Evidence of a Beautiful Mind

Beauty is hard to explain on the basis of naturalism.

Sunrise over Hawaii by Miriam Higgs

Everyone recognizes beauty. That is undeniable. Everyone recognizes beauty in nature. Nature is virtually saturated in beauty from mountain peaks, to ocean shores, to barren Antarctica and the desert landscapes, to the starry host and the living cell. We recognize beauty in things we see, in things we hear, words that are spoken and in the personalities of exceptional people.

We see beauty in human art, and that beauty is usually produced by effort and design. The beauty in art is rarely produced unintentionally. Art, itself, is an intentional activity. If “art imitates nature” (Aristotle), then our proclivity toward art suggests that nature is also the product of intentionality.

Just as human art reveals something of the personality and character of the artist, nature reveals something of the personality and character of its Creator.

Beauty has a certain objectivity to it. While people disagree may differ on whether certain things are beautiful, no one denies that beauty exists and that some things are beautiful. Further, there are some things that nearly all people agree are beautiful.

If beauty wasn’t, to some degree, objective it could not be taught by experts in universities. The study of beauty includes principles of symmetry and asymmetry, color palate, texture and many other things that these experts agree make good art. A principle that is not the least important is the meaning behind the art, not just for the artist, but for the viewer of the art.

Virtually no one disagrees that these are objective truths, self-evident in quality and character. The fact that people will disagree over what is beauty, or what is most beautiful, doesn’t negate the universality of the idea of beauty – beauty does exist, we can recognize it and we can replicate it.

Beauty is hard to explain on the basis of naturalism. What sort of function does beauty supply? And why does it persist? The more advanced human civilization becomes, the more we insist that beauty be incorporated into our world, the more we desire it and the more we seek to make things beautiful. The best explanation for the source of beauty is a Beautiful Mind of which we are but images.

Reflections on the Influence of Stephen Hawking

Lets all go to Mars, sculpture by Stephen Hawking (Depositphotos Photography ID: 169212920 Copyright: irisphoto11 Editorial use only)

Stephen Hawking recently passed away after living a remarkably full life in spite of being stricken by Lou Gehrig’s Disease at an early age. He was one of the most influential people of his time, not because of his condition, but because of his mind. He was brilliant and pioneered new understandings of the universe through applied mathematics in the field of cosmology.

Hawking is a voice that people listened to, not only in science, but in the application of science to such things as philosophy and the origin of the universe. Hawking may have toyed once with the idea of God, but he became an atheist. He chose, as have many a modern scientist has chosen since the 19th century, to view the world without reference to God.

In this article, I explore some comments made by Hawking’s colleague, John Lennox, who begins a recent interview by extolling the brilliance of Stephen Hawking and his scientific achievements. The subject is the existence of God. I also introduce two very young geniuses who have different takes on the subject of God.

The subtext of the article is this: when Hawking went beyond the science that he knew so well, and entered into the arena of philosophy, he stumbled. Hawking, the great scientist and intellect, wasn’t a philosopher, though he sought to wield his influence in that direction. John Lennox quoting Martin Rees, a cosmologist, astrophysicist and 40-year colleague of Stephen Hawking, points out in the segment of the interview that follows that Hawking is not well read in the areas of philosophy and theology:

This unfamiliarity with sophisticated philosophy and theology led Hawking to make some very unsophisticated statements. For instance, his pronouncement that “philosophy is dead” is at best ironic. The statement, itself, is a philosophical one which, if true, undermines the very assertion being made.

Without diminishing Stephen Hawkins’ contributions to science, we need to view his philosophical comments for what they are worth. Since Hawking was a such a giant in his own scientific fields with which he was intimately familiar, we tend to let statements, like the one above, go by unchallenged. The danger in that is to allow some questionable philosophy into our view of the world.

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Can We Be Certain of God’s Existence?

Doubt is the common experience of saints and sinners alike.

Depositphotos Image ID: 5872621 Copyright: ccaetano

Can we be certain of God s existence? The short answer is, no. If the question is whether we can have something like mathematical certainty or proof, we have to answer that question in the negative. There is no evidence, no proof or argument that can provide certainty that God exists for finite beings such as ourselves.

Such evidence, proof or argument would have to be built on premises that are 100% certain, and that kind of certainty is impossible for beings that are not all-knowing. The best we can do is to put forth evidence, proofs and arguments that suggest a probability that God exists – to show that the likelihood is more probable than not that God exists.

To this extent, doubt is the common experience of saints and sinners alike.

To put this another way: Can we be sure that God doesn’t exist? The only certainty is that we can’t be certain.

Many believers have doubts, and many nonbelievers have their own doubts.

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Rejecting the Right God

If anyone is going to reject God, they should at least be sure to reject the right God.

Depositphotos mage ID: 46970151 Copyright: JanMika

It occurs to me that the “new atheists” are rejecting the wrong God. They are famous for saying that they don’t believe in the Christian God any more than they believe Zeus or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It seems to me that, if someone is going to reject God, they ought to be rejecting the right one.

Not all gods are created equal. The Christian concept of God is not on a par with Zeus or a “flying spaghetti monster”, to say the very least. The same can be said of the Islamic view of God or any other major world religion. The concept and “proofs” of God are much more sophisticated than the weak understanding displayed in a comment that likens them to a flying spaghetti monster.

The ignorance of the new atheists about these things is rather shocking, though it shouldn’t be altogether surprising. They admit they find no use for such things as gods and, therefore, and most have spent no time studying or considering them. The ignorance is actually willful, then, and inexcusable.

I can’t do justice to the subject in a short blog, but I will try to summarize. The only serious contenders for consideration as God are the gods of the major world religions. They can’t all be true because they are incompatible with each other[1], so which one, if any of them, is the most likely candidate?

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On the Proposition of Looking for God

In the context of searching for God, if I can’t “find Him”, does that mean He doesn’t exist?

depositphotos Image ID: 6393928 Copyright: hilipus

If I can’t find something I am looking for, does that mean it doesn’t exist?


My inability to find something I’m looking for is not proof that the thing I am looking for doesn’t exist. Ask my wife. She will often describe an object to me and asked me to go retrieve it for her. I am reluctant to say how many times I have come back without what she sent me to retrieve. I might even be embarrassed to admit how many times I’ve wanted to tell her that the object doesn’t exist

How many times have we said to ourselves when looking for something, “It isn’t anywhere!”? Do we mean, literally, that the object isn’t anywhere? Not usually. Intellectually we know that it is somewhere, but we just can’t find it.

Maybe I am looking in the wrong place. If I’m looking for an object I’ve never seen before, maybe I have the wrong picture of the object in my mind and I am not looking for the right thing. Maybe the object isn’t where I thought it was. Maybe the object is hidden and needs to be uncovered.

These examples are allegorical when it comes to the idea of searching for God.

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How Do We Know God is a Personal Being?

Science, the study of physical world, can’t explain the cause of the universe based on initial conditions and natural laws because the universe, itself, is the first physical state.

Depositphotos Image ID: 146490813 Copyright: SergeyNivens



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Can Personal Experience be Proof of God?

For the writers of the books of the Bible, God was not an idea adopted by the mind, but an experienced reality which gave significance to their lives

Photo by Kallie Carlson

Dr. William Lane Craig is a Christian philosopher of the highest caliber.[i] He has multiple doctorate degrees and has taught at various colleges and universities. He is a prolific writer, and has debated nearly two dozen of the more outspoken atheists, agnostics and skeptical thinkers of the world on philosophical, theological and other issues.

In the short clip below, which is a segment from a longer interview on the various arguments (proofs) for the existence of God, he discusses an additional basis for knowing that God exists apart from rational bases for believing in God. This basis, or claim for the existence of God, is personal experience.

This is not an argument for the existence of God. It isn’t rational proof. Rather, it is more like a personal proof or confirmation of the existence of God apart from (not contrary to) reason. It isn’t a substitute for reason, but neither is reason a substitute for the experience.

The main ways that Dr. Craig (and most theists) usually discusses the proof of the existence of God is logic, scientific evidence and philosophy, but these aren’t the only proofs we have.

We might be apt in the western world to discount personal experience and to be suspicious of it, and for good reason. Charles Darwin was suspicious of his own intuition, being the product of evolution from lower life-forms.[ii] A good friend of his got lost in the morass of spiritualism, and that experience of seeing his friend get lost down the rabbit holes of irrational, spiritualistic notions influenced Darwin to distrust his own intuitions.

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