One of the most powerful arguments for the existence of God is the reality of love. Most people do not realize that if God does not exist, then love is an illusion. It is nothing more than a chemical reaction in your brain.

So where does love fit in a world where God does not exist? If we are nothing but material beings composed of a mass of particles, then what is love to us? Atheistic philosophy readily admits that love has no meaning in our lives other than its pragmatic, physical consequences.

Is love is nothing more than a chemical reaction in our brains?

Aldous Huxley, late author of the dystopian novel A Brave New World,  was very critical of the idea of love.

Of all the worn, smudged, dog-eared words in our vocabulary, love is surely the grubbiest, smelliest, slimiest. Bawled from a million pulpits, lasciviously crooned through hundreds of loudspeakers, it has become an outrage to good taste and decent feeling, an obscenity which one hesitates to pronounce.

The atheist, then, is forced to renounce the mystery of love, yet he must explain that which much of humanity recognizes to be a true phenomenon. As Dr. William Kilpatrick, professor of psychology at Boston College, tells us that the atheist explains away love as a matter of fact:

• Love is a sublimation of the sex drive produced in the right hemisphere of the brain.
• Love is a matter of stimulus and response conditioned by family patterns of reward.
• Love is the inherited drive to preserve the gene pool.

Dr. Kilpatrick goes on to say that, in order to understand love in a godless world, we are…

“encouraged to forget about Romeo and Juliet, and to think rather in terms of some new study of the sexual behavior of two thousand couples in the Midwest, or some observations on the mating patterns of chimpanzees, or to re-order our understanding along the lines of some such formula as she is the mother that he always wished to possess.”

Love is explained away by atheists as a chemical reaction, a biological drive, an animal instinct, a conditioned phenomenon.

What is your experience? Is love real, or are we simply controlled by our hormones, experiencing some type of chemical reaction in the brain?

At the heart of Christianity there exists a real love, and God is the source of that love. The apostle John wrote, “Love is from God” and “We love because He first loved us.” Furthermore, the better form of love is more than the expression of mere feelings toward someone. It is responding to those we love, not out of selfishness or conceit, but in humility and reverence, placing their well-being above our own.

This viewpoint postulates that God designed life to be lived out in relationships characterized by this type of love.

The skeptic will vigorously challenge this position and will point out that the world we live in is not characterized by this picture of love. Violence and hatred seem to envelop the world. Murder and assault, divorce and child abuse, bitterness and oppression are commonplace in even the most civilized countries.

A reasonable explanation is that perhaps the world is not characterized by “love” because people, including those claiming to be theists, so often leave God, the source of all love, out of their lives.

To paraphrase the Nobel-prize winning writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the problem with our world is that “men have forgotten God.”

What I find most interesting is that the atheistic view of life clearly acknowledges that love is an illusion, and yet, those who identify themselves as atheists often find themselves professing love. It is of notable significance that these atheists, those who profess to seek the ultimate truth, are unable to live an intellectually honest life consistent with the world in which they profess to believe.

The reality of “love”- beyond the chemicals, the brain, and the body is evidence that authenticates the existence of a God who is the source of that love.