By Lawrence Gartshore.
As a student of theology, one of the major criticisms that one learns about God’s existence (or lack thereof) relates to a seemingly very simple notion – the idea that, for Christians, God is good. I beg of you to bear with me here; I promise that there is a deeper point coming than simple religious semantics.
On the face of it, stating that God is good seems to be a rather straightforward assertion. If the God of Christianity does exist, which for the sake of argument here I will assume is true, then, of course, this omnibenevolent deity must be good. If he wasn’t, then one would not be thinking of the Christian God at all and rather some other, lesser, meaner god.
Yet, this statement of ‘God is good’ is, in many ways, a tautology. A tautology, in layman’s terms, is when one states the same idea twice and, in doing so, commits a fault in style. Simply put, saying ‘God is good’ is no different linguistically to saying ‘return back to’. The word ‘back’ is redundant here, for the meaning of the sentence does not change with its addition; ‘return to’ says the same in fewer words. In much the same way, therefore, the argument goes that as for Christians, God is goodness itself, so saying ‘God is good’ is, in fact, simply saying ‘God is God’ – which is perfectly meaningless.
For those of you interested in reading more about this theological minefield, I would point you in the direction of the Euthyphro dilemma but, and I can almost hear the audible sigh of relief, this article is not one on theology.
Rather, I would like to propose another tautology exists in the world – one that is perhaps even more ever-permeating than that of God’s goodness. I speak of the concepts of living and loving.
This may seem like a strange proposition on the face of it. Why, using my earlier logic surrounding the divine one could, in fact, perfectly conceive of something being alive without necessarily feeling the emotion of love. There appears to be no contradiction in terms, nor does one possess a linguistic meaning that necessitates the other.
However, I believe most strongly that we, as human beings, are not merely ‘something’ – no, every one of us, from the highest to the lowest, is rather ‘someone’.
‘Someone’, in my opinion, cannot live without love. Many of us are lucky enough to be born with it bestowed upon us by our parents. We develop the feeling as we grow, eventually finding the ability to love others. We grow a little more and obtain the far more difficult talent to love ourselves. Even when we are at our absolute lowest, and we cannot locate the facilities for self-love, when we think that all our love reserves have been spent, someone new enters our life and teaches us that we do in fact have more to give.
Love is, fundamentally, what sets us as species apart from so many others. Other animals may mate for life, such as the dolphin, but no other, as far as I am aware, show the same capacity for unbridled love as we humans. We fight for it; we are guided by it. It provides safety, and pain, and joy, and agony, and it is through all those feelings, good and bad, that we truly know we are alive.
Love can hurt, as life can hurt, but it is only through love that the very act of living becomes possible. We needn’t say that to live is to love – the statement is redundant – both words mean the very same.