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.