A BEAUTIFUL PROOF FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

We are surrounded by the awesome creations of God – those on the outside but also on the inside. We experience a taste of God when we apologize for having caused pain and then are forgiven. We also sense His presence in other ways. In “Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical,” Timothy Keller wrote:

·       Leonard Bernstein famously admitted that when he heard great music and great beauty he sensed “Heaven,” some order behind things. “[Beethoven] has the real goods, the stuff from Heaven, the power to make you feel at the finish: something is right in the world. There is something that checks throughout, that follows its own law consistently: something we can trust, that will never let us down.”

For me, it was Rachmaninoff. Having struggled for years with depression and self-loathing, the type that drives us to the Golden Gate Bridge, Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony preached to my aching mind a sermon of hope, peace, and love. It reassured me that there was something beyond the pain, a mysterious place of love and warmth, a place where I’d be cared for.

At that time, I was not ready to hear a sermon about God, but this piece of music preached a sermon I needed to hear.  Somewhere, there was a rest, and I believed in what it preached. It encouraged me to hold on.

How did this work? It wasn’t just a matter of a set of beautiful melodies, which touched my heart. It was more than that. It told my heart that there was another reality, a place of beauty, which guaranteed me relief.

But aren’t these just feelings? Can they be trusted? Perhaps they are merely the product of dreams or fears. They are not grammatically constructed with coherent sentences. However, my experiences came to me with the completeness and authority of chapter and verse.

Nevertheless, these experiences or visions of beauty are not coercive like gravity, which break bones when defied as we jump from a bridge. Bernstein heard the music that led to the doorway of “Heaven,” but he seemingly didn’t enter. Did he ask, “Whose house is this?” Perhaps he knew and understood that its Owner’s agenda didn’t coincide with his own?

Nevertheless, these visions of beauty are real and unavoidable. Biologist Ann Gauger writes:

·       I can attest that there is a genius behind all levels of biology, a genius that produces beauty. (Salvo Magazine, Issue 45; Summer 2018, 41)

This is not simply a matter of the functionality and integrity of the biological form of life but also our sense of awe and wonder in response to them. And we don’t just experience this wonder in response to biological systems. The Roman philosopher and stoic, Cicero, wrote:

·       “What can be more clear and obvious when we look up to the sky and contemplate the heavens, than there is some divinity of superior intelligence.” (Salvo, 41)

But how should regard those who look upon the same reality and don’t see the same divine hand? Shouldn’t their observations carry as much weight as those of Cicero and Bernstein? The skeptic and philosopher David Hume had some derogatory words for such naysayers:

·       “A purpose, an intention, or design strikes everywhere the most stupid thinker, and no man can be so hardened in absurd systems, as at all times to reject it.” (Salvo, 41)

Could such a harsh assessment be true? Are such “hardened” thinkers like the blind man who claimed that sight was impossible because he couldn’t conceive of sight and challenged anyone to prove him wrong? Albert Einstein rendered a similar judgment against such hardened minds:

• The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness. (The Merging of Spirit and Science)

Beauty should provoke wonder and meditation. For Einstein, the universe did just that. However, Einstein was like a child who received a precious gift and threw away the attached card, identifying of the Sender. Einstein realized that the creation represented “the highest wisdom.” However, he seems to have stopped short of probing the question of “Whose wisdom?” Instead, he wrote:

• I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. (1954)

• I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.

However, a God of wisdom is also one of consciousness, intelligence, will, emotion, and even moral concern – not a mere energy force like gravity. Spinoza’s god was like gravity. As awesome as it might be, gravity is very limited. It can’t write a poem, cook an omelet, create an atom or even an electron, answer my questions, or even be conscious of me, let alone my prayers and tears. Nor can it provide any explanation for the beauty, harmony and wisdom Einstein had perceived. He was willing to acknowledge a God of order but not one of moral order. Such a God has moral expectations!

Nevertheless, the evolutionary biologist is seldom bereft of a theory to account for beauty and our appreciation of it. Gauger cites psychologist Glenn Wilson:

·       “…symmetry and sexual dimorphism—traits that are clearly male and female—signal reproductive fitness” and aid one in making the choice of a mate.” (Salvo, 42)

In other words, we have evolved a taste for beauty because the appreciation of beauty is related to our choice of the most productive mates. While it might be conceivable that beauty contributes to a survival advantage in terms of procreation, naturalistic evolution cannot explain our appreciation of beauty across the wide spectrum of our interactions with this world. For example, Einstein and others regarded the beauty and elegance of a formula as evidence of its truth. Consistent with this understanding, physicist Paul Davies had written that:

·       “If beauty is entirely biologically programmed, selected for its survival value alone, it is all the more surprising to see it re-emerge in the esoteric world of fundamental physics, which has no direct connection with biology…On the other hand, if beauty is more than mere biology at work, if our aesthetic appreciation stems from contact with something firmer and more pervasive, then it is surely a fact of major significance that the fundamental laws of the universe…” (“The Mind of God”)

Our appreciation of beauty seems to be more than a mere bio-chemical response aiding our survival. Instead, it points beyond itself to its Creator. Therefore, Gauger writes:

·       These equations [of physics] describe fundamental relationships built into the fabric of the universe, and they have great explanatory power. Evolution cannot account for this—natural selection is blind to abstract things, and it has no power over the [elegant] mathematical structure of the universe. Yet math is beautiful. (Salvo, 41)

Math is noticeably beautiful in regards to our appreciation of music. We respond favorably to notes and chords exhibiting close and harmonious mathematical relationships. This relationship takes us beyond the merely subjective and into a world where math, music, and appreciation of music are interlocked in a glorious dance which might even transport us into the halls of heaven itself to the presence of the Creator who is beckoning us to be awed by Him.