God's Plausibility

Heart and Mind Meeting in Love

An infinite past and a starting point for time—both propositions are beyond the human capacity to envision. What we are relatively certain of is that some 13.8 billion years ago an eruption in the spacetime vacuum eventuated in a dense plasma of quarks and gluons that coalesced into protons and neutrons which then fused into hydrogen atoms. Perhaps on the order of 10 to the 85th power of hydrogen atoms. Nothing else existed in the universe but trillions upon trillions of identical inert hydrogen atoms.

Has this process been repeated at other times in the history of this universe in an infinite regression—or is it still going on simultaneously in a plurality of universes we call a multiverse? Those questions seem beyond the grasp of both religion and science; since they appear to be non-testable claims and outside scripture or revelation, they are largely guesswork.

Somehow, we get from quarks to Christ, from hydrogen atoms to Mozart and Mother Teresa. Atoms aggregate, molecules form, material coalesces, gravity absorbs more and more matter, large clouds of hydrogen gas collapse under immense pressure to form the first stars. Pressure builds, after billions of years the core collapses, a supernova explodes and hurls a variety of heavy elements into space.

Some of those heavy elements hurled into space by exploding supernovas repeat the process of aggregation and gravitational formation into planets that are captured in the gravity field of other stars. One of those planets we call Earth, and its capturing star, the Sun.

The statistical odds behind the convergence of conditions necessary for life are deemed virtually nil even by atheists. As a consequence of the near impossibility of such fine tuning of hundreds of conditions (ranging from the force of the Big Bang to the ratio of total cosmic mass to the force of gravity, to the precise ratio of forces operating within the atom, to planetary tilt, properties of water and a hundred other factors), some atheists posit an infinite number of universes where one will inevitably emerge with these conditions.

In other words, cosmology has done no better than medieval logicians (Anselm) or watchmaker arguments (William Paley) to move the dial decisively toward belief in God. Doubt always has a response to arguments for God. The great Anglican theologian Austen Farrer (admired by Neal Maxwell) made an acute observation in this regard: “Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.” The surest foundation of faith in God is experiential: the firsthand encounters narrated by mystics and prophets, given to young boys in sacred woods, or to grieving parents in the epiphanies of consolation. And sometimes, unpredictable as the wind that bloweth where it lists, to those on their road to Damascus, or just to work.

On the other hand, more than one disciple has found the greatest evidence of God in the countenances and deeds of the sanctified or the simply and inconspicuously good Samaritans with which this world abounds. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins found his path (back) to faith illumined when he perceived the music of Christ played “in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his.”

Yet purely rational argument has a place, insofar as “not all have faith,” and reason can both reinforce and prepare the ground for spiritual ways of knowing. I have found my own faith reaffirmed by rethinking the nature of love.

The God of classical theism is defined in terms remote from human categories of experience and personhood, invisible, impassible (without passions), and incomprehensible: “He is neither soul nor intellect; nor has he imagination, nor opinion or reason; He has neither speech nor understanding, and is neither declared nor understood. . . . He neither has power nor is power; neither is He light, nor does He live or is He life . . . nor is He subject to intellectual contact. . . . For God abides above created intellect and existence, and is in such a sense unknowable and non-existent that He exists above all existence.”

It is impossible for me to reconcile this God with two objections.

First, it is very difficult to see why he should be particularly interested in humanity. In me. The theologian Mark Murphy admits as much, finding it “not only anathema, . . . but a mistake in terms of theism generally, to take God’s fundamental nature to be defined relationally.” Indeed, if one is positing God as the most totalizing instantiation of all perfection, exhibiting the plenitude of all values in their unadulterated fullness, then there is no reason to presume that humans would rank higher in that Being’s sphere of consideration than triangles, or that suffering should register more profoundly than geometric symmetry. A physicist has raised the same issue: “while humans would prefer that the world contain less evil than elegance, . . . God might have a much greater appreciation of the laws of physics.” God, from his omniscient perspective, would thus see human suffering as an “inevitable trade-off ” for mathematical beauty.

Second, if one simply asserts that this God of infinite perfection and power simply chose to make humans the object of his particular attention and concern, then too much is being asked of my faith. That of all the possible priorities and projects this ineffable power or process behind the universe could undertake, love just happens to be high on the list, sounds too much like simple wish fulfillment. I crave a reasonable basis for belief in God, and in God as the purest form of what we call love. Something more compelling than the miraculous good fortune of an always existing entity who arbitrarily chose to make love his distinguishing characteristic. That belief seems, as some critics have alleged, an only slightly refined improvement on the fantasy of Santa Claus: a cosmic being who just happens to be the kind of being we would most want to have unlimited power and dominion. Who wouldn’t want a universe presided over by a being whose principal object of devotion and interest is us?

What if, on the other hand, we consider the enormous body of research of recent decades that finds consensus in the single most important fact of human nature and need: love. The world’s “longest scientific study of happiness” derived one simple conclusion from decades of tracking thousands of individuals: “connecting with our fellow human beings” is the key to well-being, to flourishing, to a life of meaning and joy. Studies that confirm this fact have become too numerous to cite. “We are biologically hardwired to help others,” notes Samuel Wilkinson in a review of the literature. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman agrees that studies of human well-being conclude that “it is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.” This is what mystics have always taught. “The longing for relation is primary.” 

Suddenly, from all directions we hear a consensus that personhood at its most elemental level is conceivable only in terms of relationality. And this seems eminently reasonable, since as Plato noted ages ago, the capacity to affect—and be affected by—other beings is the defining criterion of a particular kind of thing: an agential being. In such a light, love is not a contingent phenomenon, not the simple fruit of an arbitrary choice to elevate caring benevolence above other qualities, but the mode of being in which alone intelligent beings—all intelligent beings—can flourish and exist meaningfully. What if, whether heavenly or earthly in their plane of existence, whether perfect in self-possession or vexed by contrary passions and inclinations, intelligent agents—by definition—naturally incline toward connection, toward willful situatedness in a complex of other agential, purposeful beings, finding only in that relation the circumstances necessary to fully flourish? In that case, what we call love is not a happenstance phenomenon in a field of myriad possible worlds, but the defining nature of an intelligence as contrasted with inert matter. The capacity to affect—and be affected by—other intelligences is the defining principle of each one of us—as it is of God. And such a capacity naturally finds its fullest expression in the vulnerability and the caring benevolence to which we attach the name, love.

That process of reasoning leads me to a rational support for my own belief in God. Characterizing love in that way does not only make belief in divine love reasonable; it elevates love to absolute primacy in that galaxy of possible attributes that we attach to God. I find love’s historical articulation most perfectly manifest in the life of Jesus; and all this comports with what I understand to be my firsthand, scattered but experiential, encounters with the Divine. Reason, history, and spiritual intimations point me in the same direction.

God is love.

Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New. To receive each new Terryl Givens column by email, first subscribe and then click here and select "Wrestling with Angels."

Art by Arthur Dove.

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