The Argument From Love
Why Love Is Evidence For Theism
Introduction
Love is among the most profound features of reality. Humans love spouses, children, parents, siblings, friends, companion animals, and sometimes even strangers. We admire acts of compassion, fidelity, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice. We grieve upon losing those we love, and many would regard a life devoid of genuine love as profoundly impoverished. Love is not merely one good among many but one of the central constituents of a flourishing human life.
Yet precisely because love is so familiar, we rarely stop to appreciate how remarkable it is. Why should reality contain love at all? Why should a universe governed by impersonal physical laws produce beings capable not merely of survival and reproduction but of affection, devotion, compassion, fidelity, and self-giving concern?
In this essay, I contend that love constitutes evidence for theism over atheism. My claim is not that love proves or entails the existence of God, but rather that it is more expected if theism (and indeed classical theism) is true. Evolutionary processes may explain many behaviors associated with love, but the existence of love itself — especially its rich conscious character, its apparent responsiveness to the value of persons, and its place among the highest intrinsic goods — is less expected if ultimate reality is fundamentally impersonal.
My argument differs from familiar appeals to love in philosophy and theology. Plato treats love as a longing for beauty and goodness; Augustine and Aquinas place it at the center of the moral and spiritual life; C. S. Lewis argues, following Augustine in one of his modes, that our deepest longings find their fulfillment in God (Plato 1997; Augustine 2001; Aquinas 1920; Lewis 1960). Mine is an explanatory argument. Love exists, and the question is which worldview better explains that fact.
I proceed as follows. First, I clarify what love is and why it is plausibly an intrinsic good. Second, I argue that love is more expected on theism than on atheism. I close by considering several objections. If the argument succeeds, then love provides another significant line of evidence in the cumulative case that the deepest foundation of reality is not impersonal but personal, perfectly good — and loving.
1. What Is Love?
The relevant notion of love here is genuine interpersonal love. But what, precisely, is such love?
It is perhaps best to begin by saying what it is not. It is not simply attraction. One may be attracted to another while remaining indifferent to the individual’s well-being. Nor is love merely desire, since we desire many things that we do not love and sometimes love persons whose presence brings sorrow as well as joy. It is not merely attachment. People become attached to abusive partners, destructive habits, and harmful institutions. Attachment may accompany love (and perhaps must accompany love in some of its forms), but it is not identical with it. Love is also not merely mutually beneficial cooperation. Evolutionary theory explains cooperation through kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and pair bonding (Hamilton 1964; Trivers 1971; Buss 2019). But cooperation can exist without love — business partners, political allies, and criminal conspirators often cooperate while caring little for one another beyond the benefits each provides.
A more plausible account is that love is a settled disposition to will another person’s good for that person’s own sake, ordinarily accompanied by fitting emotions such as affection, concern, delight in the beloved’s flourishing, and sorrow at the beloved’s suffering.
This account is deliberately modest, requiring only that love involves genuine concern for another person as intrinsically valuable. That is enough to distinguish it from attraction, desire, attachment, and cooperation, and enough to reveal why love is philosophically significant.
2. Love as an Intrinsic Good
Love is not merely instrumentally valuable. A life may contain wealth, pleasure, success, and comfort yet seem deeply impoverished if it contains no genuine love. Conversely, a life marked by hardship may still be profoundly meaningful if it is rich in loving relationships. Love, therefore, seems to be not merely a means to flourishing but one of its central constituents.
This thought has deep roots in the philosophical tradition. Aristotle treats friendship as indispensable to eudaimonia (Aristotle 2000, VIII.1). Maimonides likewise emphasizes the commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself as a central feature of the moral life (Maimonides 1972, Laws of Human Dispositions 6:3). Aquinas regards charity as the highest theological virtue (Aquinas 1920, II-II, q. 23). Harry Frankfurt argues that love gives shape to our practical lives by determining what we care about (Frankfurt 2004). Robert Nozick similarly suggests that love transforms isolated individuals into a shared “we” (Nozick 1989, 68–86).
Love also enriches other goods. Beauty is more fully appreciated when shared; knowledge is more valuable when passed on to students, children, or friends. Achievement is often hollow unless celebrated with those we love. Even suffering is frequently rendered more bearable by the presence of those who genuinely care for us (and the absence of such people can compound profound suffering beyond measure).
Of course, love can become disordered. There are possessive, jealous, manipulative, and destructive forms of love. But these do not undermine love’s value; they presuppose it. We criticize possessiveness precisely because it falls short of genuine love. As Augustine argued, moral failure often consists not in loving too much but in loving the wrong things or loving good things in the wrong order (Augustine 2001).
Love, then, is among the highest goods we know. Any worldview aimed at explaining reality should account not merely for organisms capable of reproduction and cooperation but for beings capable of this remarkable good.
3. Why Love Is Expected on Theism
If love is among the highest intrinsic goods, then its existence is far less surprising if theism — specifically, classical theism — is true. Classical theism holds that ultimate reality is not impersonal matter, uncaring laws of nature, or a timeless Realm of Forms, but a necessarily existent, perfectly good, omnipotent, omniscient mind. If such a being exists, then we have good reason to expect a world containing creatures capable of participating in objective goods such as beauty, knowledge, virtue, friendship, and love. These goods need not exist; classically conceived, God was under no obligation to create anything at all. But if God creates rational creatures, it is unsurprising that he creates beings capable of participating in such goods.
Love occupies a distinctive place among these goods because it is inherently relational. At least among finite beings like ourselves, it cannot exist in isolation. It requires persons capable of recognizing one another not merely as useful objects but as beings worthy of concern for their own sake. A world containing genuine love is therefore one populated by persons capable of loyalty, compassion, forgiveness, self-sacrifice, and enduring commitment.
This fits naturally within theism, on which humans and other conscious creatures are not accidental byproducts of indifferent physical processes but creatures intentionally brought into existence by a perfect being. If persons possess objective worth because they are created in the image of God, then love becomes the fitting response to that worth. Love is not simply an emotional reaction but — at least in part — the recognition of something genuinely valuable in another person.
Theism therefore predicts more than mere cooperation. Cooperation can arise wherever mutual advantage exists, but love goes further. Parents devote themselves to severely disabled children who may never reciprocate their care; friends remain loyal despite personal cost; spouses continue caring for one another through dementia, illness, and old age after beauty, productivity, and even shared memories have faded. Strangers sometimes risk — or even give — their lives to save those they have never met. Such actions are not universal, nor are they always perfectly realized, but they exemplify a kind of concern that fits comfortably within a world created by a being whose essence is love.
The existence of genuine interpersonal love is therefore more expected if reality is ultimately grounded in perfect goodness than if it is grounded in impersonal processes, entities, or forces. A worldview according to which ultimate reality is personal and perfectly good thus provides a natural home for the highest personal good we know.
4. Why Love Is Surprising on Atheism
None of this is to deny the impressive explanatory achievements of evolutionary biology, psychology, or neuroscience. These disciplines have illuminated the evolutionary origins of attachment, parental investment, pair bonding, reciprocal altruism, and the neurochemical mechanisms associated with affection and social bonding (Hamilton 1964; Trivers 1971; Buss 2019). Such explanations undoubtedly account for many important aspects of human behavior. The question, however, is whether they fully explain love itself.
There are reasons to doubt that they do. Evolutionary theory explains why organisms exhibiting certain patterns of behavior — protecting offspring, maintaining pair bonds, cooperating with allies — would tend to leave more descendants than organisms lacking those tendencies. But adaptive behavior and love are not the same thing.
We can readily imagine creatures behaviorally indistinguishable from ourselves that nonetheless lack anything resembling love. Such creatures would feed and defend their offspring, cooperate with mates, remain with injured companions, and perform every behavior necessary for reproductive success. Their nervous systems would simply generate those behaviors without any accompanying affection, devotion, grief, or concern. From the standpoint of natural selection, such creatures would be no less reproductively successful than ourselves. The adaptive work is performed by the behavior; the conscious experience of love appears to be something further.
This mirrors a familiar problem in the philosophy of mind. Functional explanations tell us how organisms process information, discriminate stimuli, and produce adaptive responses. Yet many philosophers argue that such explanations leave unanswered why these processes should be accompanied by subjective experience at all (Chalmers 1996). Likewise, evolutionary theory may explain why parents protect children, but it does not obviously explain why parental care should be accompanied by the rich phenomenology of love: delight in a child’s flourishing, anguish at a child’s suffering, overwhelming devotion, and profound grief at the child’s death.
Nor does neuroscience by itself close the explanatory gap. Love is associated with neural activity involving oxytocin, dopamine, vasopressin, and many other biological mechanisms. But identifying the mechanisms through which love is realized is not the same as explaining why those mechanisms should give rise to conscious love rather than merely adaptive behavior.
Love also possesses a striking normative dimension. Those who genuinely love another person ordinarily do not regard themselves as merely enacting reproductive strategies or executing genetically programmed behaviors. Rather, they experience themselves as responding appropriately to another person’s value. Love presents itself not merely as useful but as fitting.
This feature of love has received the attention of several contemporary philosophers. J. David Velleman argues that love is fundamentally a response to the value of persons rather than merely to their desirable traits (Velleman 1999). Robert Adams likewise connects love with the recognition of genuine goodness (Adams 1999). Whether or not these theories are correct in every detail, they capture something that ordinary experience strongly suggests — namely, that love appears directed toward the beloved as someone worthy of concern in himself or herself.
This is especially evident where love persists despite the disappearance of nearly every trait that initially attracted it. A husband who faithfully cares for his wife through advanced dementia is no longer responding primarily to beauty, intelligence, wit, or reciprocal companionship; parents who devote themselves to profoundly disabled children are not motivated chiefly by future benefits. Such cases suggest that love is directed toward the enduring worth of the person, rather than merely toward qualities that happen to advance one’s interests.
Moreover, genuine love often transforms one’s own conception of the good. The beloved’s flourishing becomes part of one’s own flourishing; another person’s suffering is experienced as one’s own; one’s own interests are willingly subordinated to another’s good. While evolution may explain why such dispositions sometimes enhance reproductive success, it is less clear why reality should contain conscious beings capable of this remarkable form of other-directed concern at all.
Finally, love appears to be among the highest intrinsic goods we know — and arguably the highest. Most people would regard a world devoid of genuine love as profoundly impoverished, no matter how technologically advanced, prosperous, or pleasurable it might otherwise be. If so, then any satisfactory worldview should explain not merely why organisms cooperate but why reality contains this extraordinary good.
Theism offers a straightforward explanation. If reality is grounded in a perfect mind, then it is unsurprising that creation contains beings capable of participating in one of the highest forms of goodness. Atheism can explain many of the biological conditions under which love arises, but it is less clear why an ultimately impersonal universe should contain conscious creatures capable of this particular good at all.
None of this demonstrates that atheism is false. Nor does it show that evolutionary explanations are mistaken. Rather, it suggests that love fits more comfortably within a theistic worldview than within an atheistic one. Like beauty, consciousness, moral knowledge, and rational insight, love appears to be another feature of reality that is more at home in a universe grounded in mind than in one grounded solely in matter.
5. The Argument From Love
The argument can be stated in standard form as follows:
1. Genuine interpersonal love exists.
2. If classical theism is true, the existence of genuine interpersonal love is relatively unsurprising.
3. If atheism is true, the existence of genuine interpersonal love is more surprising.
Therefore,
4. The existence of genuine interpersonal love is evidence favoring classical theism over atheism.
This argument is comparative and evidential in nature; its conclusion is not that God exists with certainty, nor does it imply that genuine interpersonal love is incompatible with atheism.
The crucial point is that genuine interpersonal love is more expected if reality is ultimately grounded in a perfectly good personal God than if it is the product of impersonal physical processes. If genuine interpersonal love is more expected on theism than on atheism, then its existence provides at least some reason to prefer the former worldview to the latter.
6. Objections
Section 4 anticipated what I take to be the two most important naturalistic responses to the Argument from Love. Nevertheless, it is worth considering these objections explicitly, along with a third objection concerning the apparent corruption of love. If any of these objections succeeds, the central comparative premise of the argument would be undermined.
6.1 Evolution Fully Explains Love
The most obvious objection is that love is simply an evolutionary adaptation. Organisms that cared for their offspring, formed stable pair bonds, and cooperated with others generally enjoyed greater reproductive success than those that did not. Love is therefore nothing more than a psychological mechanism favored by natural selection.
As Section 4 argued, however, this objection addresses the evolutionary origins of love rather than the phenomenon itself. Evolutionary theory explains many of the behaviors associated with love, but it does not thereby explain why those behaviors should be accompanied by conscious love, why love presents itself as a response to the value of persons, or why it appears to be among the highest intrinsic goods we know.
6.2 Neuroscience Explains Love
A related objection appeals to neuroscience. Love, it might be said, is nothing more than a pattern of neural activity involving hormones, neurotransmitters, and other biological processes. Once these mechanisms are understood, there is nothing left to explain.
Again, as argued in Section 4, this objection identifies the mechanisms through which love is realized rather than fully explaining love itself. Identifying the neural correlates of love does not explain why those processes should give rise to conscious experience rather than unconscious information processing, nor why love possesses its distinctive normative character — that is, why it presents itself as an appropriate response to another person’s worth. Explaining implementation is not the same as explaining the phenomenon being implemented.
6.3 Love Is Too Often Corrupted
A different objection grants that love is a profound good but questions whether it really supports theism. If love reflects the purposes of a perfectly good creator, why is it so often distorted? Human history is filled with possessiveness, jealousy, manipulation, betrayal, obsession, and abuse. Love is frequently the source of profound suffering. Why should a world created by a perfectly good being contain so much disordered love?
This objection is best understood as a version of the broader problem of evil. The present argument does not require denying that love is frequently corrupted or that such corruption demands explanation. It requires only that genuine interpersonal love is among the highest intrinsic goods we know and that its existence is more expected on theism than on atheism. Whether a satisfactory response to the problem of evil can ultimately be given is a further question (I have written on my thoughts concerning the general structure such a response would take). If there is some general explanation of why God might permit the corruption of otherwise valuable goods, then the existence of disordered love poses no special difficulty for the present argument. The corruption of love no more undermines its value than irrational reasoning undermines the value of reason or moral failure undermines the reality of morality.
Conclusion
Love is so familiar that we seldom pause to consider how extraordinary it is. Yet the existence of beings capable of genuine interpersonal love is a remarkable feature of reality. Love is not merely adaptive behavior. It is a rich mode of conscious experience directed toward persons as worthy of concern for their own sake, and it appears to be among the highest intrinsic goods we know.
Theism provides a natural explanation for this fact. If reality is ultimately grounded in a perfectly good personal God, then a world containing creatures capable of participating in objective goods such as love is precisely the sort of world we should expect.
By contrast, if ultimate reality is fundamentally impersonal, evolutionary processes may explain much of the behavior associated with love, but they do not obviously explain why reality should contain conscious creatures capable of this distinctive form of other-directed concern. If reality is ultimately the product of impersonal processes, it is striking that it should contain beings capable of genuine interpersonal love at all.
If, however, reality is grounded in God, then the existence of such beings is exactly what we should expect. Love is, therefore, not merely one of life’s greatest blessings, but a clue to the nature of ultimate reality itself.
“L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle.”
— Dante, Paradiso XXXIII.145
References
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Nice essay. I share this general viewpoint. I like the ideas around expectation and prediction arising from the correlation of theism with value and atheism with the lack of this.
There’s an instinct that if we get too rational/scientific/worried about the truth of the existence of God, we’ll lose all meaning for living. (I think some “post-liberals” are starting to be explicit about this.)
Nice essay. I share this general viewpoint. I like the ideas around expectation and prediction