A high school student asks:
Despite its flaws, I find humanity beautiful. Sometimes I am so moved by the world around me that I think there must be a God.
But isn’t this just a feeling? I may find something beautiful that someone else does not. Can we expect everyone to share the same sense of beauty? Also, couldn’t the reason we find some things in the world beautiful be explained by natural selection? We find symmetry and order beautiful, which are characteristic of health. We find splotches and unevenness ugly, which are often characteristic of disease. This could apply to sounds, smells, and feelings too. Isn’t it possible that we are biologically wired to see things as beautiful rather than it being an innate trait of creation? Furthermore, the same way we might point to what is beautiful in the world as evidence of God’s existence, couldn’t someone just as easily point to what is ugly, disgusting, and evil as evidence that He doesn’t?
To me it seems that the Argument from Beauty may establish a shared intuition that God is real, but not that He is real. I’m interested in hearing your thoughts. Thank you!
Reply:
Sure, one might try to explain beauty away, but the question is whether these ways of explaining it away succeed. I don’t think they do. Let’s consider your points in turn.
As to disagreement. Of course you may find something beautiful that someone else doesn’t, but mere disagreement doesn’t establish that a perception has no basis in reality. We disagree about all sorts of real objective matters. For that matter, our agreement about the basics of the beautiful is much more impressive than our disagreement about the details. If an art critic claims to find it beautiful that a crucifix is drowned in a jar of urine, or that a painting of the Virgin is smeared with elephant dung, then I would say that he is either mistaken – or else that he is using empty words about beauty to pretend that the pleasure he takes in degradation is just “a different aesthetic.”
As to natural selection. Certainly there may be an adaptive advantage in, say, a simple preference for symmetry in faces. But it is hard to see how it helps to pass on my genes that I am moved by passages of great music, sometimes to awe, sometimes to sorrow, sometimes to joy or to pity.
As to our “wiring.” The opposition of the wired and the created is a false alternative. Since God made us embodied beings, of course our sense of the beautiful has something to do with how we are wired. Your argument is a little like saying “Because my brain has an optical cortex, I am only seeing what I my cortex makes me see, and it isn’t really there.”
As to the ugly, disgusting, and bad. Sure, one might point to evil as evidence that God does not exist, but not, as you suggest, just as easily. Good is staggering. Evil is disturbing, but derivative. Except as a defect in what would otherwise be good, evil can’t even exist. The only way to get something bad is to take something good and ruin it.
Let me go a little further. God doesn’t create evil, but He may have many reasons for permitting it. For example, moral evil comes from abuse of free will, and it’s certainly true that abuse of free will could have been prevented by not giving us free will in the first place. But would the universe really be better without beings capable of freedom? In that case, whatever there were instead of human beings wouldn’t bear His image, but would be merely like divine robots or very clever beasts. Among other things, they would have been incapable of love, because love is something chosen -- a deliberate commitment to the true good of another, a free exultation in the other’s existence. Notice too that a world without even the possibility of evil would be a world without the beauty of courage. Are you so sure that would that be a good trade?
Naturally such explanations don’t answer all our questions. If my father ran off with his secretary when I was young, if I am suffering a painful disease, or if my friend told lies about me, then I want more than a blackboard demonstration of God’s goodness. Like Job, I want to whether God is paying attention. But God has left us in no doubt that He is paying attention. He has shown us what He thinks of our suffering, because on the Cross, He took the worst of it upon Himself for our sake.
How astonishing -- and beautiful. I think I can trust a God like that.