My Personal Proof of God, Part 2: Love

"Splash", ink by Tim Holmes

In my conversations with scientists and agnostics (not necessarily the same, but let's call them 'non-believers'), I've been impressed by how often they place "proof" of a Godless universe in the absence of proof of God. If anyone should know it's the scientist, that absence of evidence does not make evidence of absence! But even given that, I find I always want to ask them one question:

Think of your spouse (or stepmother, or anyone not blood-related whom you love dearly). Allow me to line that person up with a million others who look and act very similarly. Bring in a roomful of the greatest scientists in history and not one of them will be able to pick out your loved one. And yet, out of all of the options there, you will always insist that that one person is different from all the rest, perhaps even if your life depended on it. Science cannot explain why. No matter how much you deny the Devine, you will insist that there is something that binds the two of you together. It's strange but I've never heard a viable explanation as to what that force is. It is not any elemental force described by quantum physics; most of us would agree there is no physical force at all. But though it cannot be detected outside of the two of you, is it not real?

I might insist that you're chasing a fantasy, a superstition, that you believe in ghosts. But this does nothing to diminish the reality of your love and your ability to build perhaps a lifetime of happiness upon that invisibility. So what's really's there? This force is a daily reality that affects virtually every human in history more forcefully than anything else, yet are you prepared to say it doesn't exist?

This to me is the same as my faith in God. I don't know what God is, (except that my concept is inadequate to the task) yet I know I can count on God when the chips are down. If my loved one were to face a lineup of me and a million others, I'm perfectly confident– without a doubt– whom she would choose! This is faith.