The argument from beauty

An argument for God that I never understood was the argument from beauty. Basically: something is beautiful, therefore there is a God. It was recently expressed in the song Heaven, by Live:

I don’t need no one to tell me about heaven
I look at my daughter, and I believe.
I don’t need no proof when it comes to God and truth
I can see the sunset and I perceive

Something is described as beautiful, or awe inspiring, or hard to comprehend, and therefore there must be a God. When I hear that I always wonder, is it really impossible for you to love your daughter if there is no God? Is it inconcievable to you that there could be something beautiful in a natural world?

This argument is never taught in philosophy classes and isn’t a formal proof of God since it obviously can’t hold up. But I bet it is offered as a reason to believe much more than many formal arguments. I suspect that no one outside of a philosophy department has ever been convinced by the ontological argument, but millions are convinced simply because things are beautiful.

Of course there are things that give us a sense of awe or make us feel small and insignifant. That is what you would expect if the world wasn’t created just for us. The believer wants to call that feeling “God”. Why can’t we just call it awe and not give it supernatural overtones? People also have a feeling of moral order, and they call that “God” too. They wonder at the source of the world and call that “God”. By choosing the same name for these feelings, it suggests that they all have the same cause. Even if we did need some explanation for beauty, is there any reason to believe that it is the same as the explanation for morality or for creation?

In fact, religion is anemic when it comes to a sense of wonder. Our religions all suffer from a lack of imagination in light of the scientific world view. They are all focused on a small corner of earth in a brief moment of time. Science has now shown us that the universe is over 13 billion years old and is unimaginably huge. We are the tinest speck living in a blink of an eye. That is truly awe-inspiring. All of our religions are too small for that world.

It’s not that most religions directly contradict this view. Unless you take the Bible cosmology of a flat earth with a fixed dome over it literally, the Bible does not rule out the vastness of space, and most religions accept the age of the universe. But even when they accept it, they have nothing to say about it. The best they can say is that “Sure, the universe is big, but back to what happened in a tiny corner of the earth 2000 years ago…” It’s like describing a small fern as an accurate description of a rain forest.

Science gives us a true picture of wonder and awe. Religion just calls a sense of wonder “God” and does nothing more. The existence of beauty or order is not evidence for God. I love my daughter without any help from God.

Tags: evidence for God