God's Love

The attraction of the Gospel is that god loves you. He loves everyone. His love is immeasurably infinite. He will never leave you nor abandon you. When everyone else dies, or fails, or flees, god will be right there, loving you.

God is love.

I'm not kidding or being sarcastic. That is an attractive proposition, and particularly so for anyone struggling to love themselves, or struggling with the loss of love in any aspect of their lives.

There is one crux to all this love that stands out to me, though.

It is not measurable. It is not detectable. It's effects cannot be differentiated from any other definable and measurable causes.

It is a fair and honest question I ask when I ask: How do I know that god loves me?

…

If I appeal to something in the Bible, I am appealing to events that occurred long before I existed. While that is attractive to some, it leaves me curious above the present tense of the statement that god loves me today.

And, even if I appeal to events that are described in the Bible; namely the Gospel story of Jesus dying on his cross for the sins of the world, which includes me, I am left with an uncertainty about my role in any of that. I can confirm the historical consistency of the story until I am blue in the face, and apologists seek to do exactly that. However, what no one can measure or confirm is whether or not Jesus' life or death was in any way associated with me.

The concept of faith dictates that the inability to actually measure any of the claims made by Christianity actually somehow confirms the legitimacy of such claims. In other words, while we can be historically confident that Jesus existed, it is strictly a matter of faith that Jesus had any concept of me, and that his death had anything at all to do with me.

Okay. For those who choose to take ancient claims of supernatural phenomenon at face value, I fully understand this line of reasoning. However, from my point of view, that is like saying that the warning label on herbal remedies that their claims have not been officially confirmed is actually a promotion that such claims must be true and accurate.

The counter-argument against observation and measurement I've often heard involves the wind. I can't see the wind, and I can't capture it in a little bottle. However, that is where the comparison ends for me, mainly because I can measure the wind, reproduce the wind, and different the affects of the wind from the effects of other causes.

God's love is not like the wind. I can't see it, and I can't capture it. But, I also can't measure it or differentiate its effects from other possible causes.

So, I'm still left asking: How do I know that god loves me?

I'm not saying he doesn't love me. I'm not denying any claim made by Christianity on this subject. After all, I cannot measure god's love, so I can neither confirm nor deny its existence. 

I'm just saying it is easy to make claims that cannot be measured, confirmed nor refuted. Its easy precisely because it is inconsequential whether I am right or wrong about this, as no one who is alive to make or present measurements of these claims can actually make such measurements.

So, I am left with an uncertainty that cannot be resolved. 

God's love is best compared to herbal remedies whose claims have not been officially confirmed or refuted. Their claims must be true on no other premise than that they were claimed.

It is up to me whether I want to believe those claims or not.