May 12, 2008

Love: God’s Greatest Attribute

If there is anything that I’ve learned and known for myself about God, it is that His attributes overwhelmingly point toward one attribute: His love. Though this is not the place to attempt to describe the ineffable experiences that I have received to learn of His love, I know that He loves us, people, mankind. The reader can dismiss that because all I am giving is my word—or they can try believing that it is one of His attributes. I recognize that there are many who disagree with this statement: I have to be open-minded and recognize that God may only have emphasized this attribute to me, but it is His attribute nonetheless. I do have comfort in knowing that other people who appear to know God better than I do agree with this statement. Pragmatically speaking, it is difficult if not impossible to trust or believe in a God who you don’t think is on your side, in other words, who loves you.

With stating that He is loving, there arrives a series of logical complications from traditional views of God. I will list the most common questions, and I will have follow-up posts that answer these.

  • The first and foremost is the following: If God is loving, why is there evil, pain, death, etc? Didn’t He create all? To answer this question, I wish to address the best arguments of which I know that suggest this is illogical. Without addressing the claims of skeptic thinkers, we would not fully represent the logical feelings of people of non-theist belief systems. I want to show how the love of God is not logically impossible. Because this is an old problem, I intend on taking the next number of posts to explain this.
  • Second: What about eternal hell and punishment that is associated with so many religions? If God is loving, how could He knowingly consign someone who committed a finite crime in a finite world to some sort of infinite punishment after this life? This argument follows the same form as the previous.
  • Third: How can I trust that a God is loving who doesn’t curb all the blatant evil of bad people and destruction of natural disasters throughout the world? This is the practical question of evil: How can I trust that He is after my best interests?

There are probably more questions, but in answering these, most of the other ones will be cleared up.

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