God is the best explanation for actual beauty
What is beautiful?
Certainly you can think of many things. Maybe you think visual beauty: something like the sun setting over the hills, a majestic snow-capped mountain range, a magnificent city skyline, your spouse or significant other. You may think of auditory beauty: Something like your favorite song or the sound of the gentle waves of the ocean rolling in at the beach. You may think of what I would call “active beauty,” like an act of self-sacrifice a parent makes for their child, or a husband’s love for his wife.
Not everyone will think of the same things. We don’t all agree on exactly what is beautiful, or on what makes something beautiful. You may look out at the vast ocean and see beauty, while I see a death trap of hurricanes, sharks, and drowning. I may look at the night sky and see beauty, while you may look at it and see a potential source of deadly asteroids, radiation, and black holes. Our perception of beauty differs from person to person. Yet no matter what we think beauty is, most of us agree that there is such a thing.
From this comes what I call the argument from beauty. It’s not as popular an argument as some of the rest I’ve presented. It certainly does not appear to be the favorite of most Christian philosophers, and for good reason, I think. It’s harder to defend than most other arguments for the existence of God. But I think it is worth considering.
The goodness of beauty points to the goodness of God
For the purposes of this post, beauty could be roughly defined as aesthetic goodness. In a previous post, I argued for God’s existence based on another kind of goodness: moral goodness. And I think there are many parallels between aesthetic goodness and moral goodness. We’ve seen how the existence of morality points to the existence of God, and I think the existence of beauty does so in a similar way.
Much like objective morality, if only the material world exists, then objective beauty does not exist. Beauty can’t be measured or detected with scientific instruments. It’s an immaterial concept. Beauty would just be a man-made idea invented to explain why we’re drawn and attracted to certain things. Any naturalist should agree with this. So here, we must take up the task of showing that objective beauty exists. Then we must show that God is the best explanation for its existence.
Beauty is not merely in the eye of the beholder
Many, of course, will offer explanations as to why we perceive things as beautiful. Some will say that it’s cultural conditioning. We see things as beautiful based on the culture we grew up in. Others will appeal to evolution. They’ll say that we see certain things as beautiful because they have survival value.
They would agree with our common saying, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” There isn’t really such a thing as beauty. Beauty is just a word we use to describe something we like to look at, listen to, or experience.
That’s what some people say. But outside of the philosophy departments and scientific laboratories, when we actually speak to one another face-to-face about beautiful things, that’s not usually what we mean. When we say of something, “That’s beautiful,” we aren’t usually trying to say, “I like to look at that thing.” We are usually trying to convey something more, something that goes beyond personal opinion.
Why saying “you are beautiful” is meaningful
There is an actual company based in Chicago that goes by the name You Are Beautiful. And the company’s focus is exactly what you’d guess: They sell merchandise, such as stickers, keychains, mirrors, etc., inscribed with the words “You Are Beautiful.” If beauty was simply a subjective personal opinion, this would be the equivalent of saying, “I like to look at you.” But obviously, this merchandise isn’t meant to convey that the people who run You Are Beautiful personally like to look at or be around all their customers.
Nor do they imply that most of the people around you find you beautiful–YAB couldn’t possibly know. Plus, if the statement “you are beautiful” is simply meant to reflect what other people think about you, it isn’t necessarily of any comfort at all. It would be like selling a bracelet that says “people like it when you sing.” Perhaps this isn’t true; perhaps in fact no one likes it when you sing. If that’s the case, then the merchandise would offer false encouragement, and you might end up one of those failed singers on the outtakes of American Idol.
Likewise, perhaps other people don’t find the wearer very attractive. If “you are beautiful” means “people like to look at you,” the merchandise would be conveying a false message. And even if it were true, the message would be rather shallow. Why sell merchandise that encourages you to base your self-worth on what other people think about you?
But that’s certainly not the message YAB intends to convey with its merchandise. Rather, it is meant to imply that beauty is not other people’s opinions about you, but a quality you possess. You possess this quality even if no one gives you a second glance, if no one finds you attractive enough to date you, even if no one is impressed with your musculature or would hire you as a model. In that vein, beauty is a quality like truth or goodness–something of which we have varying levels of knowledge and different perceptions, but which could be objectively assessed by one with the proper knowledge and perspective.
And most of us resonate with that message, because we have an innate sense that, although we may perceive beauty in a subjective way, beauty is itself objective.
There are certain things that are objectively beautiful…and objectively ugly
Indeed, the idea of beauty is nonsense if there isn’t some objectivity to it. You don’t need to be able to scientifically measure or quantify beauty for objective beauty to exist, just like you don’t need to be able to scientifically measure or quantify morality for objective morality to exist. We just have a universal, innate, inherent sense that beauty exists, and we even have some agreement on what sort of things possess it.
We recognize that there are certain things everyone ought to see as beautiful. For example, if you are at a wedding, and you point out to your friend the beauty of the love of the newlyweds, and he responded that it was ugly, you would sense there was something wrong with his perspective. Genuine, committed, mature romantic love is meant to be beautiful, and someone who doesn’t see it that way has a deficiency in their perspective.
So in this case, if you were to give it some thought, you’d probably consider one of two possibilities: One is that your friend has a deficient perspective and fails to see beauty where it exists. Maybe some event in his life distorted his perspective and blinded him to the beauty that exists. Maybe he had parents who divorced and tarnished their wedding vows, and he imagines the newlywed couple one day doing the same thing. Maybe he had a wife who made such vows to him and then committed adultery. Maybe he’s seen or been in physically or emotionally abusive relationships, and that’s what wedding vows bring to his mind.
Or the other possibility: Maybe you have a deficient perspective. Maybe your friend knows something you don’t. For example, perhaps he knows that the groom abused and cheated on his wife with the bride. If you knew what he knew, you would also likely see less beauty in the wedding. In either case, we have a sense that there are certain things we should find beautiful, and certain things we shouldn’t. If someone fails to see the beauty in genuine romantic love, we would probably say that they were missing something that’s actually there. They should see the beauty in it, but if there is a deficiency in their perspective–perhaps caused by a wound or lack of experience–they don’t, or maybe can’t. Or maybe we see beauty where it doesn’t exist because our perspective is deficient. If we looked beneath the surface of something, we might find an inner ugliness that mars its outward beauty.
This might be even more clear if we consider the opposite. If someone sees beauty in acts of selfishness, in gory horror movie scenes, or in an abusive relationship, we would also recognize that as being deficient. We would say that something is wrong with their perspective. They should not find these things beautiful. No one should. They are ugly, and it is proper to see them as such.
So, once again, we have this innate, universal sense that beauty is not just a subjective perception, but an actual thing that a person, action, or thing can possess. So there must be some ultimate standard, beyond what any material instruments can detect, by which we can determine how beautiful or ugly a thing is.
But does this show that beauty is a real thing that exists independent of our opinions or observations? What about the alternatives that were mentioned at the beginning? Can cultural conditioning explain why we believe this? Or have we evolved to see beauty in things and be attracted to them because they help us survive? Let’s see why these are both poor explanations.
Cultural conditioning doesn’t explain beauty at all
Some, as I mentioned, would say that we see certain things as beautiful because the culture we live in has conditioned us to. Certainly this is true to a degree. No one would deny that we see beauty subjectively. But we see everything subjectively, because we are each unique subjects. That doesn’t mean those things don’t objectively exist. Everyone sees color differently, and your culture actually affects the way you perceive color. Many languages don’t even have words for unique colors we consider basic and distinct, like blue and red. And yet color clearly exists and can be objectively defined as a certain wavelength of light–even if we use different words and classifications to describe it.
Even still, the fact that different cultures perceive different things as beautiful is irrelevant to the point. The point is not that we agree on what is beautiful; the point is that we agree beauty exists.
Evolution doesn’t explain beauty either
So what about evolution? Some would say that we’ve evolved to perceive certain things as beautiful because they have survival or reproductive value. For example, most people see the opposite sex as beautiful because that drives us to reproduce–exactly as we would expect according to evolutionary theory.
To say the least, this is highly debatable. Many things we find beautiful arguably have no survival value, or are even counterproductive to survival. For example, we tend to see dangerous natural formations like mountains, canyons, and glaciers as beautiful, but we’re far less likely to see things like farmland and farm animals as beautiful. Since beauty is usually something we’re drawn to, wanting to experience more of it, this seems like exactly the opposite of what we would expect from evolution. We are drawn to many things that can kill us and unimpressed by things that sustain our lives.
Maybe there’s some more complex explanation as to why we have evolved to find so many dangerous things beautiful and so many helpful things ugly, but scientists have nothing resembling agreement as to what that explanation is. That doesn’t mean they’re all wrong, but it does justify searching to see if there’s a more unified, better explanation.
But an even bigger problem is our old friend, the evolutionary argument against naturalism. If naturalism is true, then it’s true that beauty doesn’t exist independently of human observation. And yet we’ve evolved to believe it does. Once again, just like in the case of our desire for perfection and our belief in rationality, we’ve evolved to believe a delusion. At this point, the list of things that a naturalist must admit are delusions is growing quite long! There has to be a better explanation for these things than a theory of evolution that says that many of our deepest beliefs and perceptions are delusions, yet we can trust that our minds are not deluding us about evolution itself, or the scientific process that led to its acceptance.
Beauty cries out for an explanation that acknowledges it for what it is: a quality like goodness or truth that one can possess or not possess. Of course, this can’t be proven, but based on all this, I think it’s more likely than not that beauty exists.
The ultimate standard of beauty
That leaves us with two possible explanations: 1) beauty just exists inexplicably and indecipherably; or 2) beauty comes from a source, a designer who designed the world with beauty.
#2 is the better explanation. If beauty exists, there must be an ultimate, objective standard of beauty by which we can judge how beautiful something is. We may have different perceptions of how well a thing conforms to that standard, but that’s the idea that our judgment of beauty must be based on. That ultimate standard of beauty could be nothing less than what is by definition perfectly and infinitely beautiful: God.
It makes sense that a beautiful God would reflect some of that beauty in the world he created. Certainly the world is not all beautiful–there are parasites and predators, after all–and we might say that possibility #1 explains that better than possibility #2. But Christianity offers two explanations for why the world lacks as much beauty as it could have: 1) part of it is our fault, because we’ve distorted the world’s beauty by introducing the ugliness of evil into it; and 2) This creation is not meant to be ultimately beautiful, but to make us aware that there is something better: God himself. God offers us an experience of beauty greater than anything found in this creation.
Limited beauty, then, serves as a dim reflection of the ultimately beautiful. The limited beauty we see in this world, the beauty that always fails to capture everyone’s admiration, that is always destined to decay and disappear, and that can be spoiled or abused by human acts, gives us an imperfect picture of what God himself is like.
This is a much better explanation for beauty than the alternatives. It accounts for our innate, universal perception of beauty as an actual quality that people or things possess. It accounts for why the world’s beauty is limited and tarnished with ugliness. And it accounts for why we constantly crave more and greater beauty than what we could ever see in this world, in this life.
Questions for readers:
What kind of beauty strikes you most: visual beauty, auditory beauty, active beauty, or another kind?
What do you find most beautiful? Do you think that person/thing is objectively beautiful–that others ought to find it beautiful as well?
What do you find most ugly? Do you think that thing is objectively ugly–that others ought to find it ugly as well?
If you’re a believer in God, does witnessing beauty help you connect to him in any way?
