Why Does Beauty Matter?

There are a few atheists I have befriended at my school, the Universty of North Texas. I haven’t seen them much this fall, but last semester and the one before that I encountered them several times as they had a booth on campus with the poster “ask an atheist.” The conversations were always civil and enlightening and naturally, no one changed any fundamental beliefs of any serious nature.

However, there was one conversation I had that for some reason just came into my head today. With these thoughts out of the blue came an answer I should have given to a proposition one of them said to me.

I was speaking with Colin about evidences of a creator. I mentioned to him that if we were purely biological and merely one (or several) evolutionary steps ahead of our animal kin* then why do we have such an affinity for beauty? Animals follow their instincts to survive and procreate and do not do much else. There is no reason that a particular human’s love for a flower, or a sunset, or a poem, or a song would aid him or her in the great game of natural selection. And more to the point, there is certainly no reason a particular human’s talents to create beautiful art and anything aesthetically pleasing would help him or her survive. And furthermore, even were beauty to have survival value, this would be hard to describe in terms of instinct because the forms of beauty different people enjoy vary greatly! Why are we unique in such a distinctive way? I submitted that our love of beauty exists, at least in part, because a supreme being wants us to enjoy life. Whatever the reason, however, I challenged him to explain this human phenomenon in purely biological and evolutionary terms.

*and bear in mind I have no personal or theological disagreement with evolution; I believe in evolution, but I believe that God invented it

Colin’s answer surprised me and I remember we both had to go class so his answer was the end of the conversation. But even if we didn’t have classes to go to, I had no reply for him.

He explained that perhaps it was an advantage for men to be artistic because women find this attractive. As an evolutionary mechanism, men might have artistic inclinations that opened up greater potentials for spawning. After all, we both agreed that girls swoon over drummers (such as yours truly). We agreed that probably throughout history artistic talent has not, in fact, had a great effect on the pedigree of man, but this fact wouldn’t eliminate this biological possibility. And naturally he didn’t try to argue that artistic talent was the exclusive desirable trait in a man (just one of them). As my small brain tried to come up with an answer, he walked off to class.

But just today, months later, the answer popped into my head. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, I guess I’m kind of retarded.

My reply to Colin must be: if men are artistically inclined in order to experience greater mating possibilities, then what is the evolutionary advantage for women to be attracted to such men in the first place? If women love sunsets, and they therefore love men who paint sunsets, then we can understand why men would want to learn how to paint sunsets. However, we still have no answer for the question: what is the biologically compelling reason that the women love sunsets in the first place? And that is the rub. Colin hasn’t really answered the original question. Why are any humans inclined to love and create beauty?

Therefore, it still stands that one of the best arguments that we are not merely biological creatures is that we love beauty.

Here’s one of my favorite salient quotes. Christopher Fry said in his most famous play, “Laughter is surely the surest touch of genius in creation. Would you have ever thought of it…if you had been making man?”

No one will be convinced that because science cannot account evolutionarily for the human love of beauty and art there is a creator. This is because the creator has formed a world in which by observation and pondering alone it is difficult to determine whether he exists. Atheists use their powers of observation and critical thinking to explain to believers why he doesn’t exist. And believers also point to all sorts of observable phenomena (such as the fact that we love beauty) and convincing philosophical arguments involving the entirety of the universe such as the “first mover” argument, etc. Both believers and non-believers say that it is utterly obvious to see that there is and is not a god, respectively.

From a believer’s standpoint this makes perfect sense because this means that we must rely on faith (without which free will would be an impossibility). From an atheist’s standpoint this is merely a nuisance, which is ironically and even paradoxically another peripheral reason to actually believe in a creator.

Addendum January 25, 2010

I explained to my oldest friend, whom I visited recently, this argument of the human phenomenon of the love of beauty. He, a biologist and atheist, rebutted me by asking 'how do you know that animals don't love beauty?' I rolled my eyes. The conversation went on to other topics but here I'll add that his reply is inane. Even if animals could understand and appreciate beauty (and if they did, then why don't they create it?), then the question of 'how does the appreciation of beauty benefit them?' is still unanswered.

This seems like a big deal to me, because it is such a glaring problem for the rising militant atheist movement.

I had a strange and vivid dream last night.

We were all in a room and the man stood up to tell us we would be voting for who would be the king of Switzerland. The family of whoever won would be royalty and that would settle the matter for the small, land locked country of who would be in charge forever. I stood up and asked why there couldn’t be a president. I argued in front of everyone that a president doesn’t take everyone’s money and spend it for him and people he wants to spend it on. A president is a good steward of the people’s hard earned money.

The guy announcing our vote said there would be no president on the ballot, only kings. People started lining up to vote, ignoring me, but I shouted louder saying that we should write on the ballot that there should be a vote to decide if Switzerland should be a democracy, not a kingdom. I said that if we’re voting for a king, we’re already acting like a democracy. The guy said we must have a king, no presidents and no elections after this first one.

I spoke to a gal in line who said if there’s royalty, then there will be more trade between Switzerland and other countries and people coming would be here for vacation to buy trinkets. She was poor and wanted the economy to do better and thought that having a king would do this.

I couldn’t understand why people wanted to vote for a king and then never vote again for a president and just let the king do whatever he wants with the money and taxes. Then I woke up.

On a completely unrelated note, there is no health care crisis in America. We have extremely good health care and relatively excellent survival rates for serious diseases like cancer. We have a crisis of health care costs. Ours are too high. What can government do about this?

Government cannot generate money, it can only spend money (printing more dollars devalues all others currently in existence leaving the sum total of American wealth the same as before). It cannot magically generate the right amount of money out of thin air to pay for healthcare, although sometimes it seems like Obama and the current Congress believes it can.
Government also cannot magically reduce the cost of something. It can artificially reduce the cost of health care premiums, for example, but the same total price as before will be paid somewhere (by someone) in the economy.

This inability of government to reduce the cost of something goes with a caveat, of course. The government can reduce the actual cost of health care by forcing a reduction in its quality. Health care will cost less if it is mandated to be worse in some ways. For example, if there is some kind of rationing in some way (which would be any type of restricted access to any part of health care) then there will obviously be less costs incurred. Naturally the difficult part is determining how much and what parts of health care must be restricted and whether that will reduce the costs enough.

There are options besides “rationing.” Though my understanding is that this is not currently a part of either the House or Senate bill, tort reform could reduce costs by having doctors perform less tests and less “defensive medicine.” These tests are often called superfluous, but doubtless there have been times they have saved lives. Not all, perhaps not even most malpractice suits are frivolous (I wouldn’t pretend to know what percentage). But reducing these tests will necessarily be a reduction in quality.