The reformulated argument needs two things to be actually, empirically true: that God exists, and that love has been revealed in a specific way. This study works through both.
The first discovery: a God of a particular kind
Sijuwade draws on Richard Swinburne's wider body of natural theology for this claim, so it is worth being clear about what "God" means here before asking whether such a being exists. God is defined as an essentially, everlastingly omnipotent person — one who exists at every moment of unending time, is not caused to exist by anything else, and has the power to intentionally perform any logically possible action. Because such a being would also know the nature of every action available to it (omniscience) and would be free from any irrational compulsion (perfect freedom), it follows that this being would also be perfectly good — always choosing the best available action, wherever there is one.
The case for such a being's existence is cumulative rather than a single knock-down proof: a complex universe that conforms to simple, elegant natural laws; laws fine-tuned enough to produce human bodies; human bodies that are the seat of conscious, morally aware persons; and, among such persons, widespread claims of direct religious experience. None of these observations proves God's existence in isolation, but weighed together they form the kind of evidence natural theology has argued from for centuries — evaluated formally, Swinburne argues, using the machinery of probability theory. The details of that case belong to natural theology proper; what matters here is that this is an empirical claim, resting on features of the observed universe, not a premise assumed without argument.
The second discovery: love revealed as agapē
The second empirical claim is theological rather than natural-theological: that the Christian Scriptures reveal love — agapē — as having two specific features that most casual talk about "love" misses entirely.
Love as a duty, not a feeling
The New Testament's ethics centers on a specific, binding duty: every person is commanded to love (John 13:34–35; Romans 13:8–13). This is worth pausing on, because it cuts against a common modern assumption — that love is fundamentally a feeling, something that either arises in you or doesn't. Scripture's picture is different, for three converging reasons:
- Feelings are not under direct volitional control, but a duty is something you can be commanded to fulfill.
- Feelings are transitory and often absent under distress — yet the New Testament locates love's clearest expression precisely in extreme distress, at the cross itself (Mark 15:34).
- Feelings do not necessarily issue in action, but agapē is not something merely felt and then, perhaps, acted on — the New Testament simply takes it for granted that love acts, that it "is sufficient, in and of itself" once truly present.
So agapē is best understood as a determination of the will in favor of the beloved — not a disposition you happen to have, but a choice you continually make, expressed in three interlocking aspects: appreciation of the beloved for who they are, benevolence — willing their good for their own sake, and a striving for union with them, both a "formal" union of mind and will (the beloved held in your understanding, their good treated as your own) and, wherever possible, a "real," externally expressed union that consummates the relationship.
Love as one thing wearing many forms
The second feature is that Scripture does not treat "types" of love as fundamentally different phenomena that happen to share a word. Spousal love (Ephesians 5:25), the affection between friends, and even a misplaced fondness for status (Luke 11:43) are all called agapē. Theologically, the love humanity owes to God and neighbor (Matthew 5:44) and the love God has for humanity (John 3:16) are named with the same word. Agapē, in other words, is multi-formed: one underlying reality — appreciation, benevolence, striving for union — that takes different shapes (self-love, romantic love, familial love, love of friends) depending on who is being loved and what kind of union is fitting between them.
Putting the two discoveries together
Once these two empirical claims are granted — that there is a God of this specific kind, and that love has been revealed with these two features — we have exactly the contingent, checkable premise the argument in the previous study needed. We are not assuming, on intuition, that perfect love must be mutual and unselfish. We are working from a documented revelation of what love actually, structurally is: a duty-bound determination of the will, unified across all its forms, aimed at appreciation, benevolence, and union.
What remains is the a priori half of the argument: given a being of this kind, bound to a love of this kind, what does it necessarily follow that such a being would do? That is the subject of the final study — and it is where the argument actually arrives at three divine persons, and explains why the number stops there.
Why it matters
The claim that love is a duty rather than a feeling is not just philosophical scaffolding — it is pastorally significant on its own. A great deal of quiet guilt in Christian life comes from mistaking the absence of a warm feeling for the absence of love itself. If Scripture's own picture of agapē is right, love that shows up as faithful action in a cold or difficult season is not a lesser love waiting for the feeling to return — it may be agapē in its clearest, most costly form, the same form the New Testament locates at the cross.