Argument from beauty
Encyclopedia
The argument from beauty is an argument
for the existence of God
as against materialism
.
Points 2, 3 and 4 are relatively un-controversial, so discussion focuses on the premise (1).
advocates a variation of this argument:
Here it is not so much the (alleged) transcendent existence of beauty that is in evidence, as the overall level of beauty, and premise (1) is replaced by:
1. There are compelling reasons for considering the level of beauty in the universe to be greater than that would be expected under materialism.
The difficulty with this variation of the argument is that it depends on an essentially subjective assessment of whether the overall level of beauty in the universe is greater than might be expected if God (or gods) did not exist.
. It is possible to be an atheist without being a materialist. According to Midgley
"Atheistic Idealism like Hume
's is a perfectly possible option, and may be a more coherent one. At the end of the 19th century many serious sceptics thought it a clearer choice (Russell
's liflelong ambivalence is quite interesting here)" The classic view of Christian Neo-Platonists was that God is the perfection of the Idea
/Form of the Good that included a perfection of Beauty, and that if an Idealist was philosophically committed to the existence of the Form of Beauty it was reasonable for them to accept the existence of the perfection of that Form in God. Keith Ward
suggests that materialism
is quite rare amongst contemporary UK philosophers "Looking around my philosopher colleagues in Britain, virtually all of whom I know at least from their published work, I would say that very few of them are materialists"
. He pointed out that “the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it.” In applying mathematics to understand the natural world, scientists often employ aesthetic criteria that seem far removed from science. Einstein once said that “the only physical theories that we are willing to accept are the beautiful ones.” Of course, scientists realize that beauty can sometimes be misleading. Thomas Huxley
wrote that “Science is organized common sense, where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.” Beauty seems to be a necessary prerequisite for physical truth, but it is not identical to truth.
When framing hypotheses, scientists use beauty and elegance as winnowing fans. The more beautiful a theory, the more likely is it to be true. Interestingly, the more rarified the study such as higher forms of mathematics and quantum physics, the more likely is beauty found to be a reliable guide. The famous mathematical physicist Hermann Weyl
said with evident amusement, “My work has always tried to unite the true with the beautiful and when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.” . The quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg
wrote to Einstein, “You may object that by speaking of simplicity and beauty I am introducing aesthetic criteria of truth, and I frankly admit that I am strongly attracted by the simplicity and beauty of the mathematical schemes which nature presents us.” .
Unquestionably many aspects of mathematics are arbitrary and obviously invented by humans, but many other deep relationships seem independent of culture and as true to a space alien as to us on earth. The human sense of beauty may well have evolved along with the human brain as the result of eons of exposure to nature - as can be demonstrated through the human attempt to measure and explain the recurrence of patterns, such as the golden ratio, throughout nature . Perhaps that is all there is to the mystery of beauty in science. Why, however, does beauty become all the more important the more remote the science is from human experience. If the sense of beauty is some type of epiphenomenon of the human brain’s interaction with perceived nature, one would expect a divergence between the sense of beauty and realms of science and mathematics far distant and even contrary to everyday experience. So far that has not been the case.
, a freethought
writer of the early 20th century, questioned the argument in The Existence of God, when he asked whether God also created parasitic microbes. However, that criticism ignores the Taoist concept of polarity, i.e. that without darkness, there can be no perception of light, and similarly there could be no concept of beauty without contrasting ugliness.
Bertrand Russell
had no trouble seeing beauty in mathematics. In the Study of Mathematics, he wrote: "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.". However, he often failed to see beauty in lesser creations. He stated that he was "unable to see any great beauty or harmony in the tapeworm." H. L. Mencken
stated that humans have created things of greater beauty when he wrote, "I also pass over the relatively crude contrivances of this Creator in the aesthetic field, wherein He has been far surpassed by man, as, for example, for adroitness of design, for complexity or for beauty, the sounds of an orchestra."
Argument
In philosophy and logic, an argument is an attempt to persuade someone of something, or give evidence or reasons for accepting a particular conclusion.Argument may also refer to:-Mathematics and computer science:...
for the existence of God
Existence of God
Arguments for and against the existence of God have been proposed by philosophers, theologians, scientists, and others. In philosophical terms, arguments for and against the existence of God involve primarily the sub-disciplines of epistemology and ontology , but also of the theory of value, since...
as against materialism
Materialism
In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...
.
Outline logical structure
Its logical structure is essentially as follows:- There are compelling reasons for considering beauty to exist in a way that transcends its material manifestations.
- According to materialism, nothing exists in a way that transcends its material manifestations.
- According to classical theism, beauty is a quality of God and therefore exists in a way that transcends its material manifestations.
- Therefore, to the extent that premise (1) is accepted, theism is more plausible than materialism.
Points 2, 3 and 4 are relatively un-controversial, so discussion focuses on the premise (1).
Suggested reasons for accepting the premise
The principal arguments for the premise are:- We have a strong intuition, especially when in the presence of great art or extreme natural or human beauty, that the beauty is real and transcends its material manifestations. Although such intuitions are not always correct, they are strong enough prima facie evidence that very compelling arguments to the contrary would be needed to cancel them out.
- Creative artists generally experience their efforts to create great art/literature/music in terms that assume the objective existence of beauty, albeit mediated by their subjective experience.
- Although one can make plausible evolutionary explanations for finding beauty in potential sexual partners and in healthy animals that might be food or predators, the experience of beauty is much wider than these categories and includes visions of things for which there can be no direct evolutionary advantage (like clouds seen from aeroplanes, or images from telescopes).
- Scientists, especially physicists, have found that mathematical beauty is a very useful guide to a valid theory.
- It is very difficult to speak of beauty in a coherent way without assuming its objective existence, albeit mediated by highly subjective and cultural factors.
Suggested reasons for disputing the premise
- Our intuitions may be mistaken.
- Creative artists may be mistaken or culturally conditioned.
- Given that important brain circuits have evolved for detecting beauty in potential sexual partners, food or prey, they may be "misfiring" to detect beauty in other places. The evolution of the brain may create this impression as a byproduct of its main function.
- Ordinary language is not always a reliable guide to objective reality.
- Beauty does not actually exist in the observed object or scene. Instead the sense of beauty exists within the observer, as does the sense of "transcendent" beauty.
Richard Swinburne
Richard SwinburneRichard Swinburne
Richard G. Swinburne is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Over the last 50 years Swinburne has been a very influential proponent of philosophical arguments for the existence of God. His philosophical contributions are primarily in philosophy of religion and...
advocates a variation of this argument:
"God has reason to make a basically beautiful world, although also reason to leave some of the beauty or ugliness of the world within the power of creatures to determine; but he would seem to have overriding reason not to make a basically ugly world beyond the powers of creatures to improve. Hence, if there is a God there is more reason to expect a basically beautiful world than a basically ugly one. A priori, however, there is no particular reason for expecting a basically beautiful rather than a basically ugly world. In consequence, if the world is beautiful, that fact would be evidence for God's existence. For, in this case, if we let k be ‘there is an orderly physical universe’, e be ‘there is a beautiful universe’, and h be ‘there is a God’, P(e/h.k) will be greater than P(e/k)... Few, however, would deny that our universe (apart from its animal and human inhabitants, and aspects subject to their immediate control) has that beauty. Poets and painters and ordinary men down the centuries have long admired the beauty of the orderly procession of the heavenly bodies, the scattering of the galaxies through the heavens (in some ways random, in some ways orderly), and the rocks, sea, and wind interacting on earth, ‘The spacious firmament on high, and all the blue ethereal sky’, the water lapping against ‘the old eternal rocks’, and the plants of the jungle and of temperate climates, contrasting with the desert and the Arctic wastes. Who in his senses would deny that here is beauty in abundance? If we confine ourselves to the argument from the beauty of the inanimate and plant worlds, the argument surely works."
Here it is not so much the (alleged) transcendent existence of beauty that is in evidence, as the overall level of beauty, and premise (1) is replaced by:
1. There are compelling reasons for considering the level of beauty in the universe to be greater than that would be expected under materialism.
The difficulty with this variation of the argument is that it depends on an essentially subjective assessment of whether the overall level of beauty in the universe is greater than might be expected if God (or gods) did not exist.
Idealism
The argument as stated is for theism against materialismMaterialism
In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...
. It is possible to be an atheist without being a materialist. According to Midgley
Mary Midgley
Mary Midgley, née Scrutton , is an English moral philosopher. She was a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Newcastle University and is known for her work on science, ethics and animal rights. She wrote her first book, Beast And Man: The Roots of Human Nature , when she was in her fifties...
"Atheistic Idealism like Hume
David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
's is a perfectly possible option, and may be a more coherent one. At the end of the 19th century many serious sceptics thought it a clearer choice (Russell
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
's liflelong ambivalence is quite interesting here)" The classic view of Christian Neo-Platonists was that God is the perfection of the Idea
Idea
In the most narrow sense, an idea is just whatever is before the mind when one thinks. Very often, ideas are construed as representational images; i.e. images of some object. In other contexts, ideas are taken to be concepts, although abstract concepts do not necessarily appear as images...
/Form of the Good that included a perfection of Beauty, and that if an Idealist was philosophically committed to the existence of the Form of Beauty it was reasonable for them to accept the existence of the perfection of that Form in God. Keith Ward
Keith Ward
Keith Ward is a British cleric, philosopher, theologian and scholar. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and an ordained priest of the Church of England. He was a canon of Christ Church, Oxford until 2003...
suggests that materialism
Materialism
In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...
is quite rare amongst contemporary UK philosophers "Looking around my philosopher colleagues in Britain, virtually all of whom I know at least from their published work, I would say that very few of them are materialists"
Truth, Beauty and Science
There is a related question that bears on this argument. Scientists and philosophers often marvel at the surprising congruence of nature and mathematics. In 1960 the Nobel Prize winning physicist and mathematician Eugene Wigner wrote an article entitled The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural SciencesThe Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences is the title of an article published in 1960 by the physicist Eugene Wigner...
. He pointed out that “the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it.” In applying mathematics to understand the natural world, scientists often employ aesthetic criteria that seem far removed from science. Einstein once said that “the only physical theories that we are willing to accept are the beautiful ones.” Of course, scientists realize that beauty can sometimes be misleading. Thomas Huxley
Thomas Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley PC FRS was an English biologist, known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution....
wrote that “Science is organized common sense, where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.” Beauty seems to be a necessary prerequisite for physical truth, but it is not identical to truth.
When framing hypotheses, scientists use beauty and elegance as winnowing fans. The more beautiful a theory, the more likely is it to be true. Interestingly, the more rarified the study such as higher forms of mathematics and quantum physics, the more likely is beauty found to be a reliable guide. The famous mathematical physicist Hermann Weyl
Hermann Weyl
Hermann Klaus Hugo Weyl was a German mathematician and theoretical physicist. Although much of his working life was spent in Zürich, Switzerland and then Princeton, he is associated with the University of Göttingen tradition of mathematics, represented by David Hilbert and Hermann Minkowski.His...
said with evident amusement, “My work has always tried to unite the true with the beautiful and when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.” . The quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
Werner Karl Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist who made foundational contributions to quantum mechanics and is best known for asserting the uncertainty principle of quantum theory...
wrote to Einstein, “You may object that by speaking of simplicity and beauty I am introducing aesthetic criteria of truth, and I frankly admit that I am strongly attracted by the simplicity and beauty of the mathematical schemes which nature presents us.” .
Unquestionably many aspects of mathematics are arbitrary and obviously invented by humans, but many other deep relationships seem independent of culture and as true to a space alien as to us on earth. The human sense of beauty may well have evolved along with the human brain as the result of eons of exposure to nature - as can be demonstrated through the human attempt to measure and explain the recurrence of patterns, such as the golden ratio, throughout nature . Perhaps that is all there is to the mystery of beauty in science. Why, however, does beauty become all the more important the more remote the science is from human experience. If the sense of beauty is some type of epiphenomenon of the human brain’s interaction with perceived nature, one would expect a divergence between the sense of beauty and realms of science and mathematics far distant and even contrary to everyday experience. So far that has not been the case.
Criticisms
The argument implies beauty is something immaterial instead of being a subjective neurological response to stimuli. Some may say that the argument fails to consider the enhanced beauty perception people can have under the influence of some drugs, but they are under the misapprehension that drugs work by adding something, but instead they actually work by blocking normal neurological connections, so this is actually an addition to the argument from beauty, rather than a criticism. Critics have labeled the variant of Argument based on the level of beauty (as per Swinburne above) as a seeing the world in an overly optimistic fashion, incapable of seeing the ugliness as well as the beauty. Joseph McCabeJoseph McCabe
Joseph Martin McCabe was an English writer and speaker on freethought, after having been a Roman Catholic priest earlier in his life.-Early life:...
, a freethought
Freethought
Freethought is a philosophical viewpoint that holds that opinions should be formed on the basis of science, logic, and reason, and should not be influenced by authority, tradition, or other dogmas...
writer of the early 20th century, questioned the argument in The Existence of God, when he asked whether God also created parasitic microbes. However, that criticism ignores the Taoist concept of polarity, i.e. that without darkness, there can be no perception of light, and similarly there could be no concept of beauty without contrasting ugliness.
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
had no trouble seeing beauty in mathematics. In the Study of Mathematics, he wrote: "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.". However, he often failed to see beauty in lesser creations. He stated that he was "unable to see any great beauty or harmony in the tapeworm." H. L. Mencken
H. L. Mencken
Henry Louis "H. L." Mencken was an American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, acerbic critic of American life and culture, and a scholar of American English. Known as the "Sage of Baltimore", he is regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the...
stated that humans have created things of greater beauty when he wrote, "I also pass over the relatively crude contrivances of this Creator in the aesthetic field, wherein He has been far surpassed by man, as, for example, for adroitness of design, for complexity or for beauty, the sounds of an orchestra."
See also
- Argument from poor designArgument from poor designThe dysteleological argument or argument from poor design is an argument against the existence of God, specifically against the existence of a creator God...
- Human natureHuman natureHuman nature refers to the distinguishing characteristics, including ways of thinking, feeling and acting, that humans tend to have naturally....
- Hans Urs von BalthasarHans Urs von BalthasarHans Urs von Balthasar was a Swiss theologian and priest who was nominated to be a cardinal of the Catholic Church...
, who wrote extensively on beauty in a theological and philosophical context
Further reading
- John PolkinghorneJohn PolkinghorneJohn Charlton Polkinghorne KBE FRS is an English theoretical physicist, theologian, writer, and Anglican priest. He was professor of Mathematical physics at the University of Cambridge from 1968 to 1979, when he resigned his chair to study for the priesthood, becoming an ordained Anglican priest...
, Faith, Science and Understanding p14 - Tom Wright, Simply Christian SPCK 2006, Ch 4 "For the beauty of the earth"
- Richard DawkinsRichard DawkinsClinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL , known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author...
, The God DelusionThe God DelusionThe God Delusion is a 2006 bestselling non-fiction book by British biologist Richard Dawkins, professorial fellow of New College, Oxford, and inaugural holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford.In The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that... - Richard SwinburneRichard SwinburneRichard G. Swinburne is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Over the last 50 years Swinburne has been a very influential proponent of philosophical arguments for the existence of God. His philosophical contributions are primarily in philosophy of religion and...
, The Existence of God, OUP, 2nd Edition, 2004, ISBN 0199271682