If you’ve followed apologetics, you’ve probably heard the big three arguments for God’s existence—the cosmological argument for God, the fine-tuning argument for God, and the moral argument for God. These are good arguments, but is that all we have to make our cumulative case? Moreover, as culture changes, are we adjusting to it?
There are roughly ten arguments for God’s existence that have been carefully developed with philosophical depth and rigor. One argument for God, often overlooked, seems especially timely in this disenchanted culture that believes reality must be more rich, more “thick,” than the hollow picture provided by naturalism. It is called the Argument from Beauty.
Related: If There is a God, Why Does He Seem So Hidden?
Understanding Beauty Through our Senses
To understand the reality of beauty, we must first explore how we perceive it. Much like our primary senses of sight and hearing, the perception of beauty has several key characteristics:
- It provides information: Perceptions give us information about the world around us. Without them, we wouldn’t have access to the world.
- It is a subjective experience: There is a “what it is like” to have a phenomenal experience.
- It is passive: Perceptions come to us without effort. (We don’t try to see a car in front of us.)
- It is taken as truth: When we see a car in front of us, we don’t feel a need to prove that a car is really there.
When I reflect on beauty, I can’t help but notice how beauty comes to us in the same way. We simply “see” beauty in things, and such a perception works like all of the others. Standing at the top of a mountain, we perceive many things—we see the snow-capped landscape, we hear the whispers of wildlife, we smell the pine air, we feel the cool breeze against our face, and we behold the beauty of it all. Beauty, then, seems to be another feature of reality that comes to us through our perceptions. But if beauty is perceived, there must be some objective feature of the world outside of us that is being perceived.
Addressing the Objection: Isn’t Beauty Subjective?
Let’s try a different approach. Imagine standing at the top of that mountain with all of those previous perceptions, but the “seeing” of beauty is an illusion. All of the other senses point to real things (like color and pitch), yet the human experience of standing on that mountain is no different from staring at a concrete wall. Without beauty, our experience of the world around us would be as flat as a computer’s. Is that really the right way to understand reality? I doubt it. In fact, I find it intellectually inconsistent to accept the reality behind some perceptions but not the reality of beauty.
One may object and say that beauty is totally subjective, and therefore not real. After all, two people can look at the same painting and one says, “This is beautiful,” while the other does not. But just because people disagree about their perceptions doesn’t mean what they perceive isn’t real. Many things in this world are not obviously beautiful, so people disagree. Other experiences, like beholding a mountaintop, are more obviously beautiful. If we stood on that mountain next to another traveler who simply went “meh,” we would think something was wrong with them! It’s not that such beauty is subjective, but that the unimpressed individual has become desensitized.
Furthermore, many would argue (myself included) that every human person is beautiful, regardless of their appearance. So the idea of objective beauty is closer to home than we may think, and it digs deeper than surface-level opinions.
How Does Objective Beauty Show That God Exists?
So yes, beauty really does exist. But where does it come from, and does it point to the existence of God? To answer this, let’s compare two worldviews.
The Nontheistic View: Is Beauty Just Chemistry?
At the risk of being overly simplistic, the nontheistic view of the universe claims that everything in reality can be reduced to physical things. For example, thoughts and feelings are said to be nothing more than physical events in our brains. Morality is said to be merely an expression of how we feel. So thoughts, feelings, goodness, and evil are not “real” in themselves, but merely physical phenomena. They all reduce down to atoms and molecules moving about. It’s all just chemistry.
Already, this view gives us a picture of reality that seems terribly off. How much more when we reflect on beauty? After all, if beauty is a real feature of reality, where does it come from? Beauty is non-physical. This makes it difficult to understand our universe unless we are willing to admit that there are more than just physical things.
The Theistic View: An Enriched Reality
If we hold to a theistic view of reality, however, beauty makes perfect sense. First, with God in the picture, reality is enriched with nonphysical things like love, joy, morality, meaning, and beauty. These are not just illusions or physical phenomena as the nontheistic view is forced to claim. Second, beauty is sensible and expected. A good God would want to bake beauty into his creation so his creatures could perceive and enjoy it. From a Christian perspective, we could add that our ability to create beautiful things is a reflection of God’s image within us.
More From Cru: Jesus Manifesto
From Philosophical Argument to Christian Worship
Although the Argument from Beauty takes much more time to fully defend, hopefully, we can see some compelling reasons that beauty exists, and the existence of beauty points to the existence of God. If we take this alongside the other arguments for God’s existence, we have a powerful cumulative case that God is real and alive in this world.
For Christians, however, beauty is not just a tool for showing that God exists. It’s an objective standard of God’s nature that excites our worship for Him. As Psalm 96:9 says, “O worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness: fear before him, all the earth” (KJV). So, as you put to memory the main points of this article and share them with a friend, don’t forget to behold God in the process, inviting others to do the same. If we are willing to climb a mountain just to see its beauty, how much more should we be ready to worship the God from whom all beauty is found?
