Time Immortal

I was going over some mental notes I’d made during my recent debate with Barefoot, and — as has become the norm for my unfortunately all too scattered thoughts — realized I’d missed one key point in all of it that only just coalesced for me. Being that it’s a pretty dry day for content, though, I figure it can’t hurt to expand on the thought a little bit.

Whenever I debate atheists, I typically like to turn the discussion — in response to positivistic or crypto-positivistic claims — toward certain concepts, especially the concept of love. Fundamentally, love and God are about as equally provable, in the sense that neither can be proven either with hard evidence or reasonable conjecture; at some point, we all must take love ‘on faith’.

The responses I get to that range from slanging to rote contradiction, usually, and in this most recent case of a debate with an atheist the issue came of of the falsifiability of love; the hypothesis that a certain person loves us, or that we love a certain person, is falsifiable — in the sense that people can act in ways which run contrary to what is considered “loving”. That is to say, people can present us with actual evidence that they do not love us.

While that’s true, of course, it’s also not completely true — indifferent or hostile actions, whether temporary in nature of consistent and drawn out over a length of time, are not actually negative indicators for love in all cases; there may be other considerations we are unaware of, our ignorance of which will lead us to make a false falsification (I guess you could call it). The person whom we conclude does not love us may, in fact, love us dearly — his or her ability to express that love to us may be impaired by depression, stress, or medication (I speak here not only of general trends, but from personal experience as well).

But absent that knowledge (and, indeed, sometimes even when we possess that knowledge) we would come to the wrong conclusion and assume that the other person does not love us.

That is not to say that all people who treat us poorly do in fact love us — many do not. It does suggest, however, that simply being able to suggest that we can falsify the hypothesis that someone loves us according to the criteria of how they behave toward is is, in the end, inadequate to the task of actually establishing that a) someone loves us or that b) love even exists.

To put it another way, to say that love exists because we can demonstrate conclusively that some people do not love us is rather like saying that we know the earth is approximately spherical because we can conclusively demonstrate that it is not cube-shaped. It’s not a false statement in the sense that the outcome is incorrect — people do love us, and the earth is indeed approximately spherical — but it is false in the sense that the reasoning is insufficient.

In other words, it is not sufficient to claim that we can “know” we are loved, or that we “know” love exists, if the only basis to our epistemology is an attempt at falsification. That might show us that love does not exist, or that we are not loved in certain circumstances and/or by certain people…but that’s all.

So once again, the we run up against the wall of faith. Where to go from there?

Well…either to faith or to evidence. But since we’re talking about atheism here, and since faith is ‘problematic’ for that reason, let’s look at evidentiary arguments for love first.

The problem with addressing love on the basis of evidence is the basis on which we accept the evidence presented. We can say that a person loves us based on the fact that they act in X way(s) toward us, but that’s not really a great starting point. They might be manipulating us for personal gain, after all. And I’m pretty sure I could submit whatever evidence for love that X might entail to the guys at TalkOrigins and they’d come up with some very convincing naturalistic explanation for it that has nothing to do with anything like love and everything to do with hormones, chemical reactions, and either the human reproductive instinct or social altruism — ‘love’ thus being the (sub)conscious rationalization of what is really a conditioned response.

This is even true in the case of a game theory* approach to determining whether or not love exists, or whether or not we are loved by someone else, precisely because an ongoing conclusion of love is predicated on the ongoing presence of evidence that we are loved — evidence which may be evidence for nothing of the sort (and which our interpretation of may be skewed, especially in the case of the question of whether another person loves us, by a potentially very personal investment in the conclusion or outcome of our reasoning).

That’s what I love about love in such debates as this — there’s no scientifically solid ground on which the conclusion that love exists, or that someone loves us, can be based. At the end of the day, we have to take it on faith, absent evidence and absent conjecture, that love exists, or that someone is telling the complete truth (and is not either lying, or speaking out of what is really a rationalization of a conditioned response to hormonal fluctuations) when he or she says that they love us.

For a guy like me, that’s just fine — I’ve no particular objection to believing in love, in the same way that I have no particular objection to believing in God. Indeed, in my view, if I say I believe in one, I am explicitly saying that I also believe in the other — Deus caritas est. But what if I were the sort of person who rejected faith as a credible basis for truth?

I suppose, in the end, that would make for some pretty crappy pillow talk, wouldn’t it?

I don’t know — maybe it’s just me, but I take a certain perverse delight in watching people who don’t believe in God jump through all manner of convoluted hoops to try and explain things. I prefer the refreshing intellectual honesty of the sort that one finds at TalkOrigins, though, to the crypto-positivistic hooey that others spew forth about how love can be proven because its absence can be proven, or how love can be concluded to exist based on the presence of ongoing evidence. At least when the folks at TalkOrigins profess an essentially agnostic stance on the issue of God, they can be counted upon to profess an equally agnostic stance on other intangible concepts, including love.

That’s not to say that they’re right, of course — and again, that must make for some crappy pillow talk indeed — but hey, even if someone’s wrong about something, it is always preferable that he or she be consistent about it.

Update: Peter had a bit more to say in the comments, one particular part of which I felt was worth bumping up into the main content.

Let’s talk about what it would mean to adopt a “scientific” attitude toward love.

Popper’s idea of scientific falsifiability means that a scientific theory can never be said to be proven. Falsifiability means that scientific theories can only be disproven.

If we applied that kind of thinking to love, we would see the application of game theory in a way inimical to human flourishing. Each partner would have an “exit strategy”, they would be selective in sharing information, they would engage in opportunistic breaches.

In other words, we would see the recipe for dysfunctional marriages.

But since we recognize dysfuntional marriages, we can recognize the opposite. Those marriages are based on something other than a scientific approach. That approach, as you note, has more to to do with Deus Caritas Est than game theory.

Thanks, Peter — that’s an excellent observation. To rely on falsifiability — or empiricism, for that matter — as the basis for one’s acceptance of any (and every) given thing, and then to make a blanket statement such as “I know my wife loves me” is, fundamentally, to engage in an illogic.

In the end, there is no satisfactory evidence or argument for love — it is, and must be, taken on faith.