Problem with "God is Love"

[LateranBasilica]

Yes, and that Bible passage answers. Is there a problem with God’s own description of love in His Bible? Given you related love to God.
Even non believers would say yes, Love is patient and kind…love is joy…

 

[Vonsalza]

Vonsalza:

In fairness, you also need to remember that love itself is an abstract humanist concept that also lacks a whiff of proof as it pertains to the empiricism your worldview consistently invokes.

The irony of this always delights me.

God must pass a material standard, but not love.

I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Love empirically exists. I’ve felt it.

Cool. What unit is it measured in?

…or is it another mass delusion like God?

We don’t know, which is why I can’t accept the certainty people have in saying “God is love”.

I can agree insomuch that if God exists, I doubt it exists in a way I’m capable of directly comprehending if experienced directly rather than through some proxy.

And the standard for showing a concept exists differs greatly from showing an entity exists.

Oh?

The belief in luck and curses is demonstrably real, while we can’t show that the belief is accurate. The same is true for any deity. The belief is real, but the deity itself can’t be proven or disproven.

Sure. Same goes for any abstraction. Like love, for example.

 

[Mike_from_NJ]

Cool. What unit is it measured in?

…or is it another mass delusion like God?

Love is not quantifiable. It’s not measured in gigacupids. Love is that feeling we have for one another. It’s not a construct, but a catch-all for many of our feelings and actions. What underpins love, what is the root cause for its existence, is up for debate. It’s like faith. Faith is very real. You would agree that the faith religious non-Christians have for their deities is real even if you would in the same breath say that which underpins their faith is not true.

Sure. Same goes for any abstraction. Like love, for example.

It’s not the same. Concepts like hope and concern and anarchic capitalism exist, and saying they exist says nothing to the accuracy of what reasoning is ascribed to them. A deity is not an abstraction, but an entity. Just because we can’t sense a deity doesn’t make it an abstraction, and thus its existence isn’t a given.

 

[graciew]

“ Deus caritas est” Pope Benedict XVI

http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedi...hf_ben-xvi_enc_20051225_deus-caritas-est.html

Hope it helps.

 

[stephenSTOSS1]

Here is a bare-bones explanation of Love. The Trinity is an eternal and unceasing relationship of Three Persons. The Father is the unbegotten and unproceeding of the Three. As Aquinas tells us, you cannot Love what you do not know. The Son of the Father is the complete and total self-knowledge of the Father … by the Father. Since the Father is pure goodness, that which is generated and known is also pure goodness. The Son, being a Person, knows himself completely by knowing the Father. From this self knowledge of eternal goodness, proceeds the fire of Divine Charity. The three together are Love.

St. Hildegard of Bingen was told by God that if any Person of the Trinity were to be missing, then God would not be God … Love would not exist. The Three Persons are in eternal unity. This also explains how men were created in the image and likeness of God. As a person, we are made to know ourselves. This knowledge of ourselves is also penetrated by ourselves. If what we know of ourselves is “good”, Our hearts will be on fire to express ourselves … to radiate goodness outwards. In other words, we will possess the virtue of Charity … love. If not, we will hate ourselves.

 

[Rubee]

You mean Holy Spirit? I have difficulty accepting Love as a person.

Yes, I mean the Trinity is a communion (of Love). Love is self-giving. In God this is not a mere “feeling” or desire. It is a thing that causes there to be three divine persons instead of one or two. This same eternal communion is why God makes creatures of free will like humans and angels (and whatever others he might not have revealed to us). So that they can have some participation in that. That’s why we have wills. That’s really the only reason.

That’s what “God is love” means. Who he is in himself (a Communion of Love) and who he is to us (His outpouring of love in the creative act, the redemptive act, and the Beatific vision we are called to).

That phrase signifies the centrality of Love in understanding Christian truths and God. Typically we know God by knowing what he is not, but we have these two positive phrases about him that are fundamental: I am who am (God is being/existence itself) and “God is Love”, (He is Love itself, he’s not just “loving”). The first referring to the divine nature, the second to the Trinity and to the core motive of God for doing anything ever. Love. God has nothing else that moves him but love. God is Love through and through.

 

[Vonsalza]

A deity is not an abstraction, but an entity.

Weird. You say that as if the ideas are mutually exclusive.

If only theists the world over believed in entities that don’t occupy physical space in the same way your coffee mug does.

Oh wait…

 

[John_Martin]

So God is willing the good of another? Aren’t you personifying Love?

Well, of Course he is: God is personal, 3 persons in fact.
Oh, by the way, one of the Names of the Holy Spirit is “Love” (agape), and the Holy Spirit is a person, and is the outpouring of the person (Love) of the Father and is the outpouring of the person (Love) of the Son, so that the whole of the Father is in the Son; the whole of the Son is in the Father, the whole of the Father and the Son is the Holy Spirit.

 

[goout]

In God, being and acting are one.
So we can say God is love, and God does love.

We can apply human definitions to love, and observe that God embodies and demonstrates what we define and observe.
But the application of human language is going to necessarily fall short. And so semantics are not very satisfying.

I like analogies, and marriage is the primordial sign of God’s inner Trinitarian life.
And I can describe and define my wife for you, but that’s nothing like knowing her in the deepest sense. That will defy human description. And insisting on rigid definitions of a person is just plain contentious.

 

[John_Martin]

I think that the love that we experience is different from Love therefore Love cannot be connected to what we experience.

“Love” the noun, is the HABIT of knowing how to give yourself into doing good for another “person” as if that person were you (since everyone always does good [in their current conviction] to oneself).
And this HABIT of knowing how to give oneself into doing good for another person is readily at hand for one to use whenever one chooses to use the HABIT of pouring oneself into the good of another.
Since it is a HABIT, the person willing to Love, knows how to do it and does it very well.

When you experience a person using their HABIT of pouring themselves into doing good for you, you are in a way experiencing yourself in another person, because no one other than you yourself gives their whole self into your good, but Surprise of all Surprises, someone is “loving you”. And it makes you feel “whole”, “complete”.

 

[adgloriam]

I became overworked halfway through reading that encyclical and haven’t finished reading it since. But I will, God willing !!!

 

[graciew]

It took time for me to grasp it. Pope Benedict is really a genius… but it is worth it!

 

[Mike_from_NJ]

Abstract and intangible are two different things. All abstract things are intangible. Not all intangible things are abstract.

 

[OneSheep]

What I’m getting at is some believers will try to use the “God is love” mantra to define him into existence. For example:

1. God is love.
2. Love exists.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Or they’ll try to make claims about non-believers based on that same mantra:

1. God is love.
2. Non-believers love.
3. Therefore, non-believers seek God even if they won’t admit it to themselves or others.

Hi Mike,

Is there something wrong with believing what you said there?

The former is a bad argument.

It is? In what way?

The second is true but really isn’t an argument for God in itself or self-evident. It’s more of a thing that follows after other points have been proved, but it can’t stand as a logical argument by itself.

I think that the second doesn’t add up. It should be:

1. Non-believers have God within, even though they don’t believe they do.

The first and second premises in the triplet say nothing about “seeking”.

 

[Wesrock]

Wesrock:

The former is a bad argument.

It is? In what way?

There is way too much that must be established for any of that to follow.

 

[OneSheep]

There is way too much that must be established for any of that to follow.

Hmm. Well, let’s look at it again:

• God is love.
• Love exists.
• Therefore, God exists.

First premise: True, by asserted definition
Second premise: True, by experience
Conclusion is logical

Am I missing something?

 

[OneSheep]

I think that the love that we experience is different from Love therefore Love cannot be connected to what we experience.

I’m trying, but I cannot see how the connection cannot exist based on premise that what we experience is different from “Love”.

They can certainly be different, and connected, right?

 

[Wesrock]

Wesrock:

There is way too much that must be established for any of that to follow.

Hmm. Well, let’s look at it again:

• God is love.
• Love exists.
• Therefore, God exists.

First premise: True, by asserted definition
Second premise: True, by experience
Conclusion is logical

Am I missing something?

To simply ask someone to accept “God is love” as a starting premise of an argument begs the question unless one is being quite equivocal or vague with definitions in which case the argument loses all force. Some eliminative materialists may very well go ahead and reject the second premise as well.

 

[OneSheep]

To simply ask someone to accept “God is love” as a starting premise of an argument begs the question unless one is being quite equivocal or vague with definitions in which case the argument loses all force

Is there something wrong with being vague or equivocal about definitions?

It remains logical. For example, if the first premise is “God is Earth”, a person could disagree with the premise, but it remains merely a definition, so the triplet is still logical (Earth exists, so God exists).

So to me, I see nothing “bad” in the argument. The unencumbered atheist can say “Okay, if God is love, I believe in God. I don’t believe in some entity that created all that is, but I do believe that love exists in all people (creatures, etc). If you say God is love, then I believe in God.”

Is that problematic?

 

[Wesrock]

Wesrock:

To simply ask someone to accept “God is love” as a starting premise of an argument begs the question unless one is being quite equivocal or vague with definitions in which case the argument loses all force

Is there something wrong with being vague or equivocal about definitions?

It remains logical. For example, if the first premise is “God is Earth”, a person could disagree with the premise, but it remains merely a definition, so the triplet is still logical (Earth exists, so God exists).

So to me, I see nothing “bad” in the argument. The unencumbered atheist can say “Okay, if God is love, I believe in God. I don’t believe in some entity that created all that is, but I do believe that love exists in all people (creatures, etc). If you say God is love, then I believe in God.”

Is that problematic?

God is OneSheep.
OneSheep posted above me and exists.
Therefore God exists.

Logical, but not very helpful and not true, or doesn’t demonstrate anything as the term “God” loses any significant meaning in a discussion. This argument (as does the original) commits the fallacy of begging the question on the first premise, and probably some other fallacies, too.