Lee Moses
“We love him, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).
The above verse could be shortened and still remain true: “We love because He loves.” Man is created in the image of God, and as “God is love” (verses 8, 16), man proceeds through life with a high capacity for love.
But if there is no God, as some allege, why would we love? The predominant alternative to God that has been set forth is Darwinian evolution, which states that organisms evolve and improve into altogether different organisms by adopting traits that increase an individual’s ability to compete, survive, and reproduce. How does love evolve in such a scenario? The only attributes contributing to evolving and surviving in Darwin’s universe are altogether self-serving.
However, love is the diametric opposite of self-serving. Love, properly defined, is “affection and high regard for another, leading one to seek the other’s best interests.” Instead of self-serving, love is other-serving. How could this develop, especially among human beings, ostensibly the most highly-evolved species on earth, when such a trait could only hinder the evolutionary process per Darwin’s scheme?
MIT robotics professor emeritus Rodney Brooks described his understanding of human beings this way:
I believe myself and my children all to be mere machines. Automatons at large in the universe. Every person I meet is also a machine—a big bag of skin full of biomolecules interacting according to describable and knowable rules. When I look at my children, I can, when I force myself, understand them this way. I can see that they are machines interacting in the world.1
By admitting that he would have to “force himself” to think of his children this way, he acknowledges that it is not natural for him to think of them this way. He elaborates,
But this is not how I treat them. I treat them in a very special way, and I interact with them on an entirely different level. They have my unconditional love, the furthest one might be able to get from rational analysis.2
If evolution is true, then love is irrational and its existence is inexplicable. Psychologist and cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker explained how he addresses his dilemma as an evolutionist:
The mechanistic stance [viewing human beings as impersonal machines, LM] allows us to understand what makes us tick and how we fit into the physical universe. When those discussions wind down for the day, we go back to talking about each other as free and dignified human beings.3
Once again, we find an evolutionist admitting that he cannot harmonize his evolutionistic views with the moral way he views human beings outside of the laboratory, a way leaving room for love. If he and others were to think, speak, and act at all times in integrity with mechanistic explanations of mankind, there would no longer be any place for love. Furthermore, rather than explaining man’s place in the physical universe, the “mechanistic stance” he advocates is causing much of mankind to miss its purpose in the physical universe.
We are here because a loving God desired offspring whom He could love and who could love Him in return. Mere machines are incapable of this. Evolution is incapable of generating this.
It is true that man has often failed to love as he should, even spurning God’s love through sin, thus separating man from an eternity with the God who is love. But God’s love is unceasing, manifest in the greatest gift of love ever known: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). Let us then love, for which we have been created with a very high capacity. And let us through faith and obedience especially love Him who first loved us.
Endnotes
1 Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), p. 174.
2 Ibid.
3 How the Mind Works (New York: Stephen Pinker, 1997), p. 56.
