A First Look at Love

Because this blog is not solely about losing faith, but also the experience of love, this will be my first of many posts about love and its relationship to religion.

Through all my years of being heavily involved in church, one of the most prominent cliches is that 'God is love.' I had always been taught that not only does God love, but its what he is. His entire being is e essence of love and when we know God, we know love. Under that heading it was easy for me to get past the difficult parts of the Bible, because if God really was love, all those killings must have been for some reason I wouldn't understand until I got to heaven. Now that I am looking at Christianity from the outside, I wonder what the Biblical evidence for the statement 'God is love' really is. I went to an online Bible and search for the keywords 'God is love' thinking I would come up with dozens of responses, but interestingly, I only had two hits, both in the book of 1 John. (4:8 and 4:16) I thought it was strange that this teaching does not appear until the very end of the Bible and in a book that very few Christians study, so I tried again, this time on another search engine. Still the same. Certainly there are passages that discuss how much God loves his people or examples of his love, but why do so many Christians believe that God is love if it is only briefly mentioned in 1 John?

My hypothesis is that the human experience of love is so transcendental that we feel the need to worship it. Love is the one experience that makes me take a second look at whether we are only just chemical reactions or if there is some other force within or around us that causes us to feel this way. Love is something that represents what is truly good and for most people, what makes life worth living. I understand the need the make love something true, something more real than just chemical reactions. We feel the same way about morality; I don't follow my internal morals because they are inherited or learned social behaviors, but because I feel my actions are truly right or wrong. Emotionally, I don't think we will ever accept that these behaviors are mere chemicals, and so to explain it, we put a head and legs on it, and call it God. Now, this "God" is the source of all love and all morality, a being to explain our deep longing for truth.

Does this prove the existence of God? What if these other worldly experiences could be explained scientifically? I have been reading quite a few papers lately about oxytocin, the chemical released in our brains during sex, childbirth and stimulates a woman to release milk for breastfeeding. More research has been done to examine oxytocin's role in social behaviors, specifically long term partnerships and trust. Experiments were initially done on rodents that exhibit long term mating behaviors and the researchers found that oxytocin was directly involved in the strength of partnership behaviors. When rodents species not known for long term mating were given oxytocin, they remained with their partners much longer than placebo, and when those rodents who usually did mate for life had the genes for oxytocin knocked out, they suddenly were only interested in 'one-night stands.' This also applies to humans; oxytocin has been shown to increase trust and social behaviors in addition to its established sexual role. A nice summary of the research can be found http://www.oxytocin.org/oxytoc/love-science.html .

So now what? Is love only a series of oxytocin and dopamine release or do our desires for truth and love beyond ourselves prove the existence of some external source?