Argument

Argument from Love

Intro

Everyone, at some point, has been loved or has loved another in a way that felt like more than chemistry. The mother holding her newborn. The friend at the bedside. The widower who, fifty years on, still wakes reaching for the empty side of the bed. The stranger who jumps in the river for a child he has never met.

The naturalist has explanations for all of this: oxytocin, kin selection, reciprocal altruism, evolved bonding. The explanations are not wrong on their own level. But they do not touch the thing itself, the felt absoluteness, the sense that this person is irreplaceable, the conviction that love is reaching for something real, not performing a survival routine.

The Christian claim is short. Love is not a glitch in a meaningless universe. Love is the deepest clue to what reality is. Christianity goes further than any other tradition: God is not merely loving, God is love, eternally, between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. We love because we bear the image of a triune God whose inner life is love. The form of our loves fits the form of His.

Quick reply in conversation: "You don't actually live as if your wife is a chemistry experiment. Where does the gap between what you say about love and how you live come from?"

In full

The argument from love takes the phenomenology of love (especially self-giving, sacrificial, gratuitous love) as evidence that ultimate reality is personal and self-giving. Love presents itself to the lover as making absolute claims, as recognizing the beloved as irreplaceable, and as gift rather than transaction. Naturalism reduces these features to neurochemistry or evolutionary strategy; the reductions leave the experience unexplained and are not lived out even by those who hold them. The best explanation is that reality at its root is personal, self-giving Love, the Tri-personal God of Christian theism. This page is structured as debate prep: per-premise affirmative case, anticipated objections, numbered rebuttals (1:1), live-cite kit, and tactical notes for engagement with evolutionary deflationists, neuroscience reductionists, and non-Trinitarian theists.

Argument structure

Form

Phenomenological in starting from the lived structure of love rather than from abstract premises; abductive in arguing from that structure to the best metaphysical explanation. The argument is not deductively airtight; it depends on (a) the accuracy of the phenomenological description, (b) the failure of reductive accounts to capture it, and (c) the fit between the data and the Trinitarian-Christian account. It is most powerful as one premise in the cumulative case, paired with Argument from Desire (longing as sibling existential clue), Argument from Beauty (gift-character of beauty parallels gift-character of love), Argument from Conscience (personal-source pattern), and Moral Argument (absolute-claim pattern).

P1, Love makes absolute claims that exceed what naturalism can ground

Affirmative case (second-order arguments)

1. The phenomenology of absolute claim. Love (the deep self-giving kind, parental love, the love of long marriage, the love that goes to a friend's deathbed) presents itself to the lover as making absolute demands: loyalty even at cost, fidelity even when difficult, the conviction that this person is irreplaceable. The phenomenology is not negotiated; it is encountered as already-there. When a parent says "I would die for my child", the statement is not bargained-into; it is the report of a felt absolute.
2. The cross-cultural universality of romantic, parental, and self-sacrificial love. Anthropological data: every documented human culture has institutions of marriage, parental devotion, friendship-bonds, and exhibits behaviors of self-sacrifice for loved ones, including death (combat for kin, parental death for child, the rescuer dying in the river). The form is universal. The interpretations differ (arranged vs. companionate marriage, kin-priority vs. universal-fraternity ethics), but the underlying phenomenon of love-with-absolute-claim is everywhere.
3. The intensification, not diminution, of love over time. Reproductive-strategy accounts predict love should diminish past child-rearing years; the data show enduring marital love often deepens in old age (the "still in love after 50 years" testimony is common and well-documented). Naturalism predicts a fade-curve; the data show a strengthening. Tim Keller (The Meaning of Marriage, 2011) catalogs this pattern explicitly.
4. The death-anomaly. Humans grieve their loved ones for decades; some never fully recover. Naturalism's "evolved bonding mechanism" predicts a survival-functional grief period; the form and duration of human grief overshoots adaptive utility, and is consistent with the conviction that love is really for something that death cannot end. Lewis's A Grief Observed (1961) is the classic phenomenological text: the bereaved husband does not experience the death as the end of a bonding-mechanism; he experiences it as the tearing of a bond that was and should remain real.

Anticipated objections

1. "Evolutionary kin-selection and reciprocal altruism explain love fully (Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976; Hamilton's inclusive fitness, 1964)."
2. "Love is neurochemistry: oxytocin, dopamine, vasopressin. No metaphysics needed."
3. "The 'absolute claim' is romantic ideology, not real. Most marriages end in divorce, most loves fade, most parents are mediocre. The phenomenology you describe is a Hallmark-card overstatement."
4. "Many cultures had or have transactional marriage. The 'universal romantic love' claim is Western projection."

Rebuttals

1. Kin-selection explains the origin of love-mechanisms; it does not explain the content of love-experience. The objection commits the genetic fallacy. Even granting that evolution shaped bonding-capacities, the question is what those capacities are for, and what the lived experience of love is about. Kin-selection cannot explain the non-kin cases (adoption, the stranger-rescuer, the missionary martyr), nor the anti-fitness cases (the lover who chooses celibacy for the beloved, the parent who refuses remarriage out of fidelity to the dead spouse). The naturalist story predicts these cases would be rare; they are common across cultures. Failure mode: confusing causal origin with semantic content of an experience.
2. The neurochemistry-account collapses the phenomenology into its substrate. Saying "love is oxytocin" is like saying "Beethoven's Ninth is air-pressure waves" or "Shakespeare's sonnets are ink-marks on paper". The substrate-description is true and incomplete; it does not touch the meaning. Brain-states correlate with love; they are not what love is. Tim Keller and Jean-Luc Marion both press the distinction: the lover does not experience her love as a brain-event; she experiences it as a recognition-of-the-beloved. The reductive account confuses the level of the explanation. Failure mode: category mistake (reducing a meaning to its mechanism).
3. The high failure rate of love does not refute its absolute-claim character; it confirms it. The reason divorce is painful, the reason adultery feels like betrayal (not just contract-breach), the reason abandoned children are wounded for life, is precisely because love is felt as absolute. If love were merely a temporary bonding-mechanism, its failure would be like a phone going out of service, an inconvenience, not a wound. The pain of love's failure is evidence of love's absolute-claim character. Failure mode: misreading damage as disproof when damage is symptom-of-the-thing.
4. Even transactional-marriage cultures distinguish love from the marriage contract. Arranged-marriage cultures have rich vocabularies of love (prem, ishq, mahabbah) that operate within and around the marriage institution. The Indian Bhagavata Purana (Krishna and Radha), the Persian Sufi love-poetry of Rumi and Hafez, the Hebrew Song of Songs, all are pre-Western and document the same absolute-claim phenomenology. The objection conflates marriage as institution with love as experience; the institution is culturally variable, the experience is universal. Failure mode: institutional-historical evidence misused against phenomenological evidence.

Live-cite kit

• Scripture: Song of Solomon 8:6-7 ("love is strong as death, jealousy is fierce as the grave"); John 15:13 ("greater love has no one than this"); 1 Corinthians 13:7 ("bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things").
• Scholarly: C S Lewis (The Four Loves, 1960; A Grief Observed, 1961); Tim Keller (The Meaning of Marriage, 2011); Dietrich von Hildebrand (The Nature of Love, 1971); Jean-Luc Marion (Prolegomena to Charity, 2002).
• Aphorism: "You don't grieve a chemistry experiment for thirty years."

Tactical notes

• Lead with a concrete case: the parent who dies for the child, the spouse who stays through dementia, the friend at the deathbed. Concrete cases activate the phenomenology in the listener.
• Use the "would you trade?" probe: ask the naturalist parent if they would trade their child for an identical-twin replacement. The visceral "no" is data, the absolute-claim of love presented in their own lived response.
• Do not bully, the absolute-claim is genuinely deniable in particular moods. Patient pressing, especially via cases of grief and self-sacrifice, surfaces it.

P2, The phenomenology of love is irreducibly personal and relational

Affirmative case (second-order arguments)

1. The interpersonal "thou" structure of love. Martin Buber's I and Thou (1923): love is a recognition of another as a person, not as an object. The reduction-to-mechanism collapses the thou into an it. Even naturalists who say "love is neurochemistry" do not actually treat their wife as a chemistry experiment. The form of the love-experience presupposes the personhood of the beloved; the reduction destroys that form.
2. The gratuitous, gift-character of love. Love is not earned; it is given. The "I love you because you deserve it" framing collapses love into transaction. Real love says "I love you, and you are imperfect, and I love you anyway, and I will choose you tomorrow." This gratuity has no good naturalistic explanation; it has a perfect Christian explanation: grace. Benedict XVI's Deus Caritas Est (2005) develops the eros-becoming-agape arc precisely here.
3. The performative-self-refutation of love-deflators. The naturalist who says "love is just neurochemistry" still gets married, mourns his mother, sacrifices for his children, weeps at his friend's funeral. The deflation does not survive contact with the lived life. Pattern: theoretical reduction + practical exception = the theory is false at the level it claims to describe. As Alvin Plantinga formalizes the move elsewhere, a worldview the holder cannot live is a worldview the holder does not actually believe.
4. The "love-as-knowledge" tradition. Augustine, Bonaventure, Pascal: love is a mode of knowing. The lover sees something about the beloved that the disinterested observer cannot see. This phenomenology is reproducible (mothers know things about their children no one else knows; long-married spouses can read each other in ways outsiders cannot) and is anomalous on naturalism, which treats knowledge as third-person observation. Pascal: "the heart has its reasons which reason does not know" (Pensées §423/277).

Anticipated objections

1. "Buber's I-Thou is mysticism, not philosophy. The 'thou-structure' is a poetic gloss on ordinary brain-states."
2. "Gratuity is just selective bonding. Parents are 'gratuitous' to their own children and indifferent to other children; it is exactly what kin-selection predicts."
3. "The deflation does survive. The naturalist gets married and mourns because he is a naturalist with feelings. His behavior tracks his evolved psychology, not his metaphysics. There is no contradiction."
4. "'Love-as-knowledge' is romantic poetry, not data. Mothers project; intuitions are often wrong; the 'special knowledge' claim is unfalsifiable."

Rebuttals

1. Buber's I-Thou is rigorous phenomenology, not mysticism, and the objection performs the very reduction it tries to defend. Phenomenology is a respectable philosophical method (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty); it describes the structure of experience without committing to mysticism. The thou-structure is reproducibly present in the experience of love (every lover can verify it by attending to her own experience), and the objection's "poetic gloss" reading is itself the reduction the argument is challenging. To dismiss phenomenology as poetry is to assume the conclusion. Failure mode: dismissing first-person data because it is first-person.
2. Kin-selection cannot explain non-kin gratuity, and the cases multiply. Adoption, the stranger-rescuer, Mother Teresa picking up the dying from Calcutta gutters, the missionary martyr, the foster parent, the medic who dies for an enemy soldier. Each is gratuitous-toward-non-kin and anti-fitness. The naturalist account either denies the cases (counter-empirical) or rebrands them as "extended kin recognition errors" (which makes the prediction unfalsifiable and is the cosmological-constant of evolutionary psychology). The Christian account explains them directly: humans are made in the image of a God who loves enemies. Failure mode: post-hoc rebranding of counter-examples.
3. The performative-self-refutation is a real defect, not a benign tension. If a person's worldview entails "your wife is a chemistry experiment" but his behavior treats her as an irreplaceable person, one of the two is misdescribed. Either the worldview is false, or the behavior is irrational. Philosophical-anthropologists from Aristotle to MacIntyre have held that behavior tracks deeper belief better than verbal report. The naturalist's lived life is the better evidence of what he actually believes about love; his theory is the deviation. Failure mode: assuming verbal report has epistemic priority over lived practice.
4. The "love-as-knowledge" claim is testable in the ordinary cases. Mothers regularly know their child is sick before symptoms are visible. Spouses regularly anticipate each other's responses. Therapists who form deep alliances with clients report insights that diagnostic instruments miss. The claim is not "all intuitions are correct"; it is "love discloses information about the beloved that disinterested observation does not". This is empirical and survives the objection. Failure mode: treating modest empirical claims as if they were strong unfalsifiable ones.

Live-cite kit

• Scripture: 1 Corinthians 13:12 ("now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known"); John 10:14 ("I know my own and my own know me"); Genesis 4:1 (Hebrew yada, "Adam knew his wife", the love-knowledge link in Scripture itself).
• Scholarly: Martin Buber (I and Thou, 1923); Dietrich von Hildebrand (The Nature of Love, 1971); Jean-Luc Marion (Prolegomena to Charity, 2002); Blaise Pascal (Pensées §423/277, the heart's reasons).
• Aphorism: "You can't reduce a face to its molecules without losing the face."

Tactical notes

• Use the wedding probe: "At your wedding, did you make absolute promises? Did you say 'until death'? Why those words, if love is just bonding-chemistry?"
• Use the betrayal probe: "Why does adultery feel like betrayal and not contract-breach? Why is the word betrayal and not bug-report?"
• For the rigorous naturalist: lean on the performative-self-refutation. Frame it as "I notice you live one way and theorize another; which one is the more honest report of what you actually take love to be?"

P3, The best explanation is a Tri-personal God whose inner life is eternal love

Affirmative case (second-order arguments)

1. From the gift-character to a Giver. P1 and P2 establish that love has the form of gift, of personal recognition, of absolute claim. These features are interpersonal; they presuppose persons. The best explanation is that ultimate reality is itself personal and gift-giving. Impersonal grounds (matter, Brahman, the Tao) cannot give what they do not have; only persons can give personal love.
2. The Trinitarian fit. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity describes God as eternally self-giving Love: the Father giving Himself to the Son, the Son returning that gift, the Spirit as the bond of love between them (Augustine's De Trinitate, Books VIII-IX). On Christian theism, love is what reality fundamentally is. On any non-Trinitarian theism (strict monotheism: Islam, Unitarianism), love is something God does but not something God is eternally; before creation there is nothing for God to love. Christianity has the deeper fit: love is not contingent on creation; it is the eternal life of God. (See Christian God is the Only True God, P3 on Trinitarian fit.)
3. The Imago Dei explanation of our love-capacity. Genesis 1:26-27: humans bear the image of a relational God. The capacity for love is the imprint of the Trinitarian life on creatures. The explanation is predictive: if humans are made in the image of a triune God of love, we predict the love-phenomenology we observe, absolute claim, gift-character, personal recognition, the universal pattern of marriage and parenthood. The fit is not contrived; it is structural.
4. The cross as the final fit. John 3:16, Romans 5:8: the highest form of love is self-giving even unto death; Christianity's central claim is that God Himself enacts this on the cross. Christianity does not merely say God is love; it shows what self-giving love costs. No other religion makes this move. Other traditions teach divine compassion or favor; only Christianity teaches that the Triune God enters creation and dies for the beloved. The form of the highest human love (self-sacrifice for the beloved) is mirrored at the center of Christian revelation.

Anticipated objections

1. "Brahman, the Tao, or impersonal Absolute could also be the ground of love; you've not ruled them out."
2. "The Trinity is logically incoherent (the standard Unitarian and Islamic objection)."
3. "'Imago Dei' begs the question, you assume God to explain the love we observe, but the love we observe is what's supposed to be evidence for God."
4. "The cross is not unique. The Bodhisattva tradition has self-sacrifice; Hindu tradition has Vishnu's avatars; even secular heroes die for others."

Rebuttals

1. Impersonal grounds fail the personal-form test. The phenomenology of love is irreducibly interpersonal (P2); impersonal grounds cannot ground interpersonal phenomena without an additional explanation of how the impersonal generates the personal. Brahman in advaita must hold that personhood and relationship are ultimately illusion (maya); but if love is illusion, the data the argument starts from are illusion, and the whole inquiry collapses. The Tao is impersonal in a different sense (a pattern, not a person); it provides no source for the gift-character of love. Only a personal God matches the form of the data. Failure mode: offering an alternative that requires denying the data the argument is interpreting.
2. The Trinity is not logically incoherent; it is mysterious but coherent. The standard Unitarian objection assumes "three persons in one substance" means "three Xs in one X", a contradiction. The orthodox formulation distinguishes person (hypostasis) and substance (ousia), three persons sharing one substance, no formal contradiction (different categories). Centuries of careful work (Cappadocians, Aquinas, Barth, contemporary analytic theologians like Plantinga and van Inwagen) have defended Trinitarian coherence. The objection works only against a strawman formulation Christians do not affirm. Failure mode: strawman of the orthodox doctrine.
3. The Imago Dei is not begged; it is the abductive payoff. P1 and P2 establish the data (love's absolute, personal, gift-character) on independent grounds, phenomenology and the failure of reductive accounts. P3 then asks "what best explains this data?" The Imago Dei answer is the conclusion, not an assumption. The objection confuses the structure of the argument with circularity. (Parallel: "fossils are evidence of past life" is not circular even though we use fossils to infer life.) Failure mode: misreading abductive structure as circular.
4. Christianity is unique in claiming God Himself dies for the beloved, not a creaturely intermediary. Bodhisattvas are creaturely; Vishnu's avatars in Hindu thought are temporary forms of the divine that do not undergo real death (the avatars return; Krishna does not die for human sin). Secular heroes are creatures dying for creatures. Christianity uniquely claims that the Creator enters creation and undergoes real death for the beloved creature, and is vindicated by resurrection. The structural depth of self-giving (eternal God → creature → death for the unworthy beloved) is without parallel. (See Christian God is the Only True God for the comparative case.) Failure mode: treating surface similarity as structural identity across traditions.

Live-cite kit

• Scripture: 1 John 4:7-8 ("God is love"); 1 John 4:16 ("God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God"); John 3:16 (the gift of the only Son); Romans 5:8 ("while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us"); John 17:24 (the Father's love for the Son before the foundation of the world).
• Scholarly: Augustine (De Trinitate, esp. Books VIII-IX); Benedict XVI (Deus Caritas Est, 2005); N.T. Wright (Simply Christian, 2006, the love chapter); Tim Keller (The Meaning of Marriage, 2011); C S Lewis (The Four Loves, 1960).
• Aphorism: "Christianity does not merely say God is love; it shows what love costs."

Tactical notes

• For the impersonal-grounding opponent (Hindu, Taoist, New Age): focus on the personhood test. Press whether an impersonal ground can ground an interpersonal phenomenon without itself being personal.
• For the Muslim or Unitarian opponent: the eternal-love point is the load-bearing move. Before creation, the Trinitarian God has someone to love; the Unitarian God does not. Love-as-essence requires plurality-in-unity.
• For the secular opponent: the cross-as-final-fit is rhetorically powerful but only after P1 and P2 are conceded. Do not lead with it; build to it.
• Do not over-promise, this argument warrants belief in a personal self-giving God; it does not by itself settle every doctrinal question. The Trinitarian fit is an abductive advantage, not a deductive proof.

Conclusion

A personal God whose nature is love exists; the Trinitarian Christian account uniquely fits the form of human love. Love is not a malfunction in a cold universe. Love is a clue. Its absolute claim, its personal recognition, its gift-character, all point beyond what naturalism can ground. The best explanation is that ultimate reality is itself personal and self-giving, a Tri-personal God whose inner life is eternal love. Christianity goes further than any other tradition: it does not merely say God is love; it shows what self-giving love costs, in the death and resurrection of the Son. Augustine: "You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You." The restless heart and the loving heart are the same heart.

Master objections to the argument as a whole

1. "This is romantic apologetics, not philosophy." Reply: the argument is phenomenological and abductive, both respectable philosophical methods. Hildebrand, Marion, and Plantinga have all formalized variants. The "romantic" charge is rhetorical, not argumentative.
2. "You are confusing the experience of love with its metaphysical ground." Reply: no, the argument explicitly distinguishes these. It claims the experience is data that constrains metaphysics. Reductive accounts fail to fit the experience; the Trinitarian account fits. The inference is abductive, not identity.
3. "Even granting a personal God, why specifically the Trinity?" Reply: the eternal-love point. If love is essential to God, God must have an eternal object of love. Creation cannot provide this (creation is contingent). Only a plurality-in-unity in God (the Trinity) can. The Trinitarian fit is the abductive advantage Christianity has over strict monotheism.
4. "You are leveraging emotion against rigor." Reply: phenomenological evidence is real evidence. The alternative (refusing to count any qualitative experience as data) is unliveable scientism that would also rule out the evidence on which scientism itself rests. Love is data; the inference is abductive.

Tactical opening / closing

Opening line: "When you love someone, you don't experience it as your neurons firing. You experience it as recognizing them. Where does the gap between the experience and the explanation come from?"

Closing landing strip: "Love is the deepest clue to what reality is. Christianity's claim is that reality at its root is a Tri-personal God whose life is eternal love, and that we love because we are made in His image. If that is true, the absoluteness you feel when you love is not an illusion; it is a homecoming."

Lewis on the four loves

"Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness... There are two kinds of love: we love wise and kind and beautiful people because we need them, but we love quite stupid or even exasperating people because they need us. In one way, of course, God is not 'in need' of anything... But our Lord seems to ask us to love at both these levels, both because His goodness draws our love, and because we are loved." , The Four Loves (1960)

Augustine on the Trinity of love

"When I, who am making this inquiry, love anything, there are three things involved: I myself, what I love, and love itself. For I do not love love unless I love a lover; for there is no love where nothing is loved. Therefore there are three: the lover, and what is loved, and love." , De Trinitate IX.2 (c. 417)

Connection to Scripture

• 1 John 4:7-8, "God is love"
• 1 John 4:16, "God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God"
• John 3:16, "for God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son"
• John 15:13, "greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends"
• Romans 5:8, "but God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us"
• 1 Corinthians 13, the love chapter, the form of agape
• John 17:24-26, the Father's love for the Son before the foundation of the world
• Ephesians 5:25-32, marriage as image of Christ and the Church
• Song of Solomon, the canonical poetry of human love and its theological echoes
• Hosea 11:1-9, God's covenant love that will not let Israel go
• Deuteronomy 6:5, "you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart"
• Matthew 22:37-40, the two great commandments as the form of the law

Patristic / scholarly note

Classical / patristic / medieval:

• Augustine (De Trinitate, 400-417, esp. Books VIII-IX), the classical exposition of God-as-love-Trinitarian
• Bernard of Clairvaux (On Loving God, c. 1126), the four-stage ascent of love
• Bonaventure (The Soul's Journey into God, 1259), love as the highest mode of knowing
• Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I-II qq. 26-28), the analysis of amor, dilectio, and caritas

Modern:

• Blaise Pascal (Pensées, 1670, §423: "the heart has its reasons")
• Søren Kierkegaard (Works of Love, 1847), love as commanded act, not feeling
• John Henry Newman (Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. V, on love)
• Anders Nygren (Agape and Eros, 1932-1939), the influential (and contested) Lutheran taxonomy
• C S Lewis (The Four Loves, 1960; A Grief Observed, 1961)
• Dietrich von Hildebrand (The Nature of Love, 1971), Catholic phenomenology of love
• Jean-Luc Marion (Prolegomena to Charity, 2002), gift and the saturated phenomenon
• Benedict XVI (Deus Caritas Est, encyclical, 2005), the eros-becoming-agape arc
• N.T. Wright (Simply Christian, 2006, ch. 3), love as one of the four "echoes of a voice"
• Tim Keller (The Meaning of Marriage, 2011), the apologetic and pastoral integration

Critics / alternative accounts:

• Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, 1976), kin-selection deflation
• William Hamilton (inclusive fitness, 1964), the technical evolutionary account
• Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil, 1886), love as will-to-power in disguise
• Sigmund Freud (Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930), love as sublimated libido
• Buddhist tradition, attachment-love as cause of suffering, to be transcended in karuna (compassion) without clinging

Inference rules used

• Phenomenological description, reading the form of love-as-experienced
• Inference to the Best Explanation, the Trinitarian-personal God as the best fit for the form of love
• Argument from explanatory scope, accounts that explain more of the data (cross-cultural patterns, non-kin gratuity, the cross-cultural depth of grief) outrank narrower accounts

See also

• Argument from Desire, sister existential argument from longing; love and longing are paired clues
• Argument from Religious Experience, the experiential dimension of encounter with God
• Argument from Conscience, sister phenomenological argument from moral experience; same personal-source pattern
• Moral Argument, parallel absolute-claim grounding
• Argument from Beauty, gift-character parallel; beauty and love share the saturated-phenomenon structure
• Argument from Purpose Meaning and Hope, existential-fit case in the same family
• Pragmatic Argument, Pascal's "the heart has its reasons" connects to the love-as-knowledge tradition
• Christian God is the Only True God, the comparative case; Trinitarian fit is load-bearing there too
• Augustine (entity; De Trinitate)
• C S Lewis (entity; The Four Loves)
• Tim Keller (entity)
• N.T. Wright (entity)
• Blaise Pascal (entity)
• Arguments, master index