn\u2019t it arbitrary to select this one value, Love, as the cornerstone and engine of the universe?<\/p>\n This question, while reasonable, is nevertheless misplaced. \u00a0Note, although we often refer to God as if<\/em> He were no different than you and I in possessing a plurality of attributes, in reality, and as theologians from other times and places have observed, God is a seamless unity; there is no division in God.<\/p>\n Indeed, there can\u2019t be any division in God, for God is absolute perfection and absolute perfection is necessarily simple.\u00a0 <\/em>Perfection, in other words, precludes a composite or complex of parts. The reason for this is discernible enough:<\/p>\n Whatever is composed of a complex of parts is contingent upon those parts, as are the parts contingent upon one another.\u00a0 Whatever is a complex of parts can lose or gain parts, can, therefore, progress or regress.\u00a0 But whatever is capable of the latter is imperfect.<\/p>\n Granted, from our finite, temporal perspective, it may appear<\/em> that there exists in God multiple properties.\u00a0 This, though, cannot be.\u00a0 Consider: Whereas we speak of God\u2019s omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence as though they were literally distinct characteristics, this is only talk:<\/p>\n If God is unlimited in power, then He must be unlimited in what He can know, where He can be, and, because goodness is itself a power, God must be unlimited in His goodness.<\/p>\n God\u2019s essence is <\/em>God\u2019s existence.\u00a0 Just as it is the essence of a square to be four-sided, so too is it of the essence of God to be.\u00a0 <\/em>God, after all, is Being. This is what the Scriptures are getting at when God self-identifies simply as: \u201cI AM.\u201d\u00a0 God is, <\/em>He \u201cbees<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n Uncreated, indestructible, immutable\u2014God is, to put it another way, a being that must <\/em>exist.\u00a0 So, as Saint Anselm, the most notable defender of the so-called ontological \u201cproof\u201d for God\u2019s existence, memorably tried to show, God<\/em> is synonymous with \u201cthe Being that must exist<\/em>,\u201d the Being that cannot not<\/em> exist.<\/p>\n So, when the atheist denies God\u2019s existence, he is essentially saying that the Being that must exist, the being that cannot not exist, doesn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n The atheist claims that Being is non-being.<\/p>\n Atheism, that is, isn\u2019t just false; it\u2019s logically impossible <\/em>because it is self-contradictory. It\u2019s necessarily false.<\/p>\n God doesn\u2019t just exist, He necessarily exists.<\/p>\n Love, then, necessarily exists.\u00a0 Beauty, Truth, Justice, Goodness, and every other moral, ontological, and aesthetic value is what it is because of their inseparability from and unity in Love.<\/p>\n Plato regarded \u201cthe Good\u201d as the highest of all \u201cForms\u201d that united the other Forms into a One.\u00a0 Augustine, an admirer of Plato\u2019s but a Christian, grounded these values, not in some abstract universal to which Plato referred as \u201cthe Good,\u201d but within the Mind of God. Yet Augustine believed, as it is written in John\u2019s Gospel, that God is Love.<\/p>\n It is Love that unites the other values. There would be no Beauty, Truth, Justice, Goodness, Virtue, and the others if not for Love.\u00a0 Or, perhaps it\u2019s more to the point to say, God is Beauty, Truth, Justice, Goodness, and so forth because <\/em>God is Love.<\/p>\n That it is Love that creates, pervades, and sustains the universe can be gotten readily enough from the following considerations.<\/p>\n First of all, what we call \u201cthe universe\u201d or \u201cthe world\u201d is not something distinct over and above the totality of its members.\u00a0 Quite the contrary, \u201cuniverse\u201d and \u201cthe world\u201d are but short-hand terms for all things. <\/em>\u201cUniverse\u201d or \u201cworld\u201d basically have the same function as \u201ceverything.\u201d<\/p>\n But here\u2019s the thing: Irrespectively of the number of things of which the universe consists, there is a fundamental question that even the most sophistical of the atheist\u2019s exhibitions of mental contortionism can\u2019t evade:<\/p>\n Why is there something rather than nothing<\/em>?<\/p>\n The atheist has no answer.\u00a0 Since the universe is not something, <\/em>but rather the totality of all finite or limited things<\/em>, then even if it had no beginning, even if it is comprised of an infinitude of finite things, it would not, and could not, exist if the atheist is correct. \u00a0It wouldn\u2019t just be physically impossible; it would be logically <\/em>impossible for any finite being to exist unless there first exists something that is infinite.<\/p>\n Whatever is finite has a beginning. This means that whatever is finite at some point did not exist. But a finite being can begin to exist only through the agency of something that already exists (\u201cFrom nothing, comes nothing,\u201d or \u201cSomething can\u2019t come from nothing\u201d).\u00a0 Thus, if the only <\/em>things that exist or ever did exist are finite, then, as Thomas Aquinas and others showed long ago, at the present moment there would be nothing. <\/em><\/p>\n Therefore, there must exist something that is infinite and that is not dependent upon anything else.<\/p>\n So, God must exist.\u00a0 Why, though, did He create anything else?<\/p>\n The universe is not, as peoples (particularly philosophers) from other times and places supposed, an emanation <\/em>of God, that which is co-eternal with and which \u201cflows\u201d from God.\u00a0 The universe is God\u2019s creation.<\/em><\/p>\n All beings derive their being from Pure Being, from God.\u00a0 It is because, and only because, this Being is Love, and love is self-giving, that there is a world.<\/p>\n The world, then, is a gift, <\/em>a gift of pure Love.<\/p>\n My life and yours, are gifts that have been given to us by the Giver Himself.<\/p>\n The universe is a gratuity paid on our behalf out of sheer love by Love.<\/p>\n This is no mere abstract theorizing.\u00a0 As one goes about one\u2019s daily life, one need only pause and notice the world around oneself to recognize that the Love that brought the world into being is immanent within it.\u00a0 The handprints of the Author of the cosmos are all over His handiwork:<\/p>\n The delight that friends experience in the company of one another; the love shared between lovers, as well as the experience of \u201clove-making,\u201d and the love of parents for their children\u2014just as no finite being can bring himself into existence, so the love, often great love, experienced on the part of finite human lovers must derive its <\/em>existence from something greater.<\/p>\n In my own case, this point really hit home when, upon putting my little boy down for the night, I was overwhelmed with love for him. I realized then that this love that swelled up within me for my son had to be something like<\/em> the love God has for us.\u00a0 And I realized that this powerful love was an indication of God\u2019s Love because and only because it came from God, for left to my own limited resources, I was incapable of producing this love on my own.<\/p>\n Finite instances of love have to be dependent upon infinite Love.<\/p>\n Every time you behold a beautiful sight, whether a sunset, a landscape, a work of art, or another human being, you bear witness to Love in action.\u00a0 Sights of beauty emancipate us, even if only momentarily, from the daily grind.\u00a0 It is for this reason that one philosopher referred to them as \u201cintimations of immortality,\u201d hints in the here and now of space and time of the Eternal, of that which lies beyond space and time.<\/p>\n Finite instances of beauty can no more explain themselves than finite beings can cause themselves.\u00a0 They, thus, depend for their existence upon absolute, infinite Beauty.<\/p>\n They wouldn\u2019t exist if not for God, Who is Beauty Himself.\u00a0 But God is Beauty because God is Love. God shares His Beauty because God is All-Loving.<\/p>\n Every time you discover a truth, whether it is to be found in an intuition, a proposition, an argument, a theory, or an experience, you can be rest assured that such instances of truth would be unthinkable, let alone real, unless there first existed Truth.\u00a0 There first exists God.<\/p>\n And because God is Love, God is Truth.<\/p>\n Perfect love is honest.\u00a0 The various instances of truth that we encounter on a regular basis are signs of God\u2019s Love.<\/p>\n We could continue in this same vein with respect to every other value.<\/p>\n The gist of this line of reasoning is that whatever is finite and imperfect depends upon that which is infinite and perfect.<\/p>\n The universe, then, including, obviously, our very selves, is Love\u2019s gift to us.\u00a0 It is a gift that keeps on giving.<\/p>\n Love, through His creation and in innumerable ways, is incessantly beckoning us to follow His example and love.\u00a0 We should do so.<\/p>\n But in order to choose wisely, we must first think clearly.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In a previous essay, I argued that if there is no God, then there is no objective, or real, value, whether positive or negative: no goodness, no evil, no right or wrong, and no other values either. Now, Christianity is unique among the world\u2019s philosophical traditions in claiming that God is Love. God is Love.\u00a0…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n