One of the more interesting contradictions in our public debate today is the tendency of fully secular folk to speak of the virtues of love and compassion, almost as if they invented them.  Political liberals often criticize conservative Christians because they consider their religious and political beliefs woefully lacking in love.  The funny thing is that, apart from a loving God, an ethical system based on "love" is as insubstantial as styrofoam peanuts or pixie dust.  To reject God is to reject objective morality completely.  Secular liberals are simply stealing from Christianity — and thus breaking the Seventh Commandment! — when they insist we love our neighbors and even our enemies. 

I'm thinking primarily of secular liberals who dismiss the Christian God as a loving and lawgiving father and who embrace a purely materialistic cosmos.  But we might also include religious liberals, who acknowledge God's existence but reject the authority and inspiration of Scripture.  Such folk are practical atheists, since although they affirm God, they doubt his ability to communicate unequivocally with fallen humanity, thus leaving them no better off than an ardent atheist — stuck in a mass of moral confusion.

But, for the moment, let's limit ourselves to addressing our "atoms are the only thing" materialist friends.  Think about it: you can't assert that mindless and soulless atoms — which make up everything that we can detect with our senses, including ourselves — are all there is, yet continue to insist that we love our neighbors.  Matter doesn't tell us how to live; in fact, matter doesn't speak at all as regards ethical behavior.  Atheists are quite right in this regard: morality is purely subjective, existing only in our minds, in a godless universe.

If the cosmos consists merely of atoms ("materialism" or "naturalism"), and life on Earth is merely the result of a radically improbable string of random events, moral language has zero validity.  To assess one kind of behavior (caring for an orphan, for instance) as superior to another kind of behavior (beating an orphan, on the other hand) is nonsensical.  In the neo-Darwinian view, each behavior was precipitated by molecular reactions in the brain, governed by the laws of physics.

How can you blame the orphan-beater for acting in ways controlled by chemistry and physics, as opposed to a rational mind and moral conscience that were gifted to him supernaturally?  Or why is the one who loves and cares for the orphan deserving of praise if such love is only the product a "lucky" series of chemical events in the brain?  In short, materialism eviscerates human blame and credit.

Even words like "lucky" are prohibited if atheism is true because they generally are not completely devoid of moral content.  Wouldn't it have been just as "lucky" if the cosmos and life had never emerged?  Why should the world's existence be better or worse than its non-existence?  If God either doesn't exist or hasn't revealed Himself to us, all moral judgments simply reflect our subjective biases and feelings.  And, absent God, such judgments would, again, result solely from electrical-chemical events in our brains.  Why should we trust them?

Albert Camus, an honest atheist who understood atheism's implications perfectly, concluded that the only serious question for the atheist was whether or not to commit suicide.  In other words, existence and non-existence are equally meaningless.  In taking his own life, he answered the question with perfect logic.

Can Love's Utility Compel Us to Love?

Evolutionary biology offers a glimmer of hope to our atheist and agnostic friends struggling to assert that love has a superior claim to hatred on the human heart.  They can point to the emergence of cooperation and kin altruism as crucial evolutionary milestones that resulted in the success of the human species.

But while Darwinists arguably can claim "love" — expressed in cooperation — has had evolutionary utility in advancing the human species, it can never say love is intrinsically good or true.  Perhaps love-fueled cooperation helped us become the dominant species on Earth by making us more adaptable and less susceptible to nature's tantrums.  Consequently, if love has become embedded in our genes over time, then our "love" was programmed into our DNA to increase the odds of individual and group survival.  In short, any acts of love we perform were pre-determined and essentially selfish — designed solely to keep us alive as a species.  Not very romantic, huh?

A crafty materialist might argue that, since nature has blessed cooperation and altruism, nature itself inherently favors love.  But why should that compel us to act accordingly?  In a purely material universe, preferring "utility" and "progress" is chock-full of unsupported value assumptions.  Materialism is unable to justify the idea that bugs are inferior to human beings or that complexity is any better than primitivism.

Hence, saying nature has a moral character veers right into pantheism.  Sorry, but that's a religious idea, my atheist friends.  Indeed, two of the world's major religions — Buddhism and Hinduism — are grounded in pantheism. 

Naturally, there are psychological benefits to love as well — loving others and being loved by them makes us feel good.  But heroin and crack make us feel good, too — or so I'm told.  At bottom, materialistic love is merely a DNA-programmed chemical response in our brains.  There is zero metaphysical grounding that assures us that it is right, good, and true.

Christianity, on the other hand, tells us that love is true because the God of love is also the God of truth.  The three-personal God not only defines and embodies love, but models love relationally — something unique among all religions.  Jesus, by His life and especially in His death, showed us what love is, through His own loving obedience to the Father.

God, who can only speak truth, commands us to likewise love one another.  We can say, therefore, that love is intrinsically good — it is not merely utilitarian.  So "love your neighbor as yourself" is an objective moral law binding on all of us.  For an atheist, the notion that love is better than hate is a weightless opinion emanating from random electro-chemical firings in the brain. 

So next time an atheist friend says we should be loving, gently ask how he came to that conclusion because materialism is no more or less partial to love than it is to hate.  "True" love is rooted only in the will and character of the eternal, immutable God.

David Culver Brenner writes and produces ProofsandSpoofs.com, featuring commentary and humor on politics, faith, and culture.  His first book, The Un-Socialist Chickens, was published last year.  To learn more about the book, go to www.unsocialistchickens.com.

Image: Marco Bellucci via Flickr, CC BY 2.0 (cropped).

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.