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WillowOne's Positions

Argument from Beauty

Form

As stated by Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga ("the argument from the beauty of Mozart"), and in Catholic apologetics after Hans Urs von Balthasar:

  1. The world contains beauty: sunsets, the night sky, the structure of a cell, the Goldberg Variations, the proof of Euler's identity. And we have the capacity to perceive it and to be moved by it.
  2. Beauty has no survival value, and neither does the capacity to be moved by it; naturalism does not predict either.
  3. Theism predicts both: a good creator would make a beautiful world and creatures able to enjoy it.
  4. Therefore beauty is evidence for God.

My Positions

  1. Beauty is a response, not a property of the world. It is what certain patterns do to brains like ours. The evidence is that it varies with the brain: the peahen finds the peacock beautiful and I find him gaudy; tastes differ between cultures, eras, and individuals; and the things humans reliably find beautiful track things that mattered to human survival. Symmetrical faces signal health. Landscapes with water, shelter, and a view are the ones our ancestors did well in. Music works by setting up expectations and resolving them, which is a pattern-detecting brain being rewarded for detecting a pattern. "Beauty" is the name for that reward.
  2. Premise 2 is false. Aesthetic responses are adaptive, or by-products of adaptive capacities. Charles Darwin devoted half of The Descent of Man (1871) to sexual selection, which is the evolution of beauty and the taste for it, by a process with no designer. The argument treats the question as open when it has had an answer for a hundred and fifty years (Teleological Argument - Argument from Design).
  3. The data are cherry-picked. The world also contains the guinea worm, the tumour, the smell of a corpse, and the sound of a child in pain. If beauty is evidence of a good maker, ugliness is evidence of a bad one, and the argument has to be weighed against the problem of ugliness exactly as the Fine-Tuning Argument has to be weighed against the hostility of almost all of the universe (Cherry-picking, Problem of evil). The apologist counts the sunsets and not the parasites.
  4. Mathematical beauty tracks simplicity, which is a tool of thought. We call a proof beautiful when it is economical and surprising, and economy is a property of representations, not of the world. Physicists have begun to warn each other against trusting it (Sabine Hossenfelder's Lost in Math, 2018).
  5. Even granted a designer with taste, it is not the God of any scripture. The Bible has no aesthetics and the Qur'an forbids images. The argument's conclusion is a deity who likes Bach, which is Deism with a record collection.
  6. I keep the beauty and decline the explanation. The awe is real and worth having (Spirituality). That I am moved by the night sky tells me about me. It tells me nothing about who made the sky, and the sky's beauty does not depend on the answer.

Sources

  • Swinburne, R., The Existence of God (2nd ed., 2004), on the beauty of the universe as part of the argument from providence
  • Plantinga, A., "Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments", in Walls and Dougherty (eds), Two Dozen (or so) Arguments for God (2018)
  • Darwin, C., The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871)
  • Dutton, D., The Art Instinct (2009)
  • Huron, D., Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (2006)
  • Orians, G. H. and Heerwagen, J. H., "Evolved responses to landscapes", in Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby (eds), The Adapted Mind (1992)
  • Hossenfelder, S., Lost in Math (2018)

Also see