Beauty as evidence against evolution?

Faith & Science Conversation
62

Or you might say the beauty is borrowed (hijacked?) from another creature (the flowering plant). Why the plant produces flowers which we often consider beautiful similarly seems utilitarian in the sense that they need pollinators to help them out reproductively.

Of course beauty itself is probably the lowest ranking of Plato’s big three values: truth, goodness and beauty. Beauty as such is something we perceive directly, not something we deduce or interpret our way to anymore than we do in perceiving color. So beauty is in the world to be discovered but insofar as it shows up in the environment it is fair game as a decoy or camouflage scheme.

63

Speaking of fractal patterns, there is this:

This is a “rangeomorph”, a form of Ediacaran life with branching fronds that develop in four levels of fractal patterns. (Not that infinitely recursing fractals are beyond God; maybe it is a demonstration for us finite humans :slight_smile: ).

64

I’m stomping my foot and asking this again:
What IS Beauty?

Set aside all the deceptive strategies in the video, the assumptions about beauty are probably the biggest problem.
Beauty is NOT an objective standard that everyone agrees on.
It is not always associated tirh sexual attractiveness.
It is not always even associated with art-- even art that is highly appealing. I love art. Most of the art I love is not “beautiful” whatever that means. Much of what I find beautiful is not necessarily art.

The very premise of the entire video is flawed.

Beauty is entirely subjective. It cannot be a standard we use to assess natural things, living or otherwise, as displaying “evidence” of God’s hand.

7 Likes
65

In the eye of the beholder?

In terms of courtship, especially in non humanoid species, beauty would be the element of display that the partner is looking for. As such it is not necessarily about picturesque or aesthetics. And as such it just becomes part of the Natural (sexual) selection process. In terms of survival aesthetics may be a factor but probably not a critical one. Aesthetical beauty can probably be looked at as a happy side effect not shared by an Ugly fruit.

Richard

1 Like
66

The beholder.
Absolutely!

I suspect the idea of beauty is beyond the comprehension of nearly all of the things that carry DNA.

As important as it is to our small subset of the living, “beauty” --aesthetic beauty as you put it-- is meaningless to the rest.

3 Likes
67

Not EVERYONE has to AGREE on something in order for it to be OBJECTIVE.

Truth is beautiful.

68

Guess you’ve never heard of “the ugly truth”/

4 Likes
69

There is a difference between the result being chaotic and the process being chaos. I was objecting to the claim that the Mandelbrot set is an example of chaos and chance creating beauty.

As far as the “edges” are concerned:

“The boundary of the Mandelbrot set is a very complicated fractal with a Hausdorff dimension of 2. Bounded orbits may attract to a fixed point, a periodic cycle, or they may be chaotic.”

and:

“Thus the Mandelbrot set, with all its complexity, apparently admits a negligibly small number of truly chaotic orbits.”

https://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/chaos/manchaos.htm

As for all that beautiful color people see:

“In this figure, white represents unbounded orbits, black represents chaotic orbits, dark blue represents fixed points, and other periodic cycles are plotted modulo the remaining 13 colors.”

IOW, not the chaotic orbits.

70

Truth is beautiful? Really? All truth?

https://www.wfp.org/global-hunger-crisis

https://www.un.org/en/un75/new-era-conflict-and-violence

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/christian-nationalism-is-single-biggest-threat-to-americas-religious-freedom/

https://www.stlouisfed.org/institute-for-economic-equity/the-state-of-us-wealth-inequality

Or maybe these don’t count as truth, because they are not beautiful?

1 Like
71

The truth about something is not the same as the thing itself. And for all I know you’ve posted links to a slew of falsehoods.

“Christian Nationalism Is ‘Single Biggest Threat’ to America’s Religious Freedom?” Really? I’ve never even heard of it. On the other hand, I’ve seen the government violate freedom of assembly of Christians. That’s true, and no, it isn’t beautiful.

72

And that is my point. Truth and beauty do not go hand in hand. Some truths may be beautiful. Others horrific or evidence of pure evil.

1 Like
73

Of course they do. Falsehood is not beautiful. Ever. There’s no such thing as a beautiful lie. Falsehood and Beauty are antithetical.

74

Falsehood is never beautiful, agreed (unless it is lying to the Nazi SS about the Jews you are hiding: mercy trumps law). But that is not to say that all truth is beautiful.

75

The truth about staving populations, systemic racism, enforced poverty, human trafficking, sex trade, epidemic rates of suicide, etc are not beautiful. They are horrors. Real, true horrors.

So truth and beauty go hand in hand, except when they don’t, rather than humans evaluating as beautiful certain truths, which may not always be evaluated by other humans as true or beautiful.

3 Likes
76

Generally, when theologians talk about the interrelationship between the true, the good, and the beautiful (and sometimes unity), they are generally talking about transcendentals. These are properties that are considered to be common to all things, which classical theologians see as finding their origins in the person of God. So when theologians talk about that which is true being beautiful, they are generally talking about that which is true to all things or all things within a category.

So a Christian might say that is true that all people regardless of race, religion, gender, sexuality, or any other characteristic are worthy of love, honour, and respect because they are made in the image of God. The theologian would say this is true, and that truth is both good and beautiful.

In the video, the narrator and the speaker, seem to want to make an argument along these classicist lines. That the “gratuitous beauty” of nature reflects what they believe is true about nature, ie. that it is created by divine intelligence.

Ironically, I agree with the premise (nature reveals God’s nature), but could not disagree more with their conclusions (therefore, evolution is hooey).

That said, I completely agree, @Kendel, from a very important perspective not all that is true or truthful, is beautiful. There is nothing beautiful about the fact (truth) that racism still exists in the world (let alone the church). So I don’t want you to think that the above is disagreeing with you. I think what you’ve actually done is highlighted a weakness in this kind of theological reasoning, highlighted the need to define terms, and shown that our understanding of what is “true” also needs to account for that which we consider evil, repugnant, and morally reprehensible.

4 Likes
77

That is referring to a different component of the set from “the edges are hyper-sensitive”: what the values do in the process of iterating–it refers to points whose output value from iteration passes through a chaotic series of points, never stable, but forever bound. Many of those are close to the edges, yes, but they are different chaotic phenomena.

And if we’re going for beauty from a chaotic process (which the shape of the Mandelbrot Set is, as the edges and certain portions of the tail are described by chaos theory) look for anything beautiful that was created by a process involving fluid dynamics or chemical reactions. Like the “golden rain” demonstration (lead iodide precipitating when two clear solutions are mixed), or any coastline, or sand dunes, or …

3 Likes
78

What is the relationship between the colors and the function that creates the set? The colors are not a result of the function, are they?

If the colorway (or set of colors) is assigned to demonstrate visually what the functions are doing mathematically, the colorway can be manipulated according to any aesthetic preference or definition of beauty. As Mitchell pointed out, images of the set can be beautiful, printed on a b/w machine.

But even as cool as images of a Mandelbrot set can be, they sometimes look pretty creepy to me; I see sea monsters at times. Not always beautiful, even in the same thing.

1 Like
79

Beauty is not entirely subjective. It has been shown that men in different cultures have similar kind of opinions about what a beautiful woman looks like. The criteria include a symmetric face, youthful skin, body proportions that signal fertility, etc. Basically criteria that signal good genes and potentially high fertility.

I read a study inspecting what kind of scenery people commonly tend to value as beautiful. The study suggested that a scenery commonly considered beautiful and relaxing is a reflection of the prehistoric past of humans. Such an environment signals that it can offer both food and protection. This may be a biased conclusion (speculation) as there is no solid evidence supporting the conclusion but it is probably true that some visual elements in the scenery are interpreted as beautiful.

My guestimate is that the opinions about the beauty of a scenery varies a lot more than the opinions of a beautiful person. Growth environment seems to affect it. I see an old forest in wilderness beautiful and relaxing but I have heard that many people coming from urbanized Europe feel that closed spruce forests in wilderness are a bit scary environments.
The growth history matters even in my family. My wife comes from an inland area with plenty of lakes and prefers sites at lakes. I grew close to sea shore and value sites close to open sea. When we searched a summer cottage for holidays, it was a bit challenging to find sites that are simultaneously at a lake and close to open sea.

2 Likes
80

That’s a good point about concepts of transcendentals, @LM77, particularly in light of “classical” anything. I’ll grant you the concept of beauty and other transcendentals in the case of theology of God (largely because I’m too lazy and don’t have time to think it through to argue otherwise).

However, not in the case of this video, which is not using the concept of beauty to describe God, but rather nature.
For the sake of clarity, I will rely on @RichardG terminology: “aesthetic beauty.” An inherent, objective, describable, quantifiable (aesthetic) beauty had been assumed even into the Enlightenment, but that is no longer the case. We have too wide a perspective on the world to accept this view which relies on personal and cultural preference. I’ll point to the sea change in painting that took place with Impressionism as a microscopic example. All forms of decorative arts, fashion, music, writing, worship liturgy, design, color preference, etc demonstrate the vast disagreement about what is aesthetically beautiful, pleasing, harmonious or even good.

The video attempts to equate aesthetic beauty with a theological statement about God. The created order may well exhibit the beauty of God in a theological way. But that is not what the video is talking about. The video shows all sorts of things that are widely considered aesthetically beautiful as if those are proof of God’s hand directly making them beautiful.
But the objective beauty of God in himself is not is not what we perceive when we look at nature around us. If we see (have vision to see) and understand something natural to be beautiful, we are reacting to our reception of the thing in conjunction with our personal concept of (aesthetic) beauty.

Shall we talk about bugs? Spiders? Snakes?
And what about yeast? viruses? pond scum? humus? the maggots on the carcass out by the road? The stench of it, created by a natural process? Etc, etc?
Our attraction or revulsion are our own responses to what is around us, but says nothing about God’s hand in it.

I praise God that I am able to experience what is beautiful to me, but I recognize that others may not respond to the same things in the ways I am apt to do.

2 Likes
81

Is anyone here asserting any such a thing?