Love
This is one of the more long-winded posts I have ever written, but it was needed. Someone posed a very complex question that demanded a complex answer. If you read, please read the whole thing. There is a point. I assure you.
Before I get deeply into explaining what I see as the true origin of love, I just want to say that I feel it just like you and everyone else. I feel that strange mixture of joy/pain/fear that makes up love. It is simultaneously the most beautiful and terrifying thing that can happen to a person. I am in love myself, and I recognize that it is not a "rational" behavior that I can decide to turn on or off. Anything else I say about the subject does not cheapen or lessen that feeling. This is simply my understanding of where it comes from.
That said, I'm going to have to start with a brief explanation of natural selection as a springboard into my point on love.
I have been led by the evidence to believe that any and all traits exhibited by any and all creatures survived within their respective species because somehow those traits gave them some sort of an edge, some sort of "leg up" on the competition. Think of nature as some sort of biological arms race. If a herd of gazelles is attacked by a pack of lions, then the strongest and fastest gazelles are the ones most likely to survive the chase, right? The slower and weaker animals are less likely to survive and therefore less likely to breed, and produce more like themselves. On the other hand, those faster ones will scurry off and be much more likely to reproduce more fast and strong gazelles.
The lions are the same way. The lions that are faster and stronger, and therefore more likely to succeed in taking down a gazelle and nourishing themselves are more likely to reproduce, creating more strong and fast lions, while the weaker ones likely will starve and see fewer and fewer offspring.
In this way nature ruthlessly culls the weak out of the mix, and promotes strength/speed/intelligence/etc. And while this process is weeding out the slowest among gazelles, it can also weed out entire species, and has. I think we can all wrap our head around this much, yes?
With that in mind, I think our experience of love is just another in a long list of traits that helped us survive as a species and reproduce. Think about it. We are a species that is largely helpless for the first handful of years of our lives. Look at dogs, by contrast. They can be self-sufficient after a handful of weeks. They still tend to stick with a "pack," but on their own their are not completely defenseless. There are other creatures that are essentially instantly on their own and do just fine.
Now think of a human infant after a handful of weeks. Can't walk, can't move, can't communicate, can't stop a predator, and can't get food for itself. A human child at that stage is still learning to even use it's senses and process the info that they give him. What would ensure his survival? Without protection and nurturing for years, the child does not stand a chance.
Here's where love comes in. This feeling we get for our mate, and for our offspring is a strong emotional connection that many creatures in the world don't experience, but many of them don't need it. We humans do, because without it we would never have survived past infancy.
The maternal and paternal instincts of our parents compel them to feed us, shelter us, keep us clean, educate us, etc. etc. It is also their love for each other that unites them in this cause. They also feel compelled to nurture and protect one another. Think of this as "familial" love. Without this, there would be no call to do any of these things. That may sound like a foolish thing to say, but in the wild there are uncountable creatures who produce offspring and simply move on without another thought. They do that because they can. If our species did that, we would not be here now. On an instinctive level our early ancestors understood that the survival of their offspring is intimately connected, and even representative of their own survival.
There's also a form of love that extends to other people. You probably feel this love for your friends. It makes you want to check that they are okay, and spend time with them. Or maybe you even feel a kind of sympathetic love for those less fortunate. Maybe it moves you to want to give to charity and volunteer at a soup kitchen or something like that. I would argue that is an extension of the same idea. If you simply inflate the idea of familial love, you get "tribal" love. Grouping into tribal packs helped early human ancestors survive. Again, this love was an instinctive way of man seeing that his own survival was tied to and dependent upon the survival of the group as a whole. That desire to accept and help other people is another key reason we are here today. It's just the idea of family extended onto a broader scale.
The love that many people share for animals is the same. It could be dogs, or cats, or birds, or fish. Somehow you've extended your idea of family to include that animal. You've incorporated their survival into your concept of your own on a very instinctive level. Primitive man did the same thing with the first domesticated dogs that helped him to hunt and herd and the like.
So, no Vega, I wouldn't say love is a feeling and God isn't. I would say that God is definitely a feeling, and that "feeling" of God is the product of yet another instinctive survival impulse, but that is a subject for another posting.
COMMENTS
You make love sound so.... scientific. All very valid observations, though. Quite an interesting read.
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