I certainly love (emotionally) many people, I take care of nature (as well as I can), I help the needy - these are all actions. If you say that this is “love toward God”, then I simply
, because I don’t see God to be “there” to be loved. My positive actions do NOT come from taking God into consideration.
For starters, you love due to your feelings (this is your major ‘source’ of love) and then due to your reason (your second source); from a Catholic understanding, there is a third encompassing source (God) that you ignore, but that to us exists.
I’ll try to explain this third source, and I’ll use “like” to refer to the
feeling of love you expressed, and “love” to refer to the action we Christians mean.
You love your friends because you like them. This is basic enough: we
want to do nice things to people we like. In other words:
1) You **love **others because of your **will **to do so.
You love Nature because you feel it is important. You know you need it to exist in order to life (yours, specially) to thrive. So you (love) take care of nature because you **reason **it is beneficial to do so. In sum:
2) You love others because your **reason **leads to it.
In both these cases, we Catholics attribute YOUR actions to God’s Grace: Actual Graces moves both the will and the intellect into… doing what God wants (that is, love). Grace is that “push” or “tugging” we feel into doing the right thing.
And this “tugging” in the right direction is where
we see God in YOUR acts of love, and in that of atheists/pagans as a whole. To you, they are just actions you do because you want. To us,
it is God not giving up on you - He wants you to succeed at reaching eternal life!
God’s Grace is an act of His will - it is a part of His love for us. So, even thought you don’t consciously think of Him when doing nice stuff, to us it is still Him that is acting through you.
To put in a parent/son comparison: you saying you “don’t do good because of God” is like a child saying they can ride the bike without help, not noticing that their father never stopped holding them upright. He wants you to succeed at riding that bike!
Back to Grace. This is better felt when neither intellect nor will moves your actions. You know, the “random” acts of kindness? This is where we forgive those who hurt us - people we hate and would reason their existence as a hindrance; we hold no feelings nor reason to forgive them, but we do either way. I do it because of God: I alone cannot hold so much love for someone I hate. You do it because of God: no one can love to that level without God.
No one can love
to any level without God.
I have included God into my reasoning (my intellect), you haven’t; this is all that differentiates us but, at the core, our love comes from the same source.
You just need to look back and see who is holding the bike.
Now, something else. If you decouple emotions from love, then a perfectly designed robot also loves humans, acting in their best interest, taking care of them… and so on. And the “love” of this robot is much superior compared to the inadequate “actions” that can be performed by humans.
By our understanding: as a robot has no supernatural soul, it cannot act based on Love (as it receives no Grace from God to do so).
It would simply be another action without any supernatural effect. Just like with other animals: my cat likes me (mostly; she’s a lil devil, we are thinking of calling for an Exorcist…), err… better example, my OTHER cat likes me, but he is incapable of loving me (he only has a natural soul - no Sanctifying or Actual Grace acting on him).
To put it under perspective: if an apple falls from a tree and feeds someone under it, the tree (nor the apple) didn’t act out of love - they simply did their thing.
If a cat purrs and helps someone become calmer, the cat didn’t act out of love - it simply did it’s thing.
If a robot gives part of his savings to a poor person, the robot didn’t act out of love - it simply did it’s thing.
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