On Darwin and human love

It may be that evolution can partially explain why to share, nurture, exchange, engage or teach others is satisfying, but not so profoundly as to be the strongest and truest foundation of love, at least not in any sense beyond the natural or instinctual level. The analogy to mammals training their progeny represents “love” holds water to a certain point but male lions kill the babies of other males to mate with all in sight, and female Elephants physically kick their own adolescent males out of the herd to sink or swim with no second chance. Once taught, you are on your own to die if necessary. This kind of love is very basic, even a crocodile, decidedly not mammalian I know, is loving to a point, and then the mother might eat the little ones once the instinctual “love” wears off.

Love of the philanthropic or altruistic kind is much harder to explain through the closed system of thought brought by pure science. Sacrifices of ones life for an ideal, is even harder. The great lengths very primitive man endured to care for elderly, sick and even invalids have a difficulty being explained by the simply natural. Care for other species, pets, or care for an ecosystem or the planet for that matter is hard to trace to a rat or a bat. Why would I have genes that make me want to take care of other species and even sacrifice to do so? Love beyond ones progeny that extends to all in the above examples and others one could name, comes from somewhere else I believe.

If you ask the world of science why the water is boiling you will get a complicated answer about molecules and heat transfer and so on. Its been said the answer may be that it is boiling because I want a cup of tea. Science has never claimed and does not attempt to answer the question the second way. Science is then fundamentally limited in the scope of its answers. Spirituality, the world of the supernatural, has rightly never been considered a part of the answer by science because science starts with a premise so obvious, it does not even say it.

Miracles do not happen. All phenomenon are natural. When this is your premise, your operating premise, you cannot use your science to disprove what is by definition outside of scope, nor can you use science to prove what is outside its scope. The idea that, for example, Darwinism is disproving a creator is absurd then. Those who believe that Darwinism has something to contribute to disproving God then have taken a premise and made it a belief which qualifies these folks as being Darwin fundamentalists, no different in any sense than a person who believes God created the world 6000 years ago is a Christian fundamentalist. To stay off track for a minute, survival of the fittest, evolution, call it what you may is only the best theory we have that fits the data we have and Christian and Atheist alike can enthusiastically embrace this theory for all time, or until a better theory comes along. It matters not.

But evolution cannot explain human love fully.

It cannot because, as we see, human love defies natural law in so many ways but since science has as its premise that there can be no supernatural, the answer science gives cannot be the whole story. If you start with an open mind and consider the supernatural as an option in your philosophy, now unconstrained by the shackles inherent in the premises of science, and you examine love, you will see the divine in it right away. I see the divine in the theory of evolution; others may not, I see the divine in human love, however it got in us, it is divine.

ET