Friday, April 14, 2017

Clue from Aesthetics / Beauty

How would you go about talking about the existence of God from our recognition of aesthetics or beauty?  This "Argument from Beauty" is found in Appendix 1 of Course 101 chapter 1, but I am not sure how to really make a case for the existence of God based on something as subjective as the experience of aesthetics.

1 comment:

Daniel Kim said...

when it comes down to the argument from beauty, there are 2 large categories. One being a recognition of beauty in moral behavior, and the other being the recognition of beauty in nature.

When it comes to recognition of beauty in moral behavior, the topic overlaps with moral objectivity, so I won't belabor the point here. But one thing deserves to be said: that the flipside of beauty is horror. They go hand-in-hand.. When someone says recognition of beauty is just a subjective / internal reality, therefore, it does not give any clues to how the universe ACTUALLY is, because it has nothing to really do with the external reality. When they say that, they often don’t realize that that also means that their recognition of HORROR, even of moral horror, is then just an internal reality that has nothing to do with the property of the object or that action. There is much more to be said about that, but just wanted to mention that, because often in the liberal scholar’s attempt to deconstruct aesthetics, they forget that they are also undercutting our outrage at horrific things. It’s much easier to downplay our recognition to beauty than to downplay our recognition of horror.

Now, for the second category of physical aesthetics, then I would take a different approach, which is to point out that we seem to have an EXPECTATION that things in this universe ought to be aesthetically pleasing. There is much to be said about the mysterious effect of beautiful music and natural beauty's ability to bring out a longing for transcendence. (When we see a sunset, we are not just seeing colors, as CS Lewis said. We are reaching beyond those colors and seeing transcendence, betrayed by our sighs of yearning at such a sight). I think that longing/desire is a very powerful clue, however, I would like to point out a more technical circumstance... which is in the nerdy area of physics.

This expectation of aesthetics comes out in our endeavor to study the universe. For example, if a formula that describes the movement of an object – if it is a messy-looking thing that takes a whole chalkboard, physicists get an intuitive feeling that that’s not right.. that they must work at it more until they get to an “aesthetically” beautiful solution. And instinct turns out to be right. They work on it, and they DO get a simpler, a more beautiful solution. This is quite odd, if you think about it. There is an expectation that the universe ought to have been organized under aesthetically pleasing laws.

For example, imagine that you are taking a math midterm, and the solution that you arrive at is this really really messy formula or something that looks random. You instinctively know that that’s probably not the right answer.. why? Because you know that the professor who designed this test is a reasonable person, and would not have such a RANDOM answer on his/her test, so you try again until you get a more aesthetically pleasing answer (if this is new to you, then I have just given you an awesome clue to how to improve your midterm scores.)

This is what is happening when we study the universe. There seems to be an instinctive expectation that we have – that the universe is not simply a random, messy thing. We expect that universe to be rationally organized, and that we expect the universe to be beautifully and aesthetically organized. What does that expectation mean? As Einstein said, the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it’s comprehensible.