http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/beauty-is-truth-theres-a-false-equation/
His
arguments, if you could call them that, that the mathematical beauty of
science is something completely different from than the aesthetics
found in other fields like art are wholly unconvincing. He doesn't even
address some of the most important thinkers who talk about this stuff,
like Hilary Putnam or John Polkinghorne. And he fails to address the
ways in which scientists use math to analyze what people consider
beautiful, which would be central, I think, to making a proposed
connection between mathematical beauty and other types of beauty.
At the end of the article, the writer says something so wrong that it is revelatory:
"Beauty, unlike truth or nature, is something we make ourselves.'
Can
we just collectively agree that this is a total crock? We find a great
many things beautiful that we don't make ourselves. And, additionally,
it seems to me that our ability to find human creativity beautiful
supervenes on our aesthetic judgments about...everyone say it with me
now...nature: yes, very good. I mean how much great art, which we
recognize as great art, is about communicating an aesthetic experience
that is encountered in nature? A crap ton, that's how much.
This
is like the reconstruction of the aesthetic argument one fines in
Dawkin's the GOD DELUSION. Which is just terrible. Dawkins suggests we
don't need God to explain the beauty of Shakespeare. But who the hell
thinks that? What sophisticated theist thinks we need God to explain the
beauty of art? None I know of. The argument from beauty runs from the
fact that NATURE is beautiful, and beauty implies mind. They don't use
God to explain Shakespeare, they use Shakespeare to show that beauty
implies mind.
Now I'm not one to take this track. I
don't exactly say, okay here is something beautiful and we have to posit
a mind to explain its existence. What I appeal to in my argument from
beauty is human experience. What is it LIKE when we encounter something
beautiful? I suggest it is LIKE we are being communicated to.
Experiencing some kind of communication is just what it means to judge
something beautiful. And the writer of the article above (rightly, I
think) says about the same thing when he says:
"What
generally brings a work of art alive is not its inevitability so much as
the decisions that the artist made. We gasp not because the words, the
notes, the brushstrokes are ‘right’, but because they are revelatory:
they show us not a deterministic process but a sensitive mind making
surprising and delightful choices. In fact, pure mathematicians often
say that it is precisely this quality that delights them in a
great proof: not that it is correct but that it shows a personal,
tangibly human genius taking steps in a direction we’d never have
guessed."
On THIS point, he's correct. We judge
something beautiful because we FEEL mind is at work. It is the ability
to touch the experience of another, or to hear what another person is
saying, that makes something beautiful. But I think it is the acme of
absurdity to suggest that we DON'T make the same kinds of judgment about
things other than man-made works of art. We do it all the time, when it
comes to the natural world. So recognize the truth that negates what
the artist gets wrong, and the truth that justifies what he gets right,
we ironically get a vaguely formed but I think powerful argument for
belief in the existence of God.
For if we
experience beauty in this way, and if it is rational to take those
experiences as objective, then certainly that implies that it is also
rational to believe in some mind that does the communicating. For
communication surely implies a communicator.
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