Question for Christians: How do we know God loves us?

Great Debates
1

I’ve just read an excellent essay by Antony Flew called “Theology & Falsification”. Check it out here if you haven’t already read it. It’s very short & straightforward, and it poses what I think is a very interesting question about one of the foundational claims of Christianity.

To assert that something is the case is necessarily equivalent to denying that something is not the case. For example, the assertion “This iron is hot” also functions as a denial of the opposite assertion “This iron is cold”. Suppose one were to doubt that a statement masquerading as an assertion were really an assertion at all. To verify it as an assertion one need merely identify the state of affairs which would count against it. A statement for which no negation can be imagined is not an assertion.

The devout Christian asserts that God loves us. And when he is made aware of a child dying from an untreatable ailment while our Heavenly Father shows no obvious signs of concern, he qualifies his assertion. “Well” he says “God does love us, but our minds simply aren’t equipped to understand the true nature of his love”.

Even this qualified statement is undoubtedly intended as an assertion. However, Flew raises the point that this qualified assertion does not have a negation! In other words, there is no tangible difference between God’s infinite love as defined by the Christian in his second statement, and no love at all. How, if the Christian’s second statement were true, would we know that God didn’t love us? The most egregious calamities, from earthquakes, to tsunami’s, to decimating epidemics, are routinely made compatible with the presence of God’s “inscrutable” love. So is there anything which could disprove our hypothetical Christian’s second, revised assertion?

The answer, I believe, is no. The statement “God loves us, but his love is inscrutable”, is completely unfalsifiable. It is therefore not an assertion at all. Rather, it is a hope. And it is as much an article of blind faith as God’s very existence.

Flew puts all this much better than I have, but that’s the gist of his argument.

So, questions for debate:

  1. Is Flew’s logic sound? Does one need to make a leap of faith to believe that God is loving?

  2. If the assertion “God loves us” cannot be disproven, does that nullify everything brought forward as evidence to substantiate it?

2

A better re-statement would be “God loves us, but his love is experienced subjectively” - equally unprovable, but closer to the truth.

Note also, that for a believer, death is not necessarily the ultimate punishment your “child with incurable disease” scenario paints it to be - death is believed to be the passing from one reality to another, not an end, but another beginning. Another unprovable staement, but why are we trying to prove/disprove faith?

Grim

3
  1. The logic is sound, I think. One shouldn’t need to make a leap of faith, though, if there were concrete evidence of the loving nature. However, that’s subjective, like grim said.
  2. I’d say nope, it’s still evidence. It nullifies it as conclusive evidence, yes, but I think there are still arguments to be made from the evidence. Obviously, I haven’t been convinced yet. Atheist, BTW.
4

In Flew’s example yes, in God’s no. God does interact with us, the believer, & giving us better understanding of His will. God works through us with supernatural powers. The non-believer explorer could not see the gifts of the Holy Spirit, but might begin seeing them on the way to believe. I do believe that a leap of faith must be made at some time before the leaper starts experiencing the living God.

Not for the person who knows God.

5

Yes but it seems that if you “know” god(that is, believe in him) you will accept any result as evidence. If you pray for rain and it rains-evidence of God. If no rain-evidence of God knowing better than us when we need rain. School bus crash in which 20 children die a fiery death and 6 survive-God saved 6, and the 20 others are now in Heaven to be with him. Any action or non-action is described as “God’s Love”.

6

Christian answer: John 3:16*

*I’m not a christian

7

What great timing for this question. :cool: I just went through an elaborate back and forth (If there were a God, don't you think he would've made him or her self known by now? - Great Debates - Straight Dope Message Board) based precisely on the evolution of an assertion (in that case, an analogy) that, bit by bit, reveals itself not to be an assertion/analogy at all. The logic collapses.

#1: Yes, I believe the essay’s concept is logically sound.

It’s also something that can be utilized for lots of religious beliefs; I have a friend that used to be part of the SGI Buddhism group and I’d routinely ask him precisely that (because his expression of their beliefs was that they aren’t beliefs that require faith, but instead a ‘practice’ that is completely logical and secularly defensible).

Needless to say, he had to contort and bend his reasoning into completely unrecognizable subsequent assertions that progressively slipped farther and farther away from the point that he was trying to defend.

I call it retrofitting from a prosletyzing point of view. That is, if you believe something then your interest and eagerness for discussions and logic is just to validate your pre-existing belief which logic won’t be allowed to collapse.

I used to say to my friend who would claim that his group was always willing to discuss any possibility with an open mind, “Does that also include wondering if their entire premise is bullshit and they’re suffering from a delusion?” Even Mother Theresa seemed to have the ability to wonder (which, of course, is taken as further evidence of the faith in their view since the faith includes doubting the faith. LOL)
#2: If it’s conceded that the assertion cannot be disproven, then I think an intellectually honest person would have to agree they’ve moved out of the realm of logic-as-justifying-the-belief and into faith and logic to support the faith which is going to continue to exist no matter what. Particularly since what’s termed ‘supporting’ evidence can just as likely – and without requiring the faith leap – support other realities that don’t comport to the faith-based belief.

It’s a pretty good way to drive yourself nuts to attempt that conversation with someone dead set on their belief – and dead set on thinking it’s logically supported. You’ll notice some of the replies in this thread already starting to slip into that modality. It’s a little spooky, in terms of rationality.

8

It seems the author is attempting to force a logical construct onto something that requires no logic to its adherents. Christians don’t believe because it’s logical to do so. Christians believe because they believe. Non-falsification means nothing to a believer. They believe in their God, as well as his unconditional love, and no backing them into a corner with conundrums is going to change that, in fact, as alluded, it just reinforces it.

9

Well, sort of but not really. Once you see things along the lines of the parting of the red sea (sea of reads), and you now know that God is in control over everything great and small you know that the garden in the OP is tended by a gardener.

10

You can’t prove anyone loves you. You can’t prove the existence of love at all.

Proof is a great tool for examining logical and material things.

Faith hope and love are not such things.

Simply not believing in love makes love impossible. You can deny the love of God simply by making that choice, and you have triumphed, logically. You can do the same thing for your wife and children, and for every soul on the planet.

I choose to restrict the use of logic to matters where it has relevance. I choose also to limit my religion to faith, eschewing proof in that matter, since if I managed to find proof, I would necessarily loose faith. I find the exchange undesirable. Hope is an inherent denial of logic, yet I choose not to abandon that either.

Tris

11

I think there’s something to this, but the thing is, Christians (and other believers in a loving God) don’t claim that God’s love is completely inscrutable, just that it isn’t completely scrutable. The Christians (or at least, the non-naive ones) who claim that God loves us don’t insist that this means that God does everything we would want him to do or everything we, withour limited perspective, might expect a loving God to do.

12

I think the argument is logically sound, and people with an open mind would look at it and reject the “God is Love” assertion.

An argument that God hates humankind is just as defensible:

“Look God causes cancer and created Evil, he must hate us.”

“Yes, but he also created the beauty of a flower and love between man and women.”

“None of us can understand God’s will, and there must be an evil reason why he created flowers”.

13

The author is not trying to force logic onto something, he’s just examining it in logical terms. If that’s a dumb thing to do in some people’s opinion, so be it. But that’s the discussion.

I agree it’s not going to convince a xian.

Nonetheless, it’s an intellectual exercise to see if the logic of the belief holds up.

Beliefs don’t all have to be logically inexplicable or indefensible to be a belief.

As far as not being able to prove that love exists, yes of course that’s true. The premise that’s being used is that love does exist. That’s how a logical discussion operates; there are premises conceded for the sake of analysis.

14

I actually think you can prove that human love exists, because there are lots of observable human actions that are best explained as being based around some emotion of devotion, and when the dust settles, the moniker ‘love’ is as good as any for it. (Though it wouldn’t hurt to agually give different names to the different emotions you’ll find, that we english-speakers pretty indiscriminately call ‘love’. I mean, we love our hot sexy girlfriends, we love our own mothers, we love ice cream…)

Of course, mapping “godly actions” to some given flavor of love is a somewhat different exercise, which is either complicated or simplified by the fact that there’s no objective way to sort actions into “godly actions” and “god-didn’t-did-it actions”. A common method is to just attribute all the “nice” actions to god, and all the “not nice” actions to either bad luck or satan; whichever. This sort of sorting allows you to “prove” god is demonstrating pretty much any emotion you like, with tons of data to back you up; it only has the one small minor downside of being entirely intellectually dishonest.

If you attribute all actions to God, (which one logically must if he’s both omnipotent and meddlesome,) then you have the somewhat harder task of trying to mentally imagine a ‘love-mapping’ onto a set of all events and actions which is actually not a very good mapping of such an emotion. This is usually accomplished by a lot of rationalizing, fudging of the data, and claiming that things really do work out as being love; you just can’t explain how. This is pretty intellectually dishonest too.

And then there are some of us who just don’t attribute any actions to god. As we also generally aren’t trying to argue that this lack of actions is indicative of love, this causes us no logical difficulties or honesty problems whatsoever.

15

Exactly what do you mean by experiencing love subjectively? Are you claiming that the drowning child is actually experiencing love?

Believer or not, most of us like to hang onto life. We’re not trying to disprove faith, which is a human action. The subject at hand is belief in god’s love despite evidence to the contrary. If you say that no matter what the evidence is you will blindly believe in god’s love, fine, but don’t expect the rest of us to have a lot of respect for your position. It seems to me logically equivalent to belief in a Nigerian scam artist.

16

If we could actually see any such thing that would help. Have any miracles handy? It’s always miracles yesterday and miracles tomorrow, but never miracles today.

17

True. But if a man claims a woman loves him, while she is out every night, has babies that don’t look a bit like him, and brains him with a frying pan on alternate Thursdays, might that not be a teensy bit of evidence that he is wrong.

Jeez, people, Hinckley had more evidence that Jodie Foster loved him than you have that God loves you.

18

I’m saying that each of us experiences - or doesn’t experience, as the case may be - God’s love subjectively, and that we cannot therefore comment on each other’s experiences (or lack thereof). If you cannot respect someone else’s position, that’s your decision…

For myself, I have had experiences of God’s love expressed toward me, and I have had experiences that have made me doubt his very existance, let alone his love. At the moment, I sit in a non-commital position and wait for the grieving to end.

Grim

19

That hasn’t happened to me. I am not in doubt about God’s love. I am also not interested in proving it to you. Nor am I interested in being right in an argument on the existence of God. That wasn’t what the subject was, when I answered the OP’s question.

I think looking for proof that someone loves you is an outright rejection of that love. Insisting on it is a public declaration that you do not believe in it. I understand, completely, you do not love God. OK.

Tris

20

If Voyager was addressing you or any other particular person, it was presumptuous of him to say how much evidence you have that God loves you.

Still, I think there is a valid question asked in this thread: To anyone who says “God loves me/you/us” it is legitimate to ask, How do you know? What difference does it make? If God didn’t love us, what would be different?

What’s not legitimate is to simply assume, based on limited experience, that Christians have no answer to this beyond “It’s inscrutable,” nor to insist that love be proved in a completely conprehensible and logically airtight argument.