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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.
I think, in the end, the argument from beauty is the one that is strongest for me personally.
5 comments:
For one thing, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. When two homosexuals love each other, it's a beautiful thing. When a man kisses a consenting woman's breasts, it is a beautiful thing even if they are not married. Since these examples go against religious dogma, God is nowhere to be found.
Personally, I think my God dream argument is a beautiful thing. Also, that it is impossible to know everything is beautiful because it gives us infinite purpose to exist.
However, I can relate to your appreciation of beauty. Last week I printed some breath taking photos from the Hubble Space telescope. Giant pillars of gas and dust illuminated by new stars in nubula nurseies. Super nova remnants. Globular clusters of hundreds of thousands of stars packed tightly together. Clusters of galaxies, averaging 10 billion stars each.
The natural creation of stars is quite beautiful indeed, as ever-changing matter colludes and disperses amid it's never ending dance throughout the infinite universe.
I am happy man has no control over it all via a god. Makes me sleep well at night.
EJ:
For one thing, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
SR:
It isn’t. Shown the same photos, men worldwide, for example, will choose the same woman as most beautiful. The experiment has been done.
Similarly, there is really no debate whether Shakespeare’s writing is more beautiful than, say, Dan Brown’s. Few are unmoved by a beautiful sunset. And so forth.
Some people seem to be relatively insensitive to beauty; but that does not make it relative, any more than the fact that some are tone deaf means that musical notes are arbitrary.
EJ:
I am happy man has no control over it all via a god. Makes me sleep well at night.
SR:
There’s that humanist misanthropy again. It seems inevitable. Humanists really do not like people.
There might be a tendency for men to find a particlar woman beautiful, but no way would all men rank the same woman as the most beautiful if given enough choice in women.
In other words, if you show 100 men ten women of relative equality in beauty, no way are all 100 men going to pick the same woman.
The only way you would receive a 100% choice is if one woman was far more beautiful than the rest, in which case your test would be biased.
Furthermore, studies on beauty prove the theory of evolution as beauty equates to sucessful breeding (I.e symmetry and proportion of facial features indicate otherwise strong healty genes).
Furthermore, men and women are attracted to different body parts as more attractive than others. I.e some men are leg men, others prefer the breast, etc.
Furthermore, what is considered beautiful changes over time and culture. I.e right now slim is in compared to an over all tendancy towards voluptuary.
Again, plain Darwinianism explains these trends. I.e when people are in a nation where starvation is a concern, men tend to think "having more meat on the bones" is more beautiful. In North America, on the other hand, people are literally eating themselves to death, thus slim is more in (so much so that many top modles suffer from anorexia).
No doubt about it: when it comes to beauty, variety is important. Otherwise we would just read the same book over and over again, watch the same movie, etc. We certainly don't want to limit reality to the poetic beauty of one, single book, no matter how good it is, now would we Steve?
Re your ridiculous and backwards comment about misanthorpy: there are things we can control (i.e the level of pollution we create) vs things we can not control (bringing back the dead [not including resucsitation]). Accepting this is not misanthorpy but reality. Beliving you have access to controlling everything through a god is pure fantasy, something that leads to the "almighty complex" of war and terrorism.
EJ:
Furthermore, what is considered beautiful changes over time and culture. I.e right now slim is in compared to an over all tendancy towards voluptuary.
SR:
That is just what the intercultural studies demonstrated to be untrue. In fact, the idea of what is beautiful does _not_ vary according to culture.
Have you seen the famous bust of Nefertiti? Still beautiful, after three thousand years.
You say slimmer women are currently more fashionable than they once were. True, fashions change; but I think this is driven by female preferences, not male. Women currently want to be slim; but look at the women featured in men’s magazines. Rather more voluptuous.
Whoa, do you ever show your tendency towards the self-centered bias of over-generalization here. Sure, a work of art can be timeless, but that doesn't change the fact that what's considered beautiful is ever changing.
Take a look at classical nudes of Venus. I find her body grotesque, but in her day she was considered the all the bomb!
A black man will have different tendencies in what he finds beautiful than a white man. Some find more beauty in races other than their own.
Woman choose their look based on how men react to them. It's in their DNA.
Here's another point (besides the rest you failed to retort on my previous comment list of "furthermores"): men are more visually stimulated, whereas women are more stimulated by touch. Hence, beauty is not only relative to the eyes of the beholder, but also relative to the various forms of human sensitivity.
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