Why do we Love Love?
Jul 22, 2008
Why do we Love Love?[1]
Whenever we read of the power of evolution, it is described as a sleek, streamlining force that focuses all living beings on utility, efficiency, and most of all, reproduction. Why then, we might ask, is there so much about our existence that seems non-utilitarian? Why does it seem that there is much to our lives that leads inexorably to non-utility, inefficiency, and difficulties with reproduction? Why are there things like beauty, art, romance, love, relationships, fine dining, music, poetry? Why are we awe struck before some great painting or before some great person or before some great piece of music? Why do we love love?
None of these things serve the purpose of evolution and in fact work against it. Tim Keller, quoting Bertrand Russell, writes, "If there is no God, and everything in this world is the product of ‘an accidental collocation of atoms,' then there is no actual purpose for which we were made-we are accidents. If we are the product of accidental natural forces, then what we call ‘beauty' is nothing but a neurological hardwired response to particular data. You only find certain scenery to be beautiful because you had ancestors who knew you would find food there and they survived because of that feature, and now we have it too. In the same way, though music feels significant, that significance is an illusion. Love too must be seen in this light. If we are the result of blind natural forces, then what we call ‘love' is simply a biochemical response, inherited from ancestors who survived because this trait helped them survive." Yet we cannot escape the fact that we are awe-struck before art, beauty, music, and love-we long for it and we gain meaning and fulfillment when we find it. Furthermore, we not only feel the reality of those things, we feel pain when they are absent. C.S. Lewis brings this point into stark reality:
"You can't, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behavior of your genes. You can't go on getting very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it."
We may respond, "Just because you feel like you need something doesn't make it true. Just because I feel the desire for a steak dinner, doesn't mean I will get it." You may not get that particular meal but your hunger betrays the fact that there is something called food which corresponds to that hunger. St. Augustine found these to be clues to the reality of God. He argued that for every innate desire we have, there is a corresponding reality (sexual desire to sex, physical appetite to food, tiredness to sleep, relational desires to friendship). We have a longing for joy, love, and beauty that no amount or quality of food, sex, or friendship, can fulfill. Keller writes,
"We have a longing for joy, love, and beauty that no amount or quality of food, sex, friendship, or success can satisfy. We want something nothing in this world can fulfill. Isn't that at least a clue that this ‘something' that we want exists? This unfulfillable longing, then, qualifies as a deep, innate human desire, and that makes it a major clue that God is there."
[1] For the relevant sections, see Tim Keller, The Reason for God, 133-135